It is a lie.

On page 71 of the book Connected by Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD and James H. Fowler, Ph D. the chapter titled Big Fish, Little Pond starts.  In this chapter they make a claim, and they use the words of another economist to back up their point.  They claim, "People are envious.  They want what others have, and they want what others want."  Now this is crucial, because it is a lie.  When I read this I immediately realized the bias in the writer’s minds.  People are not envious.  People in this modern society are envious and that is because that is what they are taught to be.  People have evolved to their environment and this current environment is designed around greed; anything for a profit.  You see, what is true about the above claim is that as human beings we most certainly do ascribe to pecking order, but that does not mean we are inherently envious.  We do want to be the big fish in the little pond, but only because we have not overcome our own ego.  Human beings adapt to their environment, holistically.  One can literally say our environment defines us just as much as we define it.  So if the environment is one of greed, then people will be envious.

In the current system only one type of person can be at the top; the richest greediest person.  The only way to get to the top of this current system is to be extremely greedy and selfish.  This is a huge issue because it is obvious there are much more important things in life.  Our own socialness is catching us up, or maybe it is better to say our lack of awareness about our social/animal nature is catching us up.  This is no different than being ethnocentric.  We have no choice but to adhere to pecking order, just as we have no choice but to be the extremely social creatures that we are.  But what sits at the top of the pecking order is learned and not inherent.  The only thing inherent is that someone sits at the top.   It takes an exceptionally wise person to acquire power and not be overtaken by their own ego.  That is, if they ever confronted their ego at all before acquiring power.  It should be obvious that one does not have to mature spiritually to acquire power over others.

Imagine the loss of an arm or leg, and then imagine getting it back.  Can you imagine the power one would feel regaining the use of a limb?  Now imagine achieving a position of power where one suddenly gains control over millions of people, the sensation would be overwhelming.  Bertrand De Jouvenel in his book, Power: The Natural History of its Growth, simply states this issue on page 110, "In every condition of life and social position a man feels himself more of a man when he is imposing himself and making others the instruments of his will, the means to the great ends of which he has an intoxicating vision.  To rule a people, what an extension of the ego is there!"  I see no distinction between a place of power, like a politician and a wealthy person even if they are not a politician.  The reality of having more money than another in a system of greed is power in and of itself.  There is only ever so much money, so the more one person, the less another has. 

Following the paragraph in the book Connected where they make the claim that people are envious, they use statistical studies they themselves, and others conducted, to prove their point.  You see almost all of psychology does this same thing; they commit to analyze research based on a lie.  This phenomenon only further perpetuates the lie.  They literally create entire studies based on a lie.  Are their studies wrong?  No, not exactly.  It very accurately explains what is actually happening, but it is through a bias, they rarely if ever contrast their study with the truth. 

The studies they conducted show that a person would rather be uglier if it meant they were better looking than those around them, instead of being better looking but uglier than the average of the larger scale.  No one wants to be the ugly person in a group, obviously, it lowers ones chances of sex.  But this is based on a lie as well; true sexual attraction encompasses much more than physical beauty, which is relative anyways.   The same is true financially.  A person would rather make less money overall as long as it meant they were making more money than those around them.    These people in these studies are not aware of their potential and therefore, just like the ethnocentric person, or the person of power, they are not seeing reality because they are blinded by the bias of their own ego.

Of the undergraduates these Harvard professors surveyed, 93% of them would rather be uglier overall so long as they were better looking than those around them in everyday life.  Ego!  It makes sense to me that 93% of the population is controlled by their own ego. 

People are very sensitive to those around them and this phenomenon requires no actual thought.  We are all connected unconsciously and are evolving to the environment that is created by this same collective conscious.  If everyone is trying to get more than the next guy, it should be obvious to us by now the result of this behavior; it simply does not work. 

Consider how deeply this lie runs in our culture; consider how long it has been being perpetuated, on and on.  What a lot of people fail to understand is that the same cultural structure that exists today, where the rich are at the top, is the one that existed back then when a lot of this supposed ground breaking Western philosophy was being written down.  The ego of white Europeans has always been exceedingly unaware of itself.  The philosophical thought of Europe has always been quite egocentric.  It fails to capture all of humanity and posits itself as the epitome of being human. That is practically a text book definition of ego.  It is all a big lie. 

Culturally humans have been being raised in a society that prizes wealth/power above all else for thousands of years.  All of those men of power that were in charge of the churches and were kings or queens never got past their own ego.  They simply believed they were better than those in proximity.  They were the richest people on the planet, the most powerful; their actions affected everyone on the planet.  On many levels this modern culture is exactly the same as it was two thousand years ago, just with higher population levels.  Instead of Christianity dominating our culture now the banks rule supreme.   This culture where wealth is at the top is not the defining culture of humanity, even though it does define us as individuals because of the effects it has on us as children.  Culture unknowingly affects our beliefs and actions because we are completely immersed in it prior to being aware of its affects.  This is the real issue; people grow older and never realize the truth.  It is terribly hard to unlearn all of the things one just simply accepted as a child because those in charge of us as did not do it either, so the lie just gets carried on forever it seems.  Essentially generation after generation no real growth occurs.  Greed is one of those things that simply and blindly gets accepted as human nature.

