The Heart Political Party

The Foundational Problem

The seven root problems presented in the "National Problem Symptoms" chapter are found at the very foundation of our present socioeconomic/geopolitical system. Indeed, these problems are part and parcel of the very nature of our present system, and thus cannot be solved within the present system.

And the name of our present system is the Money System. The Money System itself is the foundational problem.

The Money System is an externally existing, vastly complex and all encompassing assemblage of economic material/service transaction rules and behaviors. It functions to externally assign value/worth to 1) the material/service and 2) the holder of money both to have money and to procure the material/service. It thus relates us to a material/service regarding reciprocal value and worth. The Money System is a self-acting dynamic entity that has evolved over many thousands of years; it operates on its own without any semblance of guidance/control from us, needing us only to catalyze its unitary activity: the transaction. If we try to change the Money System via capitalism, communism, socialism or other idiosyncratic variations of control/guidance, it does react to and on us, but it nevertheless operates virtually and essentially unaffected with regard to both its function and its substantial basic effects upon us.

The singular purpose of the Money System, according to most thoughts, is to provide a relative assignment of cost value to materials/services and to facilitate an efficient means of both symbolic representation and actual exchange of materials/services regarding production and consumption. The Money System does indeed accomplish its singular purpose well.

However, the Money System has one major, unavoidable side effect: it severely damages human beings.

We require our basic needs (food, clothing, health care, home, etc.) in order to remain alive. The Money System determines the value/worth of our needs and the value/worth of our self in ability to procure our needs; the Money System takes our value in terms of our ability to sustain our life through it and equivocates our value to the material/service we need. So the Money System accurately tells us its primary rule: the less money we have the lesser our value and hence the greater our chance of dying prematurely, and the more money we have the greater our value and hence the lesser our chance of dying prematurely. Hence, the Money System – a thing of our own creation -- owns our very life, and it thus dictates our value, and our mind accepts that dictated value to keep us alive. This message is not lost on us at any level, from our base unconscious to our highest degree of consciousness. The Money System thereby warps and subverts our normal and healthy survival drive. Our mind, which is our interface to the world wherein exists both our life sustaining needs and the Money System, becomes understandably but unnaturally and unhealthily focused on obtaining money.

Thus the Money System owns our basic needs and thereby substantiates its claim of ownership of us. This is life-threatening enslavement, and such enslavement is damaging. We react to our damage with greed, self-sacrifice, selfishness, paranoia, guilt, egocentricity, neuropsychological and physical illness, etc., etc. as evidence of our damage.

The Money System by its immutable nature must assign variable external values to materials/services relative to situational attainability in order to facilitate its transactions, and because it is a self-acting dynamic entity, it makes its valuation assignments based solely on situational attainability (scarcity), without regard to individual human need. So it assigns hierarchical valuations to materials/services and to all the production tasks necessary to produce those materials/services. Meanwhile it diabolically lets us think that we are making those assignments, thus giving us the illusion that we have some say and responsibility in the matter when in truth we are merely the Money System’s pawns and we have no say in the matter at all. So, in general and with the Money System’s typically crazy exceptions, the relative few (scarce) who are in "power" receive an assigned higher value to power-oriented tasks and the overwhelming vast majority (non-scarce) who are subservient to those in power receive a lower assigned value to their non-power oriented tasks. This task oriented value assignment translates more or less directly to one’s money holdings. So although the price of a loaf of bread may be nearly the same for us all, the purchase of that bread requires a greater percentage of one person’s money holdings compared to the money holdings of another. Carried to an accurate conclusion, those with relatively little money can barely survive, and many die prematurely because of their poverty, while those in power, seeing what happens to the poor, neurotically scramble all the more to climb the survival ladder or to remain on top.

So, whether we’re rich or poor or somewhere in the ever dwindling "in between", all of us are compelled to remain mentally centered and overly externally focused just to remain alive in the Money System. Thus in this way, as will be explained herein, we are damaged, and we are compelled to remain mentally centered, at the expense of our painful soul and our imprisoned heart, and unto our premature demise.

In truth, the Money System is responsible for essentially all of our problems today.

1. The origin of the Money System.

The Money System was created hundreds of centuries ago.

Once upon a past time, many clusters of humans lived in separate "paradises" near the water. Our ancestors were provided with naturally occurring vegetation for food and shelter. People co-operated in food gathering and enjoyed much free time for personal pursuits. In time, however, the human population grew and paradisiacal vegetation food began to dwindle. We learned to eat animals. When both plant and animal food grew scarce, we formed groups and ventured forth from the paradise to the unknown, harsher environment in search of food.

Group dynamics developed. Leaders emerged to guide the groups in their survival efforts. The stronger individuals were sent on the hunt. Weaker ones provided other services. Everyone co-operated for the good of the group and under the guidance of the leaders.

As the groups continued to journey deeper inland, the hunts would often become difficult. Small game grew scarce and larger game was dangerous to the hunters. Often hunters didn’t return. Hunters began to refuse to hunt, and groups perished.

Leaders, reacting to striking, hunters, promised them the best food, clothing, mates, shelter, favor with the gods, jewelry, etc. in return for their efforts. These rewards re-motivated the hunters, and groups would make it through times of food scarcity. This was the beginning of barter, and barter continued even when hunting was fruitful and less dangerous.

Groups grew in size. Eventually there came a time when there were more hunters than rewards. So, hunters refused to hunt without rewards. Leaders again were in a quandary. Enterprising leaders then created "promises to reward" coupled with high prestige. Leaders would create trinket symbols and give them to the hunters on their return from a successful hunt. Hunters would enjoy high seats at meal times, and could display their trinkets for all to see. Hunters could then redeem their trinkets for rewards when and if the rewards became available. Money was born.

Rewards needed to be continuously available to keep hunters satisfied. Thus leaders would pay lesser amounts to others to create rewards for hunters. Hunters could exchange their money for other goods and services, although food, clothing and shelter were at this point excluded from the money market. Those paid by the hunters could purchase goods and services from others. Centuries passed and this process became a part of the group culture. The Money System had come into existence.

