There is this great little tale about a scary man called the devil. He is the root of all evil and all evil acts are caused by him. The tale says that he whispers in our ear and tells us to do bad things. He tells us to be selfish and to hate our neighbor and to steal and kill and anything else we can think of to harm and destroy civilization. The goal for people is to resist his temptations, but don’t worry, if you fail you can blame it all on him and just say you’re sorry.
What a great little tale. It takes away any personal responsibility that we might have to face for doing the wrong thing. After all we are just helpless beings against this mighty force. We are all born good, right? It is in our nature to love each other but this devil just makes us go against our nature. This is a great tale and I am sure it works well in scaring children into doing good things, but let’s get back to reality for a second. The history of man shows our true nature. It is plagued with murder and war. No, we cannot just all get along. It is our nature to be selfish, hateful, greedy, and murderous. True evil is not a character called the devil, it is man. The goal should be; should be, to overcome our nature to live together harmoniously. To care about each other enough to make sure no one goes hungry; that no one goes without basic needs, food, water, shelter, clothing, medical treatment, and personal safety.
We have seen throughout history our failure to achieve this goal. The fall of civilizations were caused by war and the failure to care for each other. Every time a civilization rose, it fell due to another invading race or it fell due to neglect of its people. Due to the neglect famine and disease erupted and civilizations were wiped out. Our selfishness will be the fall of civilization every time. History repeats itself. People are worried about 2012. They think it will be some major disaster from without that will end the world. They should be looking within. It is our own undoing that we are creating here. We see it in the papers and on the news every day. We teach it in our universities.
Instead of asking ourselves, “how can our society be better, or what can I do to make the world better” we ask, “how can I make more money and how can I get more stuff.” Just Google ‘corporate scandal’ and you will find page after page of fraud, embezzlement, inhumane treatment, human experiments, terrorist funding, etc… Wikipedia creates a great list from A to Z of corporate scandal and wow is it eye opening. Recently I was watching a video about nonprofit governance and in the video that narrator made the comment that there was a surge of corporate types into the nonprofit arena that led to an outbreak of scandals. Excessive compensations, conflict of interest, fraud and misappropriation of funds wrecked the nonprofit community. These are business people who decided that they weren't making enough money robbing from people on Wall Street so they would go over and steal from the needy and the poor.
A comment was made to me by a friend who has several degrees in business that what they learned in business school was basically how to get rich off of lying and cheating other people. In another video I was watching about change leadership a man from Africa was talking about changing leadership in Africa. The leadership he said was corrupt and that it was that way because they were never taught ethics or leadership skills. Well, since he was educated in America he had gone back and was educating this generation in these areas. Well, that sounds great and wonderful but Americans are taught ethics in school too and it doesn't seem to be working out very well.
All we see is scandal after scandal. Greed, greed, greed; what is wrong with our society when this is all we can think about? How many millions do we really need to make? It's not enough to be a millionaire, we have to be billionaires? It just makes we sick to my stomach that people are willing to destroy other people’s lives in order to make themselves richer. This is what evil is and there is no one to blame it on but our own unwillingness to care about people. When will it change? Not until we destroy ourselves I guess. Or people start to wake up and see what we are doing to our societies. When people stop listening to the propaganda and realize what they are saying and doing. When the poor man who listens to the rich man on television saying the rich should keep their tax breaks cause this is America and we work hard for our money and we should keep it. “Yeah, that’s damn right.” Says the poor man, all the while the rich man is making his money off of him and his hard work. The rich man is relaxing at his million dollar home while the poor man who supported his tax breaks struggles to make rent.
Is it so hard to give? Is it so hard to care? Is it so hard to help? We can easily wipe out evil in the world if we quit blaming it on a fictional character and look at ourselves and make a difference.
