Dear George,
For those of us who get off on mayhem, chaos, destruction, suffering, and grinding poverty, there is no turn on like greed. When it comes to reducing a man’s brain to mush, greed trumps sex every time. With sex, a man shoots his load, turns over and falls asleep sated. With greed, he is never sated. No matter how much he accumulates, the greedy man is always goaded by the knowledge that there is more to be had, more to be accumulated, more to possess.
Greed strips resources from the earth, turns cities to rubble, wafts the stench of poverty over the earth, spreads slums like black mold, creates widows and orphans, starves children, and in general gives to life that bracing dash of pain that strengthens humanity’s moral backbone.
Greed sees freedom in possession and upon gaining this freedom, experiences freedom's paradox. In freedom, greed discovers it is not equal to the task of using this freedom to become more fully human. Feeling naked and afraid, greed’s freedom expresses itself in a crying need for the security it foolishly believes would allow it to enjoy its freedom to the fullest. The more secure it becomes, the less secure it feels.
The solidarity that makes real freedom possible is impossible in the hyper individuated fragmentation that is greed’s driving dynamic. So greed seeks security through even more possessions, yet the thicker the walls of its gated community, the more elaborate the alarm systems, the meaner the security force, the more insecure greed feels. So, it starts dropping bombs.
When all is said and done, when the rats have all come home to roost, greed is a stimulating process of slow, painful self-destruction. The Age of Oil that is drawing to a close will be remembered as a colossal act of self-mutilation, and the irony of it all is that when it is finished, the Industrial Age it spawned will barely register as a cosmic fart on the grand scale of geological time.
As I said, George, greed is the ultimate turn-on.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
7:20:23 AM 
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