Market forces and governance has created a heartless crass materialistic society which is benefiting a few rich and powerful leading humanity to one crisis to another in which which majority of people suffer.
As Kabir Edmund Helminski puts it, “Our postindustrial, materialistic, secularized culture does not encourage the awakening of our essential Self. Widespread consumerism, self-indulgence, habits of immediate gratification, the moral relativity of our age, and the displacement of individual and communal responsibilities by large corporations, institutions, and bureaucracies bring us fewer moments of truth, fewer encounters with our essential and authentic selves. The distraction of entertainment that appeals to every human weakness and the pervasive artificiality that technology has brought leave us little chance of being what we are meant to be.”
Though the capitalists , rich and powerful seem to gain, but at the cost of others and nature. To such people, Mark Helprin warns, “Your materialism will make you suffer terribly not only at the end but also on the way.” And, according to Fyodor Dostoevsky, when some people succeed in accumulating a greater mass of objects, in turn, they diminish the joy in the world for a great majority.
Here are my two haiku on the curse of crass materialism.
Haiku
The material world
Allures, deludes and sucks us
To live futile life
~*~
Body-senses combine
Entices us to honey traps
To kill or get killed
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