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The author is the president of the American Enterprise Insititute. AEI's board are the CEO's of ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical etc. Including the CEO of Enron until he was ousted. They are bankrolled by Ford, GE, Chrysler, AT&T etc. What is his message to us? "when money becomes an end in itself, it can bring misery"..."People who rate materialistic goals like wealth as top personal priorities are significantly likelier to be more anxious, more depressed"..."the moral snares of materialism"..."it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires" The majority shareholders of the companies bankrolling his institute own the lion's share of this country's stocks, bonds and other assets, and are continually at war with the workers in the company's they own so that a larger lion's share of money coming in goes to profits and not wages. So of course in this zero-sum game, the parasitical side is going to tell the workers, the wealth creating side, that they should not be too concerned with money, that wealth isn't everything, that uneasy lay the head that wears the crown, and all this other nonsense. They used to have priests and reverends dress up these ideas with superstitious mumbo-jumbo, but nowadays more people are smart enough to see through that BS ( although he does talk about "Saint" Paul, the Dalai Lama, Buddha, the Love of God ). This crook is so full of hubris, he wants to lecture me on how to live a better life - that being that I should ask for a smaller piece of the pie that I work to create, and perhaps instead dwell on "the strength to love others - [...] God", the thoughts of "Saint" Paul and other nonsense. Why doesn't he tell his contributors to stop employing psychologists and Madison Avenue to try to figure out how best to create conspicuous consumption so that people will buy the commodities they're pumping out. The advertising business is one of the biggest forces out there trying to tell people life is more enjoyable if certain commodities are purchased, and he is at the center of that world. He likes quoting the bible? Try Matthew 7: "Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." |