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. ~1 Timothy 6:10

It is impossible to achieve a spiritual awakening if you spend all of your productive time lusting after the material, scheming to grift others out of their material and — second only to your love of the material — deify your own group based on your successful ability to hoard more and more of the base material. Yet, these are the times we find ourselves in… the Second Gilded Age of Western Civilization, the age of the 1% monopolist class.

At the beginning of the First Gilded Age, initiated by the insatiable greed of John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil company, the average person was rightfully fearful of individuals and/or corporations amassing enough wealth to challenge the power of the state. Their cultural memory of dealing with the fruit of such often cruel melodramas played out in the Old World again and again and again, with the common people themselves taking the brunt of all pain radiating from such conflict. Those centuries old memories followed our ancestors to the New World, watching the ghoulish specter of Rockefeller’s Über-selfish energy monopoly threaten everything they held dear, it moved the Federal Government to create the first competition law with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. It wasn’t perfect—Rockefeller’s bribed agents in government did their best to sabotage it from the beginning—but it was a start, something to build upon. Over the next century or so, antitrust laws and their woefully few champions managed to slow down the diabolical ambitions of the 1% grifter class to somewhat of a crawl.

Obviously, their biggest opponent was the memory of the populace, their understanding that the usurpation of the lifeblood of the nation’s capitalist tradition and the free open markets it requires to function, by the wealthiest members of society was a threat to the United States of America and all of its citizens. So the 1% needed to replace those memories with something else. And that’s what they have accomplished. Today, unlike our ancestors back in the late nineteenth century, the average American no longer flinches in terror & fury at the idea of “a billionaire,” even though they absolutely should. Instead, they do the opposite and have been thoroughly indoctrinated into actually celebrating these figures and even lusting to be among their exclusive class of elitist wealth & power hoarders. We now live in a society more broken than it has ever been, divorced from the heart of the unseen spirit and brainwashed into singing twisted hymns for the love of money like “Greed is good!” and “Only profits matter!” and we see nothing wrong with it. We love it and embrace the root of evil enthusiastically with both arms. And it is quite normalized.

To become spiritually awakened is to wrench oneself away from this filth; to recognize that the promise of the unseen spirit is the true goal while eschewing the illusion of material. To do so is to find yourself in a sea of your fellow humans who still bow down to their love of money, who will see the enlightened as peculiar and even untrustworthy in that peculiarity. In fact, they will become a temptation to you, continuously beckoning you back to the filthy wasteland the 1% grifter class has turned our society into for their self-serving lusts. You become disconnected from the people around you for the protection of your very soul, because you cannot force them to spiritually awaken, they have to get there on their own because they want to be there, and history itself has proven it’s the hardest thing in the world to do.