Eventually groups grew larger. However, when food became too scarce many would starve. Leaders soon realized that to maintain chances for group survival, key individuals should not be allowed to starve. Thus, leaders decreed that food, shelter and clothing would be subject to the Money System. Initially the leaders set the prices for all items, modifying prices as necessary to keep the group stable. Eventually leaders let go of some price setting, and people were more or less free to set prices and make deals, with leaders intervening only as necessary for group stability. Thus those with the most money survived, while those not providing essential services perished during famines when food prices were high. Assuredly, leaders saw to it that they themselves would survive, and paid themselves handsomely for leading the group. Hunters were the next richest group. However, the wolf was always at everyone else’s door. Nevertheless, leaders used both physical and spiritual (angry gods) threats to keep the masses from insurrection, and the groups continued.

Eventually our groups grew into nations. We learned how to farm vegetation and animals for food. This greatly reduced the need for specialized people (strongest, most agile, quickest, etc.) to engage in food procurement, opening the door for almost anyone to procure food. But even though the reason for the origin of money was gone, the Money System was not cut back or eliminated in favor of a healthier, co-operative system. Instead, the Money System continued to expand by seducing people into thinking there was no alternative. Leaders had grown comfortable in their role as the safest from starvation. Even though starvation had been potentially rendered extremely rare by farming technology, the Money System continued to create conditions that caused starvation. Hunters had become warriors during inter-group confrontations and the military was the most powerful sub-group in the nation, and thus the richest. No one desired to eliminate the system they were in charge of, as it garnered them too many perks they were afraid would dry up if spread too thin among the masses. The masses were afraid that without "the system" they would not be able to get food. Thus, the Money System created artificial reasons for its continued existence, and it has evolved to its present-day form.

Today, the Money System is the single global production/consumption exchange system, existing as it does in its four forms of control: capitalism, communism, socialism, and idiosyncratic variations.

2. Characteristic Properties and Effects of the Money System.

The nature of today’s version of the Money System is essentially the same as the original version, and thus today’s Money System continues to reflect the same characteristic properties and effects.

The Money System is based on scarcity. Initially, food was scarce and so were rewards for obtaining it. Money came into existence because of these scarcities, and today money requires scarcity to continue to exist. Thus the Money System now creates scarcity to keep itself alive by withholding money and means of production from the overwhelming vast majority of people, even though we have long had the technology to provide basic needs and desires for everyone.

The Money System creates excessive fear. The Money System was born during times of starvation. People feared starving to death, and saw money as a hope of staying alive. The Money System continues to create this needless fear today by requiring money in order to purchase basic necessities such as food -- no money, no food, no life. After thousands of years of cultural and genetic conditioning by the Money System, we cannot help but experience the fear of death (consciously or subconsciously) whenever we think of money or our lack of money. The Money System uses people to do its bidding. Thus, to be constantly reminded of dying at the hands of others, wherever we go, creates excessive fear, which damages us. But, ironically, money itself becomes our hope for survival, and we continue to spend time thinking of ways to keep getting the money we do get, to get more money and to keep from losing the money we have. We become trapped in a frighteningly vicious cycle of both conscious and unconscious mental wheel-spinning, which overdevelops our mind and thus keeps our mind in charge of our life, when, in truth, it is our heart which is the rightful ruler of our life.

The Money System creates excessive shame. When money was initially created, those who were "not good enough" to be hunters were relegated to "lower" occupations, and were paid less money. When famine hit, these people were the first to starve. Thus these people learned quickly their relative value to the group, and experienced shame for their relative unimportance, a shame that became an integrated part of their culture’s foundation. Today the Money System functions to perpetuate the impoverished as the largest class of people in the world (over 98% of the world’s population is impoverished), thereby perpetuating the culture of shame. Although the feeling of shame is of value on occasion as a stimulus for personal growth, the shame fostered by the Money System is excessive, constant, worthless and debilitating. Thus, in order to merely function, people stuff any experience of shame deep down into their unconscious so as to avoid the feeling of excessive shame caused by the Money System. This results in psychological and physical damage, and blocks a major motivator of personal recovery.

The Money System fosters neurotic competition. Soon after the Money System was created, leaders abandoned strict control of it to its own nature. People then did whatever was necessary to survive. The rich resorted to slaughter if necessary to push back those on the money hierarchy who were climbing too closely. The impoverished resorted to theft to rise above the masses. Today, although sometimes more subtle, such neurotic competition is alive and well in corporations and throughout the market place. The Money System has created a caste system that requires such behavior as a survival tool. Some governments, which try to level the playing field, always hurt one group at the expense of another, and are often criticized by even those they are trying to help. These governments soon fall from power at the diabolic hands of the Money System, and the neurotic competition increases. Money System worshippers say that this neurotic competition stimulates performance and is good for the country as a whole economically. But there is no such thing as "the country as a whole" which in reality is only an abstract conceptual phrase used in this instance by the Money System to justify its damaging behavior. Besides, what real value would exist thereof for "the country as a whole" if the individuals of that country were miserable?! Such a country – our country – would eventually unravel into chaos or be reduced to a matrix of unfeeling automatons. The truth is that the extreme performance orientation of the Money System’s neurotic competition aspect causes damaged parents to damage their children by making affection conditional upon performance, often in ways so subtle we don't know that it's happening. The child never experiences he/she is loved unconditionally, is thusly damaged and becomes mentally centered, and grows up to replicate this dysfunction for another generation, and again and again and again – because when we’re damaged, we just can’t help but replicate damage. And all this originates from the first parent so damaged by the Money System who did this to the first child, eons ago. The Money System is the foundational problem

The Money System is a self-acting dynamic entity. Soon after leaders abandoned strict control of the Money System and left it to its own devices, it took on a genuine "life" of its own. Left uncontrolled it grew to control even the lives of leaders. Thus when the need for the Money System came to an end, it had become too strong to be replaced by a more appropriate socioeconomic-geopolitical system. Today, the Money System is the single most powerful entity humanity has ever created, and it rules tyrannically over our lives. Despite the truth that our environment and we have evolved beyond the need for the Money System, we appear powerless to put an end to the Money System and its destructive effects. The Money System causes all problems and then forces us to seek solutions to those problems within the Money System itself. Such solutions are thus non-solutions that only make matters worse, because these solutions exist within the Money System and thus cannot change its foundation or replace it, and instead solidify it.

