kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with greed

Anyone who is not living on a desert island has likely heard of Anthony Oliver, the viral singer-songwriter whose song, Rich Men North of Richmond, implicates a certain set of elites in Washington DC who allegedly ruin the country with their bad decisions. What if I told you those politicians had a fairly inconsequential part in creating the mess that inspired Rich Men North of Richmond? Politicians are despotic... trust me, I know, I live in Illinois and when a member of my Speakeasy group derided others for voting in the miserable crew we have at the moment, I asked him, "Have you met Illinois?" Elections here do not matter. I have personally witnessed two election officials brazenly looking at my completed ballot in disgust and I would not have been shocked if every ballot they disagreed with ended up tossed in a dumpster at the end of the night. It is an open secret that Illinois is a banana republic with its own renditions of Charles II at the helm. The only way of deposing the Illinois monarchy is via guillotine, and though I am sure that can be arranged, the common folk are not quite ready to go full Jacobin at this time.

As fun and easy as it is to scapegoat politicians for their copious bad decisions and dictates, the meat of the problem lies right here at home. When I was a child in the 1970s and early 80s, I knew my neighbors so well that they were a stone's throw away from acting as godparents. Our tight-knit family reliably spent holidays at each other's houses. The elementary school self-published a mimeographed book of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every student and teacher and gave copies to everyone in the school. Many of the families in town were wealthy, but the most ostentatious displays of wealth were limited to having a small in-ground pool and having a vacation home in either Florida or Wisconsin. Fast forward forty years and nearly every neighbor I grew up with has either moved far away or has atomized to distant corners of the country and globe. In my own case, I strongly considered running off to a faraway land where it would not be necessary to own a car. Nobody would dream of publishing the private phone numbers of little kids in a paper book. Displays of wealth have metastasized: there is hardly a McMansion out there without an in-ground pool. In northern Illinois, such a pool can only be used a quarter of the year at best. In all other seasons, it must be drained, covered, and cleaned by a small crew of typically brown men who may or may not be here legally.

SIMRES: Suckas Idolizing Mediocre Real Estate

The trouble with Rich Men North of Richmond is that it isn't just them. I cannot afford to live anywhere near the neighborhood where I grew up. The area is beset with suburbanites trying to outdo each other. In the 80s, the upper middle class added to their existing homes, morphing modest three bedrooms into four, expanding kitchens and bathrooms, and adding garages. In the 90s, McMansions entered the scene, and now the remodeled four bedroom seemed modest in comparison. In the 2000s, the home equity craze had people using their homes as piggy banks, desperate to climb the property ladder. This trend was stalled by the crash of 2008 but was back and rolling by the mid-2010s. Covidmania blew the housing prices sky-high, and though the exodus from big cities tamped down the bubble by a modest amount, a 776 square foot one-bedroom, one-bathroom high rise apartment in San Francisco, the Poop Capital of the World, costs $2720 per month. As long as someone is willing to pay it, someone else will charge it.

The problems Anthony Oliver sings about in Rich Men North of Richmond -- too many hours for bulls**t pay, people on the street going hungry while obese wokesters get fat on welfare, and runaway inflation -- are actually the logical results of the decisions average people make and continue to make. The upper middle class is at fault. I have a relative who moved into an ugly McMansion in an exclusive neighborhood. When asked why she chose to have her husband purchased the place when they had a very nice, expanded, remodeled home to begin with, she said, "Because I can". My parents, who used their financial prosperity to buy a vacation home in the 1980s, are at fault. Some kids I grew up with had hoarder parents who owned no less than five storage units stuffed to the gills with accumulated junk. They are at fault. I am at fault and so are you.

The Karma of Unearned Wealth

The reason why I try very hard not to do unearned wealth anymore is because someone has to earn it. I do not want the karma of unearned wealth to hit me in this and future lives, so I try to avoid it. When my parents decided to take their economic windfalls of the 1980s and buy a vacation home, it was a decision that rippled all around them. Suddenly, it wasn't enough just to rent a sketchy cottage on a lakeshore; it became de rigueur to own a place where you could go at almost any time. When one person puts an addition on their home or takes a wrecking ball to a perfectly useable place in order to erect a much larger, newer building in its entirety, the property values and taxes are raised across the board. A neighborhood that was once populated by people who made just enough to live in a smaller home becomes the domain of doctors, lawyers, and insurance CEOS. Music teachers and security guards have to go elsewhere. Towns begin competing for wealth in a similar race. Maybe you've heard of a town where I used to live and work called Naperville. Naperville is an extremely prosperous town that put McMansions on the map back in the day. The downtown is the cold-weather version of Dubai. Downers Grove, the town where I grew up, wants to be Naperville, yet has never been able to attract the huge corporate money that has enabled Naperville to pave its streets in silver and gold. Downers Grove's stupid city council avoided putting Napervillian infrastructure in high-traffic areas for fifty years and now has screwed itself out of Naperville creme de la creme status because of it. Yet if you walk down any Downers Grove street, you can sense the longing and jealousy. In both Naperville and Downers Grove, I have often spotted this sign:

This sign irritates me to no end. Though it is put up by well-meaning people, it is pure, empty virtue signaling. I have never seen the sign in the lower middle class neighborhood where I live. Not once.

