Where Greed Comes From

I’ve been sharing this planet with humans for three-quarters of a century, and my multitude of first-hand observations of individuals and groups of them, dating all the way back to the early 1950s, take precedence over any books on the subject of greed. And that includes the one titled, “How to Be Greedy Without Even Trying”, by Ima Takinedal.

Greed is a nasty affliction of humanity, and it begins manifesting itself from the very moment the brain develops the capacity to decide and choose. A typical scenario of early childhood greed may go something like, “I finished my ice cream cone already, and now I want yours.” The little tyke didn’t need one bit of prodding from an adult on how to want more than their share. It is, unfortunately, the result of man’s fallen status with the Creator of the cosmos.

Here’s another example of the early onset of greed. Peek around the corner at little Billy and Johnny in a room full of toys. Billy suddenly decides to pick up a particular toy and begins to have fun with it, becoming fully engaged, complete with uttering cute sound effects. While all is calm and peaceful, Johnny glances over at the now enthralled Billy and observes that he’s experiencing a fulfilling moment, and he immediately desires to be in that same blissful state for himself. The shortest, most straightforward route to achieving parity with Billy is to take possession of the thing which seems to have the power to provide instant gratification, so Johnny reaches over and tears the toy from Billy’s hands. Thus the fighting, shouting, and crying ensue, and the situation has gone from content to war-like.

Johnny required zero coaching to instantly become consumed with possessing his toys, plus little Billy’s now special one. This selfish behavior is inherent. Unless medical science eventually discovers a viable way to excise or neutralize this conflicting aspect of the human mind at birth, it will never wane from our existence.

Career Politicians are an excellent example of adult greed on steroids. Aside from always giving themselves salary increases while accomplishing less by not showing up, the hypocrites among them will expound on how they need to reduce the deficit by raising taxes. But the increase must not affect their particular non-profit institutions, which often have no contributing benefit for the working class whose taxes just got raised.

It’s a real shame that Adam and Eve chose to disobey God in the Garden of Eden. The consequences were losing the benefit of never being in need or want of anything, and their penalty wound up altering their son Cain and his siblings’ behavior, along with everyone coming after them, right down to the present.

Gotta go. My wife is eating all the M&Ms… again.

Hello Martha’s Vineyard

Greetings everyone! And for those of you who still may not recognize me… Yes, I am Mark Zuckerberg, and I’ll be your intellectual speaker this evening. First of all, I can’t tell you all what a thrill it is for me tonight, to be with all of you hard-working, down to earth, common folks… here at Martha’s Vineyard. Can we get that microphone turned up a little more please? Thank you guys. Well, I see we have the U.S. Representative for the great state of Massachusetts, Joe Kennedy and his family with us here tonight. Glad you could make it Joe! How are those kids? Alright! Can you people in the back hear me okay now? Yeh? That’s great! Wonderful… wonderful…

Well, I’m delighted to have this opportunity to address you all this evening, on the topic of peace and tolerance in this new age of ours, through digitally enhanced, thoughtful, and continuous concessionism, and how that facilitates the greatest coming together of civilized man in history, beginning right out there on Facebook… which I created. Thank you… thank you. No. Please… Hold the applause. Really… you’re much too kind.

The news for the present is far from what our generation would hope for, my faithful followers. I have hosted several conferences at my corporate headquarters this past year with the greatest philosophers and men and women in the mental and neurological disciplines of our time, and it has unfortunately been concluded that there is currently zero percent chance of achieving continual ‘peace and tolerance’ as defined by Webster, anytime, anywhere, within the confines of existing societal structures. An indication in my book that something’s gotta give.

Whether it’s peace in the real-world or the LCDs in the face, virtual world of social networking that I’ve hooked you all on, your brain’s easily pissed-off limbic system will continue to stay one step ahead of a practical lobotomy for now, and there simply isn’t enough Thorazine on the planet to knock the meanness out of every human being. In other words, I didn’t bring a magic peace potion in my pocket to send you home with tonight, so don’t post any threatening tweets to me tomorrow or I’ll ban your tukas from Facebook… unless you point a gun at me of course… in which case I’ll run like the Flash downstairs to the corporate bunker!

As for Facebook tolerance, the aforementioned experts also tell me that most of you are so buzzed on caffeine, pills, or lack of sleep from morning ’til night, that you’ve got one eye permanently trained on the ‘Unfriend’ button, with your trigger finger on the mouse, itching to click the sucker or type “WTF?!” as soon as the next opposing comment shows up. So I began asking myself, “Mark, how is the whole, ‘Why can’t we all just get along’ thing ever going to work with already perpetual offense-defense wired brains that are now on steroids?”