The Money System lies to us about human nature to protect itself from being replaced. The heart of each and every one of us is aware that we can create and implement a better system than the Money System and that we need to do so very soon. However, the damage the Money System does to us keeps us mentally centered to the degree that our heart is not strong enough to take charge of our life away from our domineering mind and subsequently replace the Money System. Since the Money System has our mind’s attention, it has seductively convinced our mind that all these problems created by the Money System were really created by human beings, and that these problems are "human nature" and thus non-reparable. This is a false assertion, and in truth we are compelled (via the wonderful, God-given, human trait of vulnerability) to bad behavior from bad nurture at the hands of the money system, a problem which is personally and collectively reparable and preventable. Nevertheless, our mind buys into the Money System’s lies as an integrated act of survival within the Money System. Our mind buys into these lies to the degree that we think we the people are the initiators and perpetrators of all these bad behaviors the Money System is really overpowering us to do beyond our control, and that many of these bad behaviors aren’t really bad at all!  Because a significant portion of our mind -- our ego -- can't accept the truth that we can be "overpowered", it gives in to the "compromise" of the other significant portion of our mind -- our superego -- that "we" must therefore be the cause.  Thus the Money System’s powerful lies have duped us into becoming its mentally centered puppets. But the Money System’s most diabolical lie is that we can control the Money System. Nothing could be further from the truth.  It is pure illusion that we can control the Money System, just like it is pure illusion that we can control the behavior of another.

The Money System is evil, and thus bent on destroying us. It is evil because it greatly threatens to end the lives of all of us. All too often, it carries out that threat on many. The Money System is indeed a devilish creature. Only God knows why the Money System is evil, and not merely a dangerous yet easily dispensable roadblock on our path in life’s journey. The Money System was certainly not created with evil intentions, but indeed was created to keep the human race alive. But all of the characteristic properties of the Money System clearly make it evil. If left to its own devices, it will create a global nuclear/biological holocaust in the not too distant and very sudden future. We have long been warned, "The love of money is the root of all evil.", and certainly the Money System is the personified evolutionary result of the love of money experienced and codified by those in power throughout the ages. In a sad ironic twist, the Money System has become so strong in the minds of parents that it actually corrupts the expression of the true love they would otherwise give to their children.  Thus their children experience love not as being abundant and unconditional, but instead possessing the characteristics of the Money System: scarce and requiring neurotic competition to obtain.  No wonder that when we obtain or think about obtaining money, we experience the illusion of being loved, so that when our money is threatened we feel as if we are about to become unloved.  So it's not surprising that we'd fight, kill and die for money -- and the Money System.  Exactly when and how the Money System became evil is a point of conjecture. Nevertheless, we would do well in the future to monitor more closely the things we create, and do away with those things when they no longer serve our purpose. For now, we must destroy this evil, before it destroys us completely.

3. The Money System Is the Cause of the Root Problems We Experience.

The properties of the Money System reveal the Money System as the single cause of each of the root problems of our system. Indeed, these root problems spring from the very nature and foundation of the Money System.

The valid and justified excessive fear of losing one’s job through no fault of one’s own is owed to the scarcity, fear and neurotic competition aspects of the Money System. The Money System tells our leaders to keep costs down. We, as workers, are a cost. When costs get too high, we are dismissed. Even though we are capable workers, the scarcity property of the Money System demands that there are more workers than full-paying jobs. The neurotic competition property keeps us constantly in fear that someone will come along who is just a little bit better and thus more cost effective, and we will be replaced. Indeed, we learn that at the whim of our boss or the system, we could be harassed and dismissed. We greatly fear this reality, because we know what the Money System does to those with inadequate or no source of income: it kills them. Living with this experience creates excessive fear. Excessive fear is painful, and whether or not we suppress or repress this fear, it is still damaging.

The valid and justified excessive shame of not being able to meet one’s material needs and desires is an ancient aspect of the Money System. Those who make less money than others naturally are made to think they are inferior by being closer to death’s door and thus somewhat more or less unclean. Those who can’t provide for their loved ones are looked upon as worthless. Since their mind is in charge of their life they experience the feeling of shame in connection with thoughts of fault, thus creating the complex experience of guilt -- the author of self-destructive behavior. Such shame is excessive and thus both painful and debilitating, and is beyond any person’s tolerance to allow him/her to continue functioning even close to normal-healthy. Thus the excessive shame gets stuffed way down deep where it causes psychological and physiological damage as well as aberrant behavior. The Money System is so diabolical, even one with millions of dollars is made to experience shame when he/she thinks about a richer person. The neurotic competition aspect of the Money System causes many impoverished people to resort to crime to survive or get ahead. Because the impoverished have been taught (by the rich) that crime is wrong, those who commit crimes experience tons of shame or psychological disconnection (coldness), even if they never get caught.

The Money System by its very nature places a wolf at every door. It then tells us to work harder to keep the wolf away. Thus many people who have full-time jobs are forced to work well beyond forty hours per week. Companies require employees to over work in order to cut costs, which occurs, in effect, by reducing the salaried employee’s hourly wage while increasing that employee’s production. Sadly, employees comply with the demand to work extra hours. If paid, they are happy for the extra money. Otherwise they think that more hours equals more productivity equals more value to the company equals less chance of job loss. This is over work, and it is very unhealthy. Over work causes us to focus mentally on one thing too much, and takes us away from other activities we need to be doing to maintain a balanced, healthy and vibrant life. Much distress is associated with over work.

