“In America money is the accepted measure of brains. It is thought a man who makes a lot of money must be a clever fellow; a man who does not, is not.”

“For my part, the thing that I would wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security. But what the typical modern man desires to get with it is more money, with a view to ostentation, splendour, and the outshining of those who have hitherto been his equals.

The social scale in America is indefinite and continually fluctuating. Consequently all the snobbish emotions become more restless than they are where the social order is fixed, and although money in itself may not suffice to make people grand, it is difficult to be grand without money.

In America money is the accepted measure of brains. It is thought a man who makes a lot of money must be a clever fellow; a man who does not, is not. Nobody likes to be thought an idiot. Therefore, when the market is in ticklish condition, I have observed Americans behave the way young people do during an examination.”

— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Ch.III: Competition, p. 49

Born in 1872 into the British aristocracy and educated at Cambridge University, Russell gave away much of his inherited wealth. However, in 1931 he inherited and kept his families earldom (Russell once joked that his title was primarily used for the purpose of securing New York City hotel rooms). His multifaceted career centered on work as a philosophy professor, writer, and public lecturer, even so Russell was not stable financially until the publication of A History of Western Philosophy (1945). This work became a best-seller, and provided Russell with a steady income for the remainder of his life. Along with his friend Albert Einstein, Russell had by the late 1940′s reached world wide celebrity status as a public intellectual. In 1949, Russell was awarded the Order of Merit, and the following year he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

When my sister died of cancer last year I decided to study up on cancer. One book had some interesting info — that cancer has the ability sometimes to evolve resistance to substances that had previously caused the cancer to shrink, ……
and that it can direct veins to itself to get nourishment for further growth.

But even from the point of view of a cancer, the end game of an extensive cancer is that it kills the host — and thus dies itself.

It struck me that all these things are also true of our cancerous civilization based on capitalism — the corporations can lobby and bribe Congress and State houses to direct subsidies and favorable regulations to themselves.

they can evolve resistance to regulations intended to constrain their destructiveness, and in the end their wildly successful growth will kill the host –humanity– and will thus itself die.

This thing is just as mindless as the cancer cells in a human body, and just as terminal. Unless humanity gets the will to develop a weapon sufficiently powerful to rein it in… but the secret weapon of the corporate state is control of the media, so that most people are not even thinking about any of this.

Mary Wildfire