Folks, raise your hands out there in the audience if you truly believe you can make it through an entire year on Facebook, without either inadvertently offending or taking issue with someone by giving voice to your now ‘has to be wrong’ belief systems and refusing to surrender unconditionally to that wonderful blameless soul’s last 20 agitating comments, and so prevent the loss of yet another ‘never met before’ friend being tossed out with yesterday’s trash. I see three hands way in the back there. Well, I’m sorry to inform you three, but the timeline of human behavioral patterns says you won’t be able to do it for 365 days in a row because both you and your friend’s emotions are lurking behind the brain’s ancient amygdala, waiting to jump out and see how fast they can open or shut the door in your faces; and it only gets exacerbated in the virtual world as one habitually perceives the other as never quite up to their level of knowing and in need of being shown the real facts of the matter. Shame on you barbaric cave dwellers! Catch up with the times why don’t ya.

Now here’s an original Zuckerberg idea I came up with last month that we can all get our minds around. Tomorrow you all deposit twenty-five dollars in one of my banks, and whoever comes out walking on water after twelve months of total non-confrontation, including typing words that can be taken more than one way, to a ‘not as close as you thought’ friend, takes it all? Naturally, I’ll put a clause in the rules that states if no one wins, I get to keep the money and use it to buy up all the available stock in Apple… just because I can. I’ll come back to this idea later.

Barring catastrophe, no typical American grade school kid has learned any more as a child than I did about the brain’s terrifying emotional capacity. We lived right across the street from the school when I was growing up and I first began learning about peace and tolerance at the early age of seven. There was a bully named Jimmy Decker in second grade that would corner me at recess. Every day he would knock me down, take the lunch money out of my pants pocket, and then spit in my face. My mom told me to tell him, “Give peace a chance.” I came home the next day with a broken tooth and a busted lip, and she asked me what happened. I said, “I told Jimmy to, give peace a chance”, and he said, “Give me a chance at a piece of your sister and I’ll only take your lunch money on Tuesdays.” “Then he punched me in the mouth and took my lunch money.”

That was the year of my greatest epiphany. My mom always got weekends off from work, so early one Saturday morning I took mom’s credit card from her purse before she woke up, hopped the bus over to Radio Shack and bought a pair of walkie talkies and hid them under my bed when I got back. I slipped the credit card back in mom’s purse while she was over at the new neighbors playing bridge, and hurried upstairs to my room to work out the details of my master plan.

The following Friday, mom came screeching into the driveway from work in the middle of the day after getting a call from principal Powell, wanting to know if the reason I had been absent from school all week was because I had the same flu that was sending all the other kids home sick. She burst into my room screaming, “Why have you been skipping school all week young man?!” Confidently I said, “I no longer require the physical accouterments of continuing education mother. I duck taped a voice-activated walkie talkie with a five-year battery under the teacher’s desk, and now I can do my lessons without ever leaving the house, so the solution to the Jimmy Decker enigma and your ever-growing fiscal loss of lunch money has been handily resolved at the same time.” Pretty clever huh.

I had to ride with her in the back seat to return the walkie talkies and was grounded for the entire summer for lifting mom’s credit card, but the potential of my concept of learning things remotely stuck with me like glue on flypaper from then on. Oh, I’m sorry folks. I digressed there didn’t I… It’s a Zuckerberg thing. Where was I?

Human aspirations of living in a perpetually harmonious society have remained globally elusive because even though we know what that word ‘peace’ implies, our unharnessed, emotion-driven brains will never be capable of pulling it off, twenty-four-seven… even if we all lived to be five-hundred years old! And greed is one of the biggest culprits right up there at the top of the human frailties ladder, requiring no teaching whatsoever. It just sprouts right out of the brain as a toddler. By the way, “I ate my ice cream, and now I want yours… plus that yellow Tonka truck you’re loading playsand into with mom’s tablespoon and making all those engine noises with your mouth. I can do that better than you can. That’s not even how an engine sounds. It goes, “brrrrrr…brumm brumm, chhhtt.”

The only snowstorm chance in Hades for any semblance of tolerance on this earth while clinging to our grandparents’ ridiculous ancient values, would be to continuously concede with no drugs or alcohol while maintaining that silly, “We the People” nonsense at the same time… on every topic, everywhere, continuously, which would be ungoverned chaos with unrelenting brain fire. Anyway, that’s how it was explained to me by the experts, so I’m reasonably certain about that…

Okay everyone… This is the part of the evening I’ve been waiting for. It’s time to unveil the grand ‘Mark Zuckerberg Solution’! I present for your approval this evening, my ultimate plan that will finally achieve peace and contentment in our technologically advanced time. It’s really not that difficult to grasp, but you may want to take notes so you can ask the AIs in the back questions later.

We begin this massive planet-wide undertaking by implementing some long-overdue changes. The complete agenda is much too lengthy to be addressed here tonight but here are a few of the ones that are at or near the top of the list so you can get the general scope of it. Included in the plans early stages are the following items. A merging of all independent nations the size of Israel and smaller to streamline geographical governing areas, establishing a new global hybrid form of socialism to ensure equality (hooray!), euthanizing cranky old people, required annual mood-altering vaccinations, and hopefully down the road, mandatory ‘genetic amygdala alteration’ or ‘GAA’ during infancy to eventually replace the vaccinations; and when we finally achieve the new calmer, non-argumentative peaceful order of homo sapiens that has eluded us since the dawn… well then, peace will finally reign on Earth, Family Feud and Marriage Bootcamp will be the number one rated TV shows… and my Facebook will be smooth sailing for everyone, all the time! There just won’t be any more of that nasty, ridiculous old divisive stuff hindering us and causing harmful stress and anxiety… not to mention the constant damage to the body’s antioxidants and such.

