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The Treaty Stone of Limerick on which it is said the Treaty of Limerick was signed in 1691, but its guarantee of religious freedom was later repudiated.
King John's Castle, built in the 13th Century, is visible across the River Shannon.

THE TWO FACES OF SOCIETY
© Newsmedianews 2001

“How much longer will we kill our prophets
while we stand aside and look?
– some say it's just a part of it
got to fulfil the book” — Bob Marley

“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
Bible: I Timothy 6:10

“The world will begin to run out of fresh water by 2050...”
— World Population Fund report

OF FOOLS, FOLLIES & KNOW-IT-ALLS

SCIENTISTS estimate that our sun is some halfway through its stable lifetime with another five billion or so years to go until it begins to expand, engulfing the planets of the solar system before contracting to a white dwarf. Depending on overall mass, the white dwarf can transform into a black hole, a cosmic phenomenon in which the gravitational forces of the dead star can be so powerul that nothing can escape, not even light. Very lttle is know about black holes except that they exist.

How long it takes for a white dwarf to become a black hole is unknown —the level of negative energy that must be attained for the forces involved to rip open the fabric of the universe like the vortex of a whirlpool has yet to be quantified. What is certain is that no human will ever watch this happen to our sun from Earth because the planet will no longer exist. We may colonise the stars and may observe the future fate of Earth from some far off point, who can tell?

The emergence of human evolution has been traced back some eleven million years with the first hominoid toolmakers traced back to 2.1 million years BC.

So-called civilised society has been documented since about 5,000BC, although differing societal cultures have been detected as far back as 40,000BC, with the recession of the last great Ice Age.

All of this is but a grain of sand on the beach of life's ocean—an ocean that itself is as one pod in an infinite field of peas.

The question how long will life as we know it last has no possible answer. It is pointless asking whether it might last longer if we were a unified species with no tendency to aggression.

Where we think we have largely removed aggression from sections of our global society, we have in fact only channelled it into another form. It is a form that is, however, just as deadly as the naked aggression of war.

Any acceptance or rejection of conditions is governed in the main by adherence or misalignment with the status quo. There is much that is wrong in the world that masquerades as right due to the acceptance of and adherence to the status quo.

We accept the existence of opposites – happy, unhappy; good and bad. Likewise, society has two faces - the benevolent and the malevolent - the caring and the uncaring, with the criteria for determining either status rooted in the evaluation of humanity's worth.

Therein began and continues the problem. We worship the idols of our ethics while sacrificing them daily to scorn.

"It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think that they can be happy without money," wrote Albert Camus.

It is spiritual suicide to think that you can be happy with money, for to so think creates an unattainable and therefore futile target. It is not the money, it is the life. It is the fact that we have put a cost and a fee upon our own right to life.

"What do you not drive human hearts into, cursed craving for gold!" wrote the Roman poet Virgil.

So. Where did money come from? More importantly and leaving religious philandering aside for a moment, how did the love of money come to so dominate human existence?

We can look back to the days when goods and food – and even people – were bartered, but money as a commodity can only be said to have been popularised by the first of the empires and dynasties. We have lived for so long in the gloom of its sparkle filled shadow it is questionable if we will ever as a planetary species fully return to the light without some cataclysmic catalyst.

Today, the bulk of global society revolves upon one kingpin — money. If the kingpin is faulty, how can any mechanism dependant upon it be considered reliable?

Who controls the life we are born into? Are we marionettes who dance only to the hand-me-own memories of some long forgotten tune by some long forgotten composer? Should we be content with this? Have we lost our self-volition and autonomy? Did we ever have either?

We have become so entrenched in simply accepting the world of man that it has become almost sacrilege to acknowledge the truth that we would be better off in a world where the value of people ranked greater than money.

Shudder the thought. What, no retirement annuity? If there was no need for money to begin there would be no need for pensions. Think about it. Someone somewhere is always getting rich at someone else's expense. They say it is a dog eat dog world, but we made it like that. And folk can become so used to the 'good' living that they can easily forget about the simple things like plain onion sandwiches.

Look at the people in the street. The majority hell bent on a spend, spend, spend spree, as if somehow the freedom to have and spend money can absolve them from the responsibility of facing up to what is going on in the world.

Don’t tell me what you think I don’t know, said the man in the cafe, tell me what you don’t know.

THE TWO FACES OF SOCIETY © Newsmedianews 2001

THE TWO FACES OF SOCIETY
© Newsmedianews 2001