The Elimination of Profit: It's Time

Nearly fifty years ago, in a less fraught time than now, I was moved to write the following:

'In this year it would appear/Auspicious time has come/for some clear thinking on/the state of the world, and what/can be done about it./I submit that/a society that thinks of such as war/and crime as inevitable, at least/until a further time, is already/well on its way into the dark night/of insanity,/having in the construction/of an artificial atmosphere, built/unintentionally, or not, or whatever combination/lost contact/with the greater reality around/that never sleeping ever presses in/on the so-called private dreams of men./Only with minds free/from the magnets of the moment/can we make/our way out, before it's too late/and many pull more back./To say:/No more money, no more crime./No more laws to break/anyway.'

I went on:

'How do we do it/without profit?/Simple. By installing/a system with no market but a heart:/unobstructed circulation, functioning/not on money, or some similar device/for level differential,/but on golden rule./And there you have your principle,/now man can produce at will,/and abundance/no longer a paradox,/grace without meaning.'

I think there was more; but that's the gist of it. And I reiterate it now, not just because it's time - which it is - and even past time; which it is. But because of one more straw in the wind today. It came in an email from an investigative journalist named Evelyn Pringle ("focused on exposing corruption in government and corporate America"). It was an article, second of two parts, on the drugging of America starting with its children. It said, in part:

"As of 2008, upwards of a million children in the United States - in many cases preschoolers - are on "mood-stabilizers" for bipolar disorder, even though the condition remains unrecognized in the rest of the world," Healy points out. [Healy is Dr. David Healy, a British pharmacology expert and author of the book 'Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder'.]

"But there is no evidence that the drugs stabilize moods," he says. "In fact, it is not even clear that it makes sense to talk about a mood center in the brain."

"A further piece of mythology aimed at keeping people on the drugs," he reports, "is that these are supposedly neuroprotective - but there's no evidence that this is the case and in fact these drugs can lead to brain damage."

I am not sure that he is correct in questioning the idea that there is "a mood center in the brain", though it all may be simply a general effect of the brain damage involved - both before and after such treatment. For there is evidence that children in our 'day and age' ARE suffering from various forms of brain damage. But to treat them with the sort of thing that caused the problem in the first place is - like "the dark night of insanity" that I posited in the above Credo statement of mine of some fifty years ago - madness. And it is a madness that has been caused by one thing: the concept of profit. Which has taken our eye off the ball, of understanding what life is all about- what we COULD be doing with and for each other on this lovely planet we call Earth - and reduced us to acting as though we are mere mortals.

Mortals that have beliefs of various kinds, of something 'other', something larger involved than the simple life experience itself, in and of itself. But not REALLY believing it. Or we would be acting more like it is the truth than we are. And have been, for so long that we have been conditioned by it. 'It' - the "artificial atmosphere" I referred to above. Which has created "magnets of the moment". And the biggest of them all is the concept of profit.

It is the concept of profit that is causing humanity to trash its environment.* It is the concept of profit that drives pharmaceutical companies to look at ways to make money, including creating the very conditions that they will then come up with drugs to treat (as in side effects to other of their products). It is the concept of profit that causes Wall Street denizens to look out merely for themselves - so shortsighted in that pursuit that they would even threaten to bring down the very system that is rewarding them. The gaudy parade of madness goes on.

But not for much longer.

Profit is the Gordian knot of our day.

The answer is, simply, to eliminate it. And it disappears.

Because it is just that. A concept.

A concept that cannot stand against the reality that life has meaning, beyond merely in and for itself only.

And as soon as we start functioning from a space of a little more humility, and live by a sense of gratitude to our Creator for life with meaning, we will have our answer, to all the ills that beset us. And which we have been heir to, for 'time immemorial'.

Until now.

Recognizing, that

it's time.


* Yes, communism also trashed 'its' environment. But that was because that concept of life was still material-oriented. That there was nothing beyond the life experience itself. That life has no meaning BEYOND itself. And so there is no morality, or justice, or standards, except those imposed by the state. A state that was created out of the concept that the end justifies the means.
Another erroneous concept, that has bedeviled us terribly, through the centuries.