The Odyssey

This is an old picture of mine, one that I took in November 2008 and I've posted it before. But it's related to something I've been thinking of recently. I originally named the picture A Shopping Cart's Odyssey, jokingly, to give the shopping cart's adventure in the woods an appropriately Homeric character - as befits someone like me who dabbles in ancient things by way of work. Recently, though, I was thinking that it actually fits what is going on these days. The Enron scandal, the absurdly large bonuses of industry execs, the depression, and so on. You could certainly say that the capitalist economic system is looking for direction, couldn't you?

Money's a weird thing isn't it? The way I see it, money in itself has no negative or positive moral or ethical value. It is simply a medium which enables people to obtain the necessities and pleasures of life, to buy services and goods. Money only acquires a moral or ethical value depending on how it's obtained and used. I'm not against money nor do I think it is evil.  I very much enjoy the pleasures that money can get when I happen to have it (conversely, now I don't happen to have that much money, and I don't mind that either). I don't mind some people being richer than others, as long as the acquirement of wealth and its use has not caused suffering to others. Even so, it is very absurd that money has very much become a value in itself. It's always been so in the whole human history of course, and I know this is not a new thing to say, but that is where the problems stem from. Money as an independent value has become more and more emphasized in the past couple of decades, with the multinational corporations aiming for greater and greater profits at any cost. It's as if the race towards bigger and bigger profits has become some sort of a sacred objective that justifies any means.

I could really rant about this a long time, but I'll end this with some wise words by Douglas Adams:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.