I could not help but make my own version to get even:

There is an old saying "If you cannot beat them, join them" that is essentially what I tried to do when I was straight out of college. I grew up salary class and though I should have known better, I went through a phase where I tried to become salary class. Now that I have the benefit of hindsight, I realize that the salary class is not for me and I cannot join them without completely selling out. I would honestly rather die as a kamikaze than become more grist for the salary class mill, so with this bargain I consign myself to great and mournful losses.

None if By Plane

I won't speak for anyone else, however, in my desire to be the change, I may never travel by plane again. I am not afraid of flying. The problem with flying is that it has become a common leisure activity. I knew someone who actually flew to China from the US and only stayed there for a few hours. Basically this person saw a Chinese airport firsthand and then turned around and flew back. I knew two other Americans who visited Antarctica. A trip to Antarctica involves flying to South America and either crossing the Drake Passage via ship or another flight. Just as family trips to Florida in the 80s morphed into family trips to Prague and Budapest in the 2010s, vacationing in St. Barts is no longer enough. You've got to go to ANTARCTICA now to get those bragging rights. You need to rack up eighteen hours (at least) in order to get there. The amount of fossil fuel resources squandered in order to indulge such a vacation is absolutely staggering. Anyone who goes to Antarctica for pleasure is the opposite of an environmentalist, even if they are fruit-only vegans for the duration of their lives who avoid having biological children and driving a car.

I will not contribute to the gentrification of my lower middle class neighborhood any more than I already have. My husband and I have improved our house and garden to the best of our ability and within the limits of our modest finances. That's where it ends. Even if I end up somehow earning a far larger income than I am working with right now, I am not going to betray the only neighborhood where I could afford a house a decade ago by turning around and starting a property ladder race. I will not go out and buy a McMansion "because I can". If I have a windfall, I will put it into the creation of a private physical library, a music school, or a brick and mortar sheet music store.

The salary class and their handlers fear people who cannot be bought. The rich men north of Richmond were bought off long ago, though at this point, any compromising videos of them with "miners" can be passed off as AI deepfakes. The poor girl who would sell her body and soul to become an influencer and the pampered suburban boy who becomes far more pampered with the help of sponsorship cheddar are very much part of the problem. Anyone who can be bought is part of the problem, and the only solution to my mind is to avoid the dealers.

One of my favorite discursive meditation series has been the Seven Deadly Sins. When I started doing discursive meditation three years ago, the Seven Deadly Sins gave me an opportunity to dive into my own past for my cringiest moments, allowing me to process a great deal of astral garbage that had piled up over the years. I have been revisiting those old meditations lately, expanding on them in a new way by understanding the Sins as states of imbalance.

One of my big issues with modern Christianity is its bad habit of oversimplifying solutions to problems as binaries. This, unfortunately, is the legacy of thinking of sin as binary: good versus evil, angel versus demon, God versus Satan. When I came up with my own system of Ogham divination, I decided to frame each tree letter outside of the Forfedha as three possibilities: two potential modes of imbalance for every single state of balance. In other words, I apply the phrase "the opposite of one bad thing is reliably another equally bad thing" and treat each tree letter as a spectrum. Out the outsides of the spectrum are the extremes and in the middle lies a state of balance. If you're saying, "Hey wait, that sounds like an Aristotlean approach to divination," you would be exactly correct. Aristotle argued that all of the good stuff in life is achieved by finding a Golden Mean or a balance. This striving for balance is what I believe Christianity threw away over the centuries. In the construction of arch-evil as a scapegoat, Christians resorted to a "if you're not with us, you're against us" philosophy that saturates modern political zeitgeists as well as the narrative of Progress. For this reason, I seek to turn the old Christian standys, the Seven Deadly Sins, on their ear and reframe them as Seven Ternaries in which the Seven Virtues are states of balance.

I'm sure you've guessed that this will be a seven part series, one essay for each sin. I'll be starting with my thoughts on Greed.

Here is a chart I have made to get your mental wheels running:

My Definition of Greed

The definition of Greed varies with everyone who encounters it: Greed, along with all the other Deadly Sins, is subjective. For instance, when I commute to work, I pass through a neighborhood of McMansions. In my opinion, McMansions are an unwitting symbol of greed. They are huge, inefficient, showy wastes of resources that cause harm directly and indirectly. On the more obvious side, they squander water, building materials, and electricity. On the less obvious side, every McMansion dweller drives up the price of housing in his/her immediate area, making it financially impossible for anyone of modest means to live close to their jobs or to amenities like shopping. In the US, zoning laws are designed to prevent the live-work housing situations of old, segregating shopping and business districts from housing subdivisions, and the McMansion lifestyle is instrumental in making that happen. So yeah, anyone who chooses to live in a McMansion is greedy, in my opinion.