Under work is also caused by the Money System. The scarcity aspect keeps companies always on the alert for ways to cut costs, even if people are hurt in the process. Many people who want to work are rendered unemployed, not because they are incapable, but because the Money System has decreed there are no jobs available. Also, since the Money System dictates that the law states that part-time employees do not have to receive additional company benefits, companies often hire many people for part-time work to keep costs down. Thus part-time workers are not only compensated less for their day’s work, but have no medical benefits as well. If they get sick, it is costly, and they can’t afford to buy insurance on their part-time earnings. The unemployment figures published by the Money System may say everything is somewhat rosy, but these figures don’t tell us who is under employed or the tremendous number of people who aren't paid a wage they can live on for their full-time work.  No, these figures just tell us how many are employed (a figure itself that is far smaller than portrayed). Nearly all part-time workers can’t live on a part-time wage, and are thus impoverished. They want full-time employment, but the Money System won’t allow it. Meanwhile too many people work well over 40 hours per week, giving the illusion that they are preventing the part-time workers from obtaining full-time employment. The Money System is indeed diabolical in the way it causes us to blame each other for its dirty work.

Because we are all too busy making money, or finding a way to make more money, or just thinking about money, there is not enough time for us to accomplish all our desires and responsibilities. If we aren’t suffering from over work at our one and only job, we’re busy doing side jobs to supplement our income, extending our education to get a better job to make more money, etc. We thus lose time we should be giving to ourselves our children our spouse our friends our homes our true vocations and other life-affirming activities. We don’t seem to have time to recover our own heart. Many catastrophes occur in life simply because we lacked the time to attend to all of our facets. Sure, we can cut back on our work hours -- if we don’t mind increasing our realistic fear of getting fired and then starving to death.

The Money System is the single reason we suffer from population non-management. The Money System dictates the quickest and least expensive form of action. Thus businesses just pop up where there are conditions to support the greatest and cheapest labor force. So a populated area naturally becomes more populated as additional workers are brought in to fuel the Money System’s need for transactions, and the problem quickly snowballs. So cities grow asymptotically and living conditions decay in proportion to population density. We don’t put a stop to any form of immigration because we all know immigrants are a cheap source of labor for businesses that translates to keeping prices down for those of us already established here. Mass production means mass concentration of people. Thus to meet production needs at low costs, cities become more congested and traffic comes to a standstill. So we spend more time at the process of work due to longer commutes. As living conditions become more horrendous, people hide from their problems via addictions. Sex is a valid addiction suffered by millions. Thus, instead of managing their procreation, addicted people simply and unintentionally create more masses. Left to our own heart we would manage our population more consciously, intelligently, humanely and each individual would do so voluntarily. But the Money System is evil and bent on destroying us. Thus our cities and roads are well over three times the tolerable population density, and growing rapidly. Like our country and its cities, we as individuals have lost our personal boundaries to the Money System’s dictates.

And so, everywhere we look there is someone "out to get us". This is not paranoia, as the Money System addicts would demean. This is a valid and justified distrust of "the other guy", whom the Money System uses for its own destructive purposes. The way the Money System has trained us to think of strangers, new employees, new classmates, new citizens, the person ahead of us in line at the store, etc. is that he or she is ultimately taking or is threatening to take scarce resources away from us. The Money system tells us that the lack of such resources could lead to our death or the death of someone we love. The scarcity and neurotic competition aspects of the Money System cause this condition. No wonder we suffer so many environmentally engendered mental disorders in this country. We have been trained by the Money System to love money more than we love our fellow humans. Such fear of ourselves is very damaging.

4. The Money System is at the Bottom of All of Our Reported Problems.

The Money System is the foundational problem. The seven root problems exist inextricably in the Money System’s foundation. These root problems filter up to the surface where they become the underlying cause of the observed reported problems. Each one of the reported problems is thus caused by the Money System.

Abortion is the pre-mature ending of a human life. No one who commits abortion is evil. However, the mind of those who commit abortion is most often in charge of their life when they do. Aside from cases of rape, tragic defect, and life-threatening pregnancy, it's the Money System that's telling them they have no time or resources to birth or raise a child, so they do as they’re told, or face severe economic and personal consequences, even though one may be compelled, against her will, to abort. Then she is left with extreme and often repressed guilt, no matter what the circumstances, which damages her life – and often her partner’s as well. Many would prefer to prevent conception, but the Money System has placed this technology out of their reach. This is especially true for teenagers and young adults, possessing the strongest sex drive, who have little if any money, which they must use just to survive.  So the Money System facilitates unwanted pregnancies, which it then either terminates or uses to over-populate the world.  Left to their own devices those who did not want pregnancy would use technology to prevent it. But the Money System via those diabolically controlled by the Money system refuse people the proper, effective, safe and convenient technology to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Meanwhile the Money System continues to damage more and more of us into masking the pain of damage via sexual addiction – resulting in undesired pregnancies.  Thus, for all the aforementioned reasons, abstinence, in the Money System, is a myth.  Sadly, abortion has become a bitter political issue; a struggle locked in stalemate between two tiny factions, neither of who are interested in real solutions. They are only acting out in cowardice, twistingly projecting their repressed/suppressed selves onto the unborn child, and transferring and displacing levels of rage onto their opponents as expressed from the pro-abortionists' contempt for and the anti-abortionists' idealization of  their overpowering, absent, abusive parents. They do this at the expense of their arrested personal damage recovery, wallowing in their hatred and guilt respectively, while they horribly infect the rest of us with their "position" on the issue, re-damaging us and arresting our recoveries in the process. Too bad the extremists on both sides of the abortion conflict won’t turn all their "energies" away from each other and toward their personal recovery and then toward replacing the Money System. But, then again, these people are extremists because of the damage done to them by the Money System, especially that damage done indirectly through their family of origin. It is doubtful they will turn on that which "created" them – until they begin to get well.