All governments are greedy, there is no government that doesn't take from it's people in order to maintain power.  All these people achieving power are just ego maniacs.  Those rare occasions when someone aware of their ego achieves power, by nature of being so completely outnumbered, they fail.  Think of the guy who came up with communism, Karl Marx, and the affects this doctrine has had on humanity.  It was just a book written by a guy who studied cultures back in the day.  Marx spent something like fifteen years in a library studying.  People who knew him then said he was ill-tempered and prone to fits, the man was angry at the world, but instead of focusing on himself, he focused on lies.  I think Marx never really became individualized himself, he only saw through the filter of greed, through the bias of his growing up in the world, which at the time was a nasty place to live.  His bias was that he judged man as they were then, in his world, and deemed that that was their natural state. 

That European society was not then nor is it now, human beings natural state.  I see it in my readings dealing with the economist who set up our current system.  It was Hobbes that said all men are brutish, nasty, and short or some such, and not many seemed to disagree with him.  Almost all of those men who decided what was going on were extremely and ignorantly biased regarding what it really means to be a human being.  One could say that they didn't have the necessary information, but that would not be correct either.  There is plenty of documentation regarding people understanding the truth a thousand years before Hobbes was even born.  Almost all of these intellectuals were born in Europe, in the most insane situations and cultures.  It does not take long studying European history to realize how screwed up it really was.  We look around and see all these messed up things going on in the world; they were going on then too.  It was possibly worse then, but that would be a terribly hard argument to make considering what is going on right now in the world. 

Here are a couple of interesting facts that can easily be found.  Keep in mind though this is just a couple of the things that were happening back then.  There were so many horrible things happening back then it is hard to think of it at all.  One could study for years about all of the atrocities Christianity and banks have wreaked on humanity sense their creation. 

In Europe in the 1700's people would sell their children into chimney sweep service for money for food.  This meant their children were forced up chimneys to clean them out.  Little children.  Can you imagine selling your 5 year old so that you could eat?  If children refused they were put in the chimney and then a fire was made to get them up the chimney.  Imagine if you can, needing food so badly that you would sell your child into slavery.  Imagine that.  Just as it is now, the most powerful are in control of the food.  People do not only starve because they are ignorant; they starve because the people at the top of the pecking order do not handle their lives appropriately.   There is absolutely no reason that anyone on this planet should be starving: None.  Yet it is happening still to this day because the top of the food chain is dominated by the greediest of people and this obviously reflects downward on all of us. 

In the same time period in Europe, when children would be born out of wedlock they would take them to a place where the babies would be left in a box till they died from a lack of socialization.  They died because no one would touch them.  Then, the mothers would be hired out to breast feed for the wealthy, so rich women’s breasts didn't become unsightly.  I might add these same women went to the same churches as each other.   So you have a social structure in which a young woman is forced to kill her baby, then breast feed for a rich person so she herself could eat, all the while, going to the same church being told who knows what about god.  Talk about hypocrisy right out in the open. 

These philosophers and economist were using this type of stuff to judge human nature.  But what they failed to realize is that it was not human nature that was flawed, but the system, the environment, in which they were being raised that was flawed; just like it is today.  You see, if people knew this, those men of power would have power no more and this is precisely why they do not fix the problem. 

The truth is people are not inherently envious or greedy.  People do however adhere to pecking order as the foundation of all social interaction.  That is for survival.  Any kind of functioning as a group requires this.  In this modern society, the methods of survival are different than say living in the wilderness, but they are there none the less.  In this culture people are not taught to think about who sits at the top they have simply accepted it as how it is because that is what they were taught.  In our current culture public schools teach children to mindlessly follow authority just like the churches did back then.  They are not aware of their power to decide who sits at the top.  So therefore, the evilest of people remain sitting at the top. 

There is this notion that human beings are flawed that underlay's all of this.  It is one of the main excuses that allow the perpetuation of the system.  This is actually the beauty of religion if you are the one in charge of said religion; this idea that we are flawed allows everyone to accept the flaws of those with the power.   I cannot count how many times I have heard someone justify someone's actions by saying, "no one is perfect."  This is such a ridiculous notion.  Does one have to be perfect in order to not cause mass suffering?  That is an absolutely ridiculous notion, yet this excuse is put forth endlessly because so many people in the world have just accepted it as fact, but it is not a fact at all: it is a lie.