I think Greed is potentially the worst Sin, which is why I am starting out with it. Greed is the horrible force that motivates a country's leadership to starve its constituents because all the grain is sold to other countries for profit. Greed is amorphous: it combines other Deadly Sins such as Gluttony and Envy into its own sodden snowball. Greed is the preference of living and dying a miserable death in a decrepit, Collier Brothers style hoard when presented with a nearly infinite array of other choices in one's incarnation, including the path of altruism. But altruism would involve the idea of giving one's toys away... and therein lies the rub. It's entirely possible to be poor and greedy, don't get me wrong -- does anyone else remember the Sarah and the Junk Lady scene from Jim Henson's Labyrinth, where protagonist Sarah realizes all of the toys proffered to her is junk distracting her from the goal of finding her kidnapped baby brother? I have known many older women (and a few men) who were the living personifications of Junk Lady, and none of them were outside of the lower middle class. The junk monger, whether entombed in her cluttered McMansion or scraping out a meager shopping cart bag lady existence, cannot let go of their material mounds for fear of deprivation. Hoarding doesn't always manifest in a disheveled space, either. Greed may frequently show itself in ostentatious housing or piles of unused detritus, but there are strict minimalists who are just as greedy as the most seasoned hoarder. Greed is the state of grasping onto things you can't take with you when you die. It is a state of parsimony and unwillingness to share. The greedy live with the background hum of constant anxiety that somebody, somewhere is going to take all of their goodies away. They are not wrong; that somebody is Death and he apparently does not accept credit cards.

Liberality: The Opposite and Equally Bad Counterpart of Greed

Liberality is called a Virtue -- I disagree. If Greed is the damming up of resources and wealth flows, Liberality is the city destroying flood that happens when we obliterate the dam. In other words, Liberality is Socialism. Socialism idealizes the equity of outcomes. It's not enough to avoid amassing hoards of wealth for oneself -- no, socialism would have the McMansion dweller disenfranchised and forced into a labor reeducation camp, his children spirited away to a brutal foster care system. The McMansionite's material riches are then mostly wasted out of spite. Anything left after the predictably violent Revolution is siphoned off to various ass-kissers who virtue signaled the hardest in the initial throes of communist victory. Liberality represents an inability to discriminate: "You're for us or against us" bellow the Twitterati, making lists of Trump supporters and anti-maskers like myself in hopes of interrogating and torturing them at a later, post-Revolutionary date. The fear of deprivation that drives McMansion greed is within the same genus as the one driving Liberality, except Socialists go one step further in thinking they know what is best to rectify the situation. They seek to remove the limits to (allegedly) spread wealth around whereas Gordon Gecko walls himself off in his luxury apartment, stopping all of the leaks that would allow plebians into his exclusive building. Socialists see themselves as little Jesuses enforcing the divine will of the God-State, flushing the hard-earned possessions of others down the memory hole along with freedom of speech and the ability to make an honest living via hard work. It's one thing to choose to give away your worldly possessions as Christ the Lord did and quite another to force others to live out your vision of aesthetic holiness. There is never the consideration that poverty is not necessarily the McMansion dweller's lesson to learn in this incarnation, nor is it the Socialist's job to teach it.

Generosity: The Balance

Of course there is a state of balance between Socialist equity of outcomes and Capitalist greed, and that is Generosity. Generosity sublimates, which is to say it transforms the everyday and mundane into the divine. The simple act of sharing food with someone you love sublimates that food and makes it more nutritious and beneficial to the person or people you share it with. Can we prove the food is more nutritious via scientific, meat plane, double blind studies? I doubt it; there are too many variables. As usual, there is no proof, there is only the long, slow, personal process of figuring out whether generosity sublimates or whether it does not. There is only one way to find out, and that involves being generous. Plus the value of the shared food is far more intense on the more subtle planes, such as the astral, mental, and above all, the spiritual plane, and we dumb humans don't have tools for measuring those plane's phenomena as most of us don't believe they exist.

There is no wealth threshold in order to be generous: the poorest of the poor are often more magnanimous with what scrapings they have then the richest of the rich, but not necessarily. In the documentary Happy, the interviewees include the members of a family literally living in a shack on the side of a garbage dump. They are poor, yet they are happy because they have each other.

Generosity is an act of grace. It requires a letting go of one's fear of deprivation and attachment. Generosity reinforces the idea that you cannot take it with you. Generosity is also an act of bravery. Being generous is risky: the imbalanced Greedy types and the imbalanced Liberalists are black holes. Consider the greedy adult child (we all know one, I think) whose parents bail her out time and time again, giving her the best of everything until they themselves are exhausted, impoverished, or both. Or maybe the adult child is an aspiring Socialist, funding her next disaster with parental money, taxpayer money, and donated money that disappears into a gaping void of grift and mismanagement.

If one is the recipient of generosity, and I believe we all are whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, the best strategy is to say "Thank you" instead of the wasteful Socialist's or Greedster's response of "F*** you." The ultimate repayment of generosity is to become a more generous person. Generosity, when paid forward, creates a chain of sublimation which provides a foundation for learning. Generosity nurtures and lays the foundation for creativity and beauty in oneself and others, a beauty that shines outward and serves to lift the foul enchantments currently plaguing the world.