Addiction is the process of attaching oneself to a thing, taking that thing inside oneself and using that thing to mask or block the experience of pain caused by damage. There is probably no limit to the things one can addict to: drugs, alcohol, sex, television, computers, a person, food, money, religion, job, a social or political cause, etc. Most damage is spiritual, and is caused by something or someone outside oneself. Since the Money System is the foundation of nearly all damage we experience, and since addiction is merely a human method of coping with the pain inflicted by a more powerful foe, we, once again are not to blame for addiction, and the Money System is to blame. It is absolutely necessary to eliminate the pain blocks in order to get through to and experience the root of one’s damage so as to repair the damage. Addiction, however, blocks recovery from damage, because the addict is unlikely to want to relieve him/her self of the thing he/she is using to block the pain, especially as long as the thing inflicting the pain (the Money System, directly or indirectly) is still around. In addition, addiction contributes to anti-human behavior because the thing being addicted to is strongly activating the addict’s mind. The false heart in the addict’s mind (the false heart is the nexus of the ego and superego) often takes on the persona of the thing-culture he/she is addicted to at the expense of his/her own, true personality, thus creating in the individual a collective mindset. Addiction also keeps the mind powerful, making it more difficult for the heart to regain its rightful sovereignty. Some things we addict to can harm us, even to the point of premature death. Since the Money System keeps on wreaking damage, we keep our defenses up, and that includes the addiction. Were it not for the Money System, we could eliminate addiction.

Alcoholism is caused by spiritual pain. People are damaged in childhood by abusive authority figures. The pain of this damage is felt in the soul. When repair and healing does not occur, the child grows up with this pain. The pain is nearly completely masked from the heart by the resulting dominant mind. Nevertheless, the pain is still there and has an adverse effect on the body. People in this situation may not be consciously aware of the pain. Yet, if these people take a drink or two, they begin to "feel real good". They relax. They all of a sudden realize that they don’t hurt. When they begin to sober up, they initially feel bad (hangover), and then return to their previous "norm". However, they remember how good and relaxed they felt with alcohol, and they anxiously look forward to their next drink. As adults, these people experience additional pain directly at the hands of the Money System, which "drives them to drink". Adults, who were suffering pain at the hands of the Money System, abused these people when these people were children. Now, these adult alcoholics abuse their own children in both similar and opposite ways, and the cycle of the environmentally engendered disease of alcoholism continues. The cause, once again, is the Money System. And, when we try to get to the bottom of alcoholism, the Money System puts up one of its lies that the cause of the problem is genetic, and scientists and incompetent mental health practitioners -- because they are mentally centered -- fall for it. This is very sad.

Anger is growing. All of the Money System’s aspects combine to make us miserable, and the repeating misery makes us angry. Anger in and of itself is a good thing, and propels us to take action to relieve our suffering. But we are powerless against the Money System, completely frustrated to do anything about the damage it inflicts on us. This leads to rage, and rage can be damaging. Many try to get rich to beat the Money System. However, far less than one percent who try succeed in doing so (and they lose their soul in the process), leaving those who failed feeling guilty. Some try to ignore the Money System’s disastrous effects. They live a meager existence of poverty and unexpressed depression, and have children who often either rebel against society or become hard core Money System addicts. The rest of us work and play and try to get by the best we can. We are the most susceptible to the seething anger caused by the Money System’s damaging aspects. Often we are angry and we don’t know why. Sure, we realize the Money System is hurting us spiritually, physically, etc., yet we feel so guilty about admitting it. Often this experience never reaches our consciousness; it just lurks beneath wreaking havoc on our psyche. This is the source of our strong discontent. It is founded on one of the Money System’s lies, the lie that the Money System is good. We are told from childhood how great our system is. We are immersed in it as we grow. As adults we Americans worship the capitalist control form of the Money System, championing it above the other systematic attempts to control the Money System (communism, socialism, idiosyncratic variations). We even go to war and die for the Money System and to keep it free of "inferior" controls. Yet, we know in our hearts that it’s hurting us, even though our mind is programmed to worship it. So when we think or speak negatively about the Money System, to any degree, we are compelled to experience guilt (albeit false guilt). This cognitive dissonance leaves us miserable. It compels us either to explode in rage at the wrong target, damaging others and ourselves in the process, or to do nothing at all and implode or collapse under the weight of our repressed anger. It is only when our heart begins to emerge that we experience the truth of the damaging Money System and that we are innocent of wrongdoing by speaking negatively of it. Then we begin to release and relieve ourselves of this inhibiting anger and take appropriate action to begin replacing the Money System. But until then the Money System controls our mind, leaving us powerless to shake its enraging effects.

Anxiety is internalized excessive fear and shame. People who are constantly anxious about something -- from the fear of death to what to eat for dinner -- are suffering from the Money System’s long term effects regarding excessive fear and shame. The shame of not being good enough is taught indirectly (abuse by Money System-damaged authority figures) and directly (insufficient finances) by the Money System. The fear comes from having life threatening experiences at the hands of those one is supposed to trust. Sometimes these experiences cause depression, and the observed anxiety can be the evidence of someone trying to fight his/her way out of depression. Once a person suffers from anxiety, they are often crippled from taking action in various walks of life. They watch everything closely, looking for the potential damage. They don’t take positive risks. They simply try to follow the rules as best they can and not get hurt. They are right where the Money System wants them: fearful and obedient.

Apathy, regarding the problems and potential solutions, has grown to unprecedented levels in our country. Voter turnout is very low. People seem to share the attitude that nothing can be done, so why try. They think that politicians are all crooks, the government is out to get them, big corporations will always win over "the little guy", etc., and that’s just the way it is and no one can do anything about it. This thinking is understandable. Every previous attempt to solve problems has been an attempt to work within the Money System. This approach is doomed to failure, as the Money System won’t let us alter its basic nature, lest it would die. Thus no matter how we turn and squirm, the observed problems continue in the Money System. Those in charge keep coming up with the same old tired attempts to solve problems, attempts that continue to fail over and over again. After people have their hopes for solutions dashed enough times, they become apathetic, even in the face of worsening conditions. In this way, the Money System is killing our ability to fight back against it.

Asthma, although partly genetic, is environmentally triggered. Both pollution and stress cause this triggering. The Money System is, once again, the cause of both. Pollution is the result of profits at any price. Carrying the weight of excessive fear and shame causes the stress. If asthma is not triggered, it will remain dormant and never appear. Then when a person is in his/her late teens and early twenties, he/she has a great chance of never showing any symptoms of asthma. But, the increased incidence of asthma in our country illustrates the ever-increasing, life-damaging power of the Money System.

