Lesson 59 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

Since jealousy and greed are related closely, jealousy must obviously be a source or root of evil.

I am not so much interested in defining evil as identifying the cause of evil, these I have boiled down to greed, envy and jealousy. Indeed I believe that envy and jealousy are actually aspects of greed. Behind any behavior that could possibly be considered evil is the root of greed and its expression as naked greed, or greed disguised as envy or jealousy.

Sometimes of course greed is difficult to identify, for example when many people (including BHO in my humble opinion) start to talk about giving to the poor they rarely intend that they should give to the poor but are somewhat more like Judas Iscariot who had his hand in the money bag of Jesus. I say that even if they may not be stealing money for their own enrichment, for when they use the power of the government to take money from one person to give to another in order to appear to be generous they at minimum steal the accolade that would go with such a gift if they had not stepped between the ‘donor’ and the ‘recipient.’

However since BHO is running the money through the government chances are that at more than one level there are people who are diverting some of it to their own enrichment. This is on top of the fact that government ‘charity’ rarely does anything other than to increase the dependency of its recipient. While the increasing control this gives stokes the appetite of the government for ever greater power (which is one objective of some strains of greed) over all aspects of life.

© 2012 Vic Jones

Lesson 58 from The Hard knocks School of Life

Evil seems to me to be made up of three basic behaviors: greed, envy and lying.

Greed may be (I believe is) the underlying disease for the behavior for which envy is the motivation, and most of the time greed is also the motivation for lying.

The only motivation I have ever seen for lying other than greed is fear. This then brings up the question of whether or not fear motivated lying is as evil as greed motivated lying. Another issue that muddies the all lying is evil is the fact that at times lying can be very necessary to stop someone from carrying out an evil act. An example of this is those people who hid Jews from Hitler’s SS during world war two. These people obviously lied and did good. Thus lying became not only a necessary evil at that time but became an actual active good.

© 2012 Vic Jones

Lesson 57 from the Hard Knocks School of Life

Socialism (or communism) seems to me to be systems of government based on greed and fueled by envy.

Communism and its child/sibling socialism are philosophies that are often hard to discuss rationally because people get heavily emotionally involved in these belief systems. Perhaps the reason for this is that so many people have invested their ‘treasure’ both in worldly goods and belief in these ideas and if anyone refutes these ideas they are devaluing the treasure that has been invested in them.

Yet when one takes the time to examine the idea that everyone should have the same stuff, (goods and services) without all of the emotional baggage, it becomes very evident that communism is childish or infantile at best and evil at worst. The reason for this is that not everyone wants, or needs, or deserves the same things in life. For very young children it may only seem fair that Johnny doesn’t have a cookie when Timmy doesn’t have a cookie. But adults can easily understand that if John works every day he has the goods and services he earns while if Tim refuses (not cannot) to work then he should likewise have what he has earned which is poverty.

© 2012 Vic Jones