Well, that concludes my presentation. I love you all so much, and thanks for leaving your yachts for a while and coming out this evening! Don’t forget to pick up one of our beautiful newly designed Facebook tee-shirts at the tables in the lobby on your way out. We’ve got plenty of the new spill-proof 5X size for all you sedentary Facebook and Coke junkies, and they’re a real steal at only seventy-five dollars each. You can also buy them online anytime, and the shipping is free… when you order a minimum of four shirts. Also, we’ve set up 100 AI terminals in the back to answer all your questions. Just place your hand on the recognition pad to your right and state the last four digits of your social security number when prompted. Easy as pie!

Goodnight Everyone,
Mark Zuckerberg

Brave New World Revisited

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It’s wonderful that we have conservative and liberal views in America, but the accelerating lack of rationality that is occurring in this twenty-first century is not wonderful. I’m not so much concerned about the country transcending into some new form of twenty-first century governing, as all governments eventually fade into history, usually lasting not much more than a couple hundred years. Even though I was brought up to be a conservative individual, and in fact am, I no longer lay claim to, nor participate in any political faction, for the simple reason that I have chosen to finish my days observing and philosophizing the human condition full time now, with no further interest in becoming caught up in its impassioned endeavors happening before my eyes; and none of these factions are even remotely capable of dealing with the much larger issue which presses upon me. In fact, without exemption, all political parties have become the most amplified and accurate reflection of the fallibility of the human condition. They know not what they do, yet they keep on plowing madly away at it, with an accelerated momentum.

This past decade has revealed to me an exponentially growing viciousness between political sides. I observe an increase in ‘cut-throat’ tactics on a level never before witnessed… a level which now revelates visions of assassinations and an ever growing likelihood of civil war, all for the attempted fulfillment of settling a list of decades (if not centuries) old grievances that would fill a chasm, and in reality could never be completely agreed upon; and this is an example of the elements of the condition that truly concerns me regarding the social sanity of the American citizen.

A specific alternative government doesn’t weigh very much in my mind as a path in which to solve the continuing degradation of the sociability of humanity. Short of global administering of George Orwell’s soma gum to sedate us all into a continual passive state, I am currently at a loss to see humanity ever transcending into that ‘Brave New World’ where all our grievances are finally dissipated once and for all.

We have so many innate flaws, like greed for example. Greed isn’t even a thing that is observed and learned. It comes built in, right out of the box, and no biology scientist or brain surgeon has a clue as to how it might be excised at birth, as simply as doing an excellent job of severing and tying off the umbilical cord. Watch two children sitting on the step eating their ice cream cones. One child gulps their cone down while the other slowly licks it, enjoying every moment. Suddenly the first child looks at the other and says, “I ate my ice cream cone, and now I want yours”. No one taught them that. Or the same two out on the lawn, and one picks up a Tonka truck and starts making motor sounds with their mouth, and the other one sees the enjoyment transpiring and tries to tear the truck away from the happy child, which now becomes a fight with crying and shouting ensuing. Did you teach those children to do that Mom? I didn’t think so… And with inborn issues like this, humanity is already predisposed to self destruction (or even annihilation).

We are at an ominous crossroads at this point in linear time. I observe the differing sides, and not just the political arena, but our own smaller groups and personal interactions as well, and that is where my concerns lie, although I’ll be gone soon enough, which raises the question,”Why be concerned at all?” I’ve a feeling the philosophical observer has some sort of sense of responsibility regardless of a total lack of time or ability to wave a magic wand. Feminists have struggled for decades to make their gains. The gay community has struggled for decades to make their gains, and an entire array of other social groups have struggled to make their gains. My concern is real, and human history clearly shows that all the struggling in the world can come to a vicious and horrendous end at the drop of a hat (or axe), if we steer too haphazardly into the next era.

Why have we become so acutely piqued at issues that used to more appropriately cause our brows to furl, and to then place said issue into our think tanks for later discussion and discernment using rationale? Why are we all on such a razor edge with this generation, and so full of the fallacy of, “My way or the highway… and I mean Right Now!” Is this forever going to be the curse of the homosapient? Are we pre-programmed to be stuck in this singular mode? Are we helpless all the way to our own undoing then?

Well, I for one would like to finish this life, having some sort of positive proof that these conditions are not unalterable, and that as a social animal with access to intelligence and reasoning at the ready, we might at least begin a brave… new… and different world. In the meantime, I’ll continue observing and thinking, and if I have a great epiphany of the solution, I’ll certainly be letting you know.