Bureaucracy is the organized attempt to control and make peace with the Money System. The vast majority of both government and corporate activities involve this bureaucracy. The bureaucrat attempts to create an "empire" to protect him/her from unemployment. This process involves identifying a problem and creating a prolonged and organized solution with the bureaucrat and his/her underlings at the center of the "solution". Once a bureaucracy is in place long enough, it becomes "one" with the problem, and thus keeps the underlying cause of the problem from being solved, paradoxically perpetuating both the bureaucracy and the problem. This is acceptable to the Money System. It tolerates our foolish attempts to control it, and throws a reversal on us when we do, thereby making us unwilling partners in its crime, while it becomes further entrenched, and more and more powerful.

Burglary is the covert form of stealing. One takes something from someone while he/she isn’t looking. A person steals because he/she is damaged (directly or indirectly by the Money System). A person steals because the Money System won’t let him/her work or earn a wage one can live on, and he/she needs to eat, have shelter, etc. The impoverished learn this survival mechanism early. After a short time this is all they can do. Others steal due to mental illness caused by damage at the hands of trusted authority figures. Either way, the excessive shame and fear of the Money System is the cause. Morality and ethics are powerless, and pale in comparison to the drive to stay alive and escape the Money System or extract revenge. Imprisonment (if caught) is the only recourse in The Money System.

Business vs. government conflict is everywhere, all the time. Just pick up a newspaper and you can read many stories of government and business butting heads. Some side with government. Some side with business. Pick people at random, and you are most likely to create two groups divided on the issue in equal numbers. Business sets prices that are too high and pays wages that are too low, but does give us our money so we can eat. Government comes along and taxes us and puts restrictions on our behavior, but does try to protect us from corporate abuse. When both butt heads, people lose jobs. Which is wrong? Which needs to be changed? The answer is that neither is at fault for their behavior. The answer is that the Money System forces each to be that way by its neurotic competition aspect. Nevertheless, it is our reaction that fuels the struggle. The Money System creates abusive authority figures who damage us when we are children. Depending on our view of these people, we develop anti-authority or pro-authority reactions if we do not get separation and healing from the abuse. When we do find people we "think" we can trust, we tend to side with them on their extreme fear/revenge based anti-authority or guilt-ridden pro-authority viewpoints. All of this creates a complicated, partly unconscious, personal viewpoint on this conflict. Often, however, it just boils down to our alliances; whoever butters our bread wins our support. Whoever, we think, is most favored by the Money System at a given time – government or business -- wins our allegiance – at the waste of our thoughts and the price of our soul.

Cancer can be linked to the Money System. The Money System compels us to manufacture too many things we neither want nor need, and to do so in the cheapest way possible which nearly always means burning, dirty, fuel in inefficient engines. This creates pollution. Many pollutants are carcinogens. Pollutants also destroy the ozone layer that protects us from harmful solar rays, thereby exacerbating the damage. The stress caused by the Money System’s aspects of neurotic competition, not enough time, excessive fear and shame, etc. damage our immune system. Then the Money System takes away our time and provides us little resource to eat healthy foods. So we eat poorly and damage our own cellular energy mechanisms into creating internal pollution in the form of oxidized cellular factory waste: free radicals. Thus, the free radicals in our body are stimulated by the pollutants and they win the battle with our malnourished and over-stressed immune system. Cancer is the result -- and we die prematurely. The Money System is to blame.

Child abandonment occurs all too often in our society. Impoverished parents and unwed mothers (especially teenagers) cannot cope with the pressures of raising a child. A child consumes a lot of a parent’s time. Add that to time spent at work and other responsibilities and a parent barely has enough time to get a good night’s sleep. Few can handle this. The Money System places tremendous burdens on raising a child by taking too much of our time away from us at work, making related materials too expensive, and generally leaving us in a damaged and painful state. Functional people have a difficult enough time with these burdens. Somewhat functional people can’t cope with this at all and would rather give up the child. Although these people did not abort, some of them soon find that they just can’t cope with the responsibility and crying of a newborn child. Sadly, the Money System makes adoption difficult and costly. Regardless, many overburdened with their shame simply don’t want to present their child for adoption and risk further ridicule as to their lack of ability as a parent. Thus, they just leave their child: on a doorstep, at a daycare facility, in a trash can – and remain anonymous – damaged by the Money System beyond their ability to parent their child.

Child abuse is a direct reaction to the Money System. Child abuse is a cycle that started thousands of years ago. It first began when a parent, stressed and in pain beyond tolerance from damage at the hands of the Money System, attempted to release his/her pain by expressing it onto his/her child. The child is defenseless and has to take the abuse. Thus the adult experiences and remembers that he/she is sure to get a release of stress when taking it out on a child. The release of unbearable pain feels great, so great that the parent is compelled to suppress/repress the horror of his/her behavior. Thus it is sure to repeat. Once this began, there was no stopping it from generation to generation. This is because children were taught to be abusive adults by example and the Money System was coped with, thus allowing the Money system to intensify its damage within the new tolerance created by abuse, and so cementing abuse as a coping mechanism. Psychologists use terms like displacement, transference, projection, etc. to describe why the adult psyche will abuse a child. Regardless of the psychogenesis of abusive behavior in the adult authority figure, the child is the next victim in the cycle, and such treatment is always the child’s introductory experience with the Money System. Child abuse can be subtle, obvious, intentional, unintentional, physical, emotional, mild, intense, sexual, non-sexual, etc. It can involve abandonment, enmeshment or both. In all cases, however, the abuse is a threat, to some degree, on the child’s life. The child senses this reality and reacts naturally by creating a mental and physical defense against feeling the pain of the damaged soul by detaching the soul from the heart. The heart becomes walled-in and powerless. The mind takes over and copes to survive. Prolonged child abuse cements this condition to where long-term therapy is often required to chip away at the barrier to eventually free the heart to reconnect with the soul and repair the damage. The truth is that all of us were abused as children to some degree. It is also true that the overwhelming vast majority of us have not yet recovered. The Money System continues to abuse us as adults and we react by strengthening our mental defense and becoming "one" with the Money System, at the expense of our heart. Then, when we may least expect it, we experience momentary mental connection with our soul, feel the horrendous pain, and let loose our pain in a breach of tolerance onto our defenseless children, acting out what happened to us. Our heart would never abuse a child. Yet, we blame ourselves when, in truth, the Money System made us do it. We humans have no defense against the Money System’s effects and we have no control over how we release the pain or when we break, no matter what our mental egos and superegos may tell us, until we repair from damage. Eventually, abused children, who survive, grow up to take and accept their place in the Money System. The Money System is truly evil. It creates new victims through child abuse to keep itself going, century after century after century.

