CAPITAL-While refering to wealth and property, "capital" also describes the forces that
work to increase these things. When we speak of "the needs of capital", we refer to
low wages, cheap resources, and a favorable tax system. Of course capital, in it's
strict sense, is inanimate. The "needs of capital" refers, obviously, to the desires of
individuals to further their own wealth.
CAPITALISM-The idea that utilizing the base emotion of greed will produce a society that benefits all individuals. This can not happen for at least two reasons:
1) Allowing the unfettered pursuit of wealth and power only leads to the concentration of these things in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
2) The paradigm that the system operates under encourages materialism and individualism, both of which work against sustainability.
As the word suggests, capitalism focuses on capital. It strips important human needs
and abilities of their inherant value, and converts everything into dollar amounts, to
be manipulated, in turn, to somehow wring more dollars from the system. If some of these manipulations just happen to better society and our surrounding world, well, lucky for us, because the primary intent is not human progress, but rather wealth creation.
Also, capitalism is based on the suicidal myth that we can have endless growth in our
finite system. This is usually what we consider a cancer, and, at present, it is eating
away at our social cohesion, our government, and our environment.
CONSCIOUSNESS CONTINUUM-We tend to think of human growth as a simple straight line, from undeveloped to fully developed, but when it comes to the growth of consciousness, an irregularly shaped sphere provides a better representation. Each
person carries a broad array of developments going on at various stages, depending on
one's life experiences. That's why we can say that people have their good and bad points. As consciousness expands, the sphere grows progressively larger, encompassing more and more of its physical and mental surroundings into its point of
reference. This, in turn, leads to increases in one's compassion, understanding, and
ability to live with mystery.
