mkrnhr said:
the funny thing is that a thread about gold already creates discord. Is there any symbolism at it? ;)
Well, as long as this thread is viewed as a learning experience, I'd say it's worth it's weight in gold. ;)
I haven't had anything to say in this thread up to this point. Sometimes I wonder about that too...whether it's because I have a more or less balanced view of a subject or whether it's more that I simply don't care. At any rate, I see the issue a certain way and I think that even if someone goes out and buys a bunch of gold for whatever reason, it wouldn't affect me negatively.
Most of the time, I feel like I have within me everything I need to be able to survive. In other words, no matter how high your pile of gold, you will always need something. If I find out what that is and supply it, we can swap, because I live in a non-zero sum game Universe.
But I don't think everyone understands this - even many people in the Work and I sometimes wonder if it's because the mechanics and effects of Narcissistic wounding go so deep.
To me, it appears that, quite simply, in many people, there is an inner denial. A way down deep disconnect between the individual and the Universe, most likely due to the influences of past experiences. It's a basic inversion...the preference for a "Cartesian Theatre" version of reality that turns existence inside out like a figure-ground inversion.
The Universe I live in contains non-zero sum games. For example, if I have a computer with no hard disk and a spare CD-ROM, and you have a computer with no CD-ROM but a spare hard disk, we can swap and both install Linux. Yippee! :D
If sleepy-head super-hero Gordon Gecko were to come along and ask who was the loser in the deal, we'd just laugh and tell him he was, since he was not involved. This property of containing non-zero sum games is not a trivial effect that is only seen in special cases.
Today, there are many living things on the planet. I imagine that from space, the presence of the biosphere is the most noticeable thing about the planet, since it keeps it out of chemical equilibrium as Lovelock's Gaia concept has demonstrated. Life has established this dominance by creating an ecosystem.
In an ecosystem, all members are symbiotic. That is what "ecosystem" means if you think about it, and I believe that was the deeper meaning embodied in Guardian's quote regarding those who share will always have enough.
Denial afflicted people have this horrible habit of pre-narratization. They represent what they have seen on that film in their internal thinking space, and deny that anything else exists - before their surface awareness even registers what they've done. So they are always constrained to working with the things they know about, in the configurations they know about. They cannot take opportunities because they cannot see them. Thus they quickly achieve a state called "
scarcity", and within this scarcity they 'know' that
if one person acquires a resource, another must lose it - so fear enters. The inner inversion converts a non-zero sum game Universe into a zero sum game.
Then, they set about teaching their young. With the Universe turned inside out they cannot teach them any good reasons for
not maximizing their own well-being at the expense of others. Yet they must do so, because otherwise (and from their point of view) their young become competitors for scarce resources. Since they cannot teach positive reasons for social behavior, they teach negative reasons for avoiding anti-social behavior.
This is probably where "morals" and "punishment" come from.
Sadly, not-anti-social does not equal social, since the Universe is not a mass of interlocking zero-sum games at all levels.
Not-anti-social does not bring the benefits of symbiotic interaction. Networking and sharing does, OSIT.
My 2 cents, fwiw. :)