Computer Crime consists of using a new weapon (the computer) to commit old crimes. People steal (software piracy, illegal access to others bank accounts, etc.), vandalize (computer virus), defame (publish libelous lies in web pages about another person), etc. People even commit murder (microcomputer controlled bombs, organize assassinations and terrorism) using a computer. But the motivation for crimes using a computer is essentially the same as for crimes committed using other weapons: poverty, excessive fear, neurotic competition, distrust and excessive shame. Since the origin of both of these is the Money System, the Money System is again to blame for computer crime. Computer crime, however, is unique, in that it highly stimulates the mind. This makes the mind grow more powerful, making it difficult for the heart to regain sovereignty. Couple this with the fear-based excitement generated by crime and it is easy to see why hackers are so addicted to their computers. Were it not for the Money System, the brain damage that motivates computer criminal behavior could be completely healed.

Cults are nothing new. They have been with us for thousands of years. Immersion in a cult is a form of addiction. The cult member sees the cult as a shelter from the ravages of the Money System and a "second chance" to get the unconditional love he/she missed in his/her family of origin. One can "hide" in the cult, away from psychological awareness of the damage and pain one experiences at the hands of the Money System and one’s family of origin. Why a person chooses one particular cult or another is a combination of individuality and the unique nature of the child abuse he/she experienced. Cults as a whole have a strong attraction because they are a group of people who initially promise the new member that he/she will become whole again in the group. Since we initially incurred much false guilt through damage in a group setting (a dysfunctional family), we frequently react by craving vindication in a group setting. Unfortunately, people are further damaged in the cult because they lose to the group mindset what little self-awareness and self-determination they have, which ends up strengthening the mind at the expense of their heart and real recovery. The illusion of love through conditional affection is at the foundation of our childhood losses, and this same conditional affection and illusion of love is the primary "transaction" in a cult, and thus the powerful draw on the cult member’s unconscious. This is how cults can have power over their members such that their charismatic leaders can induce the cult members to do anything from sell an overpriced product to commit suicide -- and the cult member doesn’t have a clue what’s happening to her/him. All that the new member wanted was to experience being truly loved, an experience that was at least partly missing in his/her family of origin. That’s what the cult promises. That’s not what anyone ever gets from a cult. Yet, sadly, cults are on the rise. Cults are indeed everywhere, taking many insidiously disguised forms.  Why who would have thought that a corporation, with its esprit de corps and "family" type functions and dysfunctions, would become so seductively enmeshing to its employees that the employees would spend well over 40 hours/week at work and even more time thinking about work, away from their friends and families both physically and psychologically, and not even recognize they have become corporate cult members? Money System-damaged executives, that’s who! And whom do we have to blame? The Money System, which is the root cause of all the damage that drives people to join cults.

Depression is suffered by nearly everyone to some degree. Again the foundational cause of depression is the Money System. From the time we are children we encounter many threats on our life, either indirectly from the Money System through other people or directly at the hands of the Money System. This causes us to experience excessive shame, one of the two main ingredients in depression. We are overpowered by this abuse to think that we are at fault for why our life is being threatened, fault being the other of the two main ingredients in depression. The excessive shame and fault combine together to give us the experience of guilt. Add to that the catalytic elements of hopelessness, excessive fear and the lack of unconditional love in the home (all with root causes in the Money System), let simmer for just a short period of time, and you’ll cook up a major depression. Depression not only robs us of happiness, it damages the soul and thereby our body’s regulatory and immune systems. Depression also causes self-defeating behavior and sometimes suicide. Since most of us suffer some degree of depression, we often go about our life as if this condition is normal. We are thus prone to seek forms of excitement (which the Money System cleverly provides to keep us in the depression cycle). Some forms of excitement can themselves be damaging. But we continue anyway, just to lift us up a little, without thinking twice about the damage that can be caused by such behavior (crime, drugs, inappropriate sexual encounters, etc.) Such excitement is always followed again by a letdown as we’re jolted back into our unconscious experience of our depression. Depression has a number of forms depending on one’s unique life experiences. Smoking, for example, is caused by depression that depletes the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. The nicotine in tobacco is a primary agonist of acetylcholine, which in normal, healthy amounts relaxes us from tension. Thus when people smoke they get a temporary lift from their depression and psychogenic muscle tension. However, smoking is harmful and can be fatal. The truth remains that depression is not genetic – it is caused solely by the Money System. Were it not for the Money System, only situational events and microbiotic, genetic and physical damage oriented body illness could get us down for any length of time, and only temporarily at that. We would all, for the most part, experience our natural, heart-centered self-esteem and enthusiasm for life, even during  times of illness and the death of a loved one.  But the Money System exists, and it just keeps beating us down into mass depression.

Disease is prevalent everywhere. However, much disease is curable and preventable. The problem is that the Money System won’t let us cure and prevent significant disease. The Money System damages us. The damage taxes our immune system and causes aberrant behavior. These couple to create disease and facilitate the spread of disease. The Money System also creates poverty, a condition where disease germinates and thrives. Then the Money System makes health care, both curative and preventative, way too expensive for most. The result is that many diseases such as tuberculosis, AIDS, venereal diseases, flesh eating bacteria, etc., etc. are thriving and spreading. Only if there is a significant profit in curative medicine will the Money System allow us to focus on curing a disease (such as AIDS), but usually this is after major damage to the population, and little if any affordable effort is allowed for prevention. As the lack of population management causes us to overpopulate the planet, diseases in one small corner of the world are easily making their way throughout the globe. Were it not for the Money System we would drastically reduce the incidence and severity of damaged psyches, eliminate poverty, reduce the spread of disease, harness science to serve humanity (instead of to serve science itself) and provide curative and preventative health care for all. But the Money System won’t let us cure and prevent significant disease, no matter how hard we try.

