The Free Radical

Money seduction is so pervasive… so insidious… and seemingly, so easily tolerated.

Money is a tool– a potential tool of convenience for its users engaged in commerce, and as a tool of control by its creators, as it has evolved. When a tool of convenience becomes an unquestioned necessity– “You gotta have money”– the tool and its would-be wielder have exchanged places. Money is king and we are its subjects.

How inveigled is money in the consciousness of humanity? It quashes our dreams; it usurps our natural desire to do good; it turns our very souls into a sellable commodity. Can you seriously doubt the veracity of these statements?

When you were young, and perhaps still a little idealistic, did you have many more ideas about what you might eventually do to genuinely make the world a better place? But over time, perhaps, those ideas were parsed and whittled into scraps of unrealistic dreaming because you kept coming back to one pervasive, insistent question: Can I make money at it? There were so many things you really wanted to pursue, knowing that they would indeed make a positive difference in a suffering world… but the nagging voice of a pragmatic mother or father– perhaps both– doggedly asked at the hatching of every compassionate scheme “But can you make a living at it?” And if the answer was no, those compassionate schemes, one by one, were abandoned… and you convinced yourself that it was the only reasonable course.

“Can I make money at it?” lies deeply embedded in our consciousness. It is irresistibly conditioned into us from baby’s first Christmas, and then through an educational indoctrination system focused almost exclusively on conformity and the promise of job placement, and finally in the dire imperative of keeping up with the Joneses– because prestige and net worth are so important to turds swirling the unclean bowl at the final flush.

How many will betray their conscience for the promise of serious coin? Our modern societal standard is that you’d be a fool not to. Everything– yes EVERYTHING– must be monetized, and conscience and soul tend to fetch the highest price; you’d be a real fool to hoard such antiquated garbs of character. Character, above all, these days, must be marketable… and changeable according to fickle market fashions.

Whores! Fucking whores– the whole lot! And our venerated leaders are the pimps championing our whoring, telling us straight-faced that it is our willingness to sell ourselves, to sell our children and their future, that make us great and exceptional– and worthy of the great empire we have inherited through our gutless, mindless acquiescence to their dead-end plans.

“Oh, but what can I do? I have to feed myself and my children. I’m powerless to change a thing. Perhaps if I had a little money… then perhaps I could make a real difference…” Fuck off! And go back to sleep. Go back to hating life. Go back to hating your children; continue beating them, by all means, with your whoring example, teaching them that it’s much better to be a sellout in a world of sellouts than a lone voice for sanity. Teach them the love of money so that it might finally obliterate the love for anything else; it’s the civilized way, you know.

I know, I’m spitting poison. Truth is like that. Further, I know that I’m not being persuasive; I’m playing you like a cheap violin into adopting a posture of total defensiveness…

Look around… what the fuck are you defending? Seriously.