Divorce is often rationalized as simple irreconcilable differences. Couples divorce today at the drop of a hat, or so it seems. Some surveys indicate that the divorce rate is over 50 percent. These surveys also cite some of the major causes of divorce: disagreement over finances and physical absence top the list. These two causes lead to other marital problems such as withdrawing emotionally, complete divergence in interests, addictions, problems with the children, infidelity and health problems. Once again, the Money System is the culprit. Were it not for the overwork, under-work (which causes insufficient income), excessive shame (inadequate income), excessive fear, not enough time, etc. – all foundational aspects of the Money System – couples would marry for the right reasons and stay married "till death do us part". Only hearts can love, yet the Money System makes us relate almost solely with our mind. The "false heart" in our mind (the nexus of our ego and superego) cannot synthesize the emotional intimacy that emanates from the heart. Thus, emotional intimacy, a foundational ingredient in a successful marriage, is a very, very rare occurrence in most marriages. And of course, let us not forget the damaged "child" that surfaces in marriage and attempts to extract from the spouse the unmet needs of his/her childhood attributed to damaged parents who themselves were using their own children as parental substitutes -- crazy. Once again, thanks to the Money System.

Drugs are a painkiller. Cocaine, marijuana, LSD, crack, ecstasy, barbiturates, alcohol, uppers, downers, etc. exist for just one reason: to attempt to kill the pain of the damage wrought by others at the manipulation of the Money System. The greater the damage, the stronger the addiction. The pain is experienced in the soul. The mind can block the experience of some pain, but sometimes either the mind lets go for a moment or some relived experience gets through to the soul and stimulates the awareness of the pain. When this occurs, the addict reaches for the drug. Drugs follow the rules of all addictions (refer to addiction in this section). Drugs however are very self-destructive. They can damage one’s body and often cause premature death. Drugs also inhibit one’s ability to operate machinery, such as an automobile. Drugged driving deaths occur all too often. We easily get angry with the addict (why not vent on the addict, we have so much pent up rage against our parents and others who've damaged us that we can’t seem to let go of appropriately, we might as well let loose of a little on an addict). We, however, forget that the Money System caused the addict’s pain and that he/she is just trying to cope with the pain. We forget that some people may have been damaged more than other people have been damaged, and that when the damage exceeded their tolerance they fell upon drugs for relief from pain. We all need to remember that it is the Money System that deserves our rage, not the addict. Sadly, it is our ego that won’t let us face the reality that we can be damaged beyond tolerance. Only our heart knows that any of us can be damaged beyond tolerance, and only our heart can have compassion for the addict.

Elitism is an attitude used by those who have lots of money to keep from thinking about the fear they experience regarding losing that money. People with elitist attitudes operate under the delusion that they earned their money. They behave as if they are better than those who don’t have money. Such snobbery is a mental trick to keep the elitist at a psychological distance from those whose lack of money would stimulate the elitist’s own painful fear of being poor. The elitist doesn’t realize that he/she is truly without a heart-centered life and is merely the Money System’s pawn, and that his/her wealth could vanish at any moment at the whim of the Money System. Elitism helps to protect the Money System, because those with the perks of being rich don’t want to lose those perks and be more conscious of feeling the daily excessive fear experienced by most of us. Thus they contribute to political processes that keep the status quo of the Money System. This continues to keep a wide chasm between the few and powerful with money and the vast majority of those without. Sadly, the elitist is compelled to his/her attitude often beyond his/her ability to do anything about it, simply because his/her parent(s) were often elitists and he/she secured his/her parent’s attention by mimicking them. So, the child grows up with this attitude, and doesn’t even know he/she is being an elitist, or why. Thus the Money System perpetuates itself through generations.

When people speak of freedom in America, they most often refer to freedom from tyranny at the hands of either government or government leaders and freedom to rise in the Money System’s power structure. Such freedom is legislated democratically by a process of government, and this process is respected and its virtues extolled. Americans say that they are "free" via this process and that no person or group of people can take this freedom from them. Thus we worship our structure and the freedoms it provides and we blame human beings whenever we experience a loss or threat of loss of these freedoms. We view our system as "good" and we view people who threaten our system as potentially "bad". Meanwhile, oblivious to many, we have been experiencing an erosion of freedom that has not come from any person, group of people or government structure, but originates solely from the Money System itself. Prices have risen to the degree where meeting even a meager budget is difficult. So people have cut back on spending to just basic necessities. Since all activities cost money, this has severely reduced freedom in choice of activities. The Money System has instituted workaholism as the norm. Thus people work many hours (way more than is healthy) and as a result spend less time in free choice of activities. The Money System’s population non-management aspect has created overcrowded roads causing us to spend much more time in frustrating commutes than is healthy. We find ourselves standing in line too long and too often. We are robbed of our time and therefore of our freedom of choice that we would otherwise spend in that time. So we rush around to get things done, and are thereby deprived of our freedom of peace. High costs have forced both parents to work long hours, requiring that household chores be performed late on workdays and on weekends by both; again free time for love, health, fun and fulfillment has been eroded. High education costs prevent many from obtaining an education, thus insuring that these people will work long hours for low pay, increasing their lack of freedom compared to many. As time passes, these problems increase, continuing to reduce our freedom of choice and activity. Such enslavement crushes our spirit, makes us interpersonally intolerant, and we are resigned to mental diversions and compulsions. Addictions set in to dull the pain of boredom and slavery. We are not free to be fully human. Thus, remaining mentally centered, we rarely see that this is happening to us. We can’t fathom that a system has this power (especially the one our mind worships), and when we are rarely somewhat aware of our loss of freedom, we briefly blame government officials or greedy business owners and then simply accept it and cope. And we just continue to say how great it is that we have so much freedom in America from government oppression and to rise in the Money System. In truth, if we could only replace the evil Money System we would attain true freedom of time, choice and activity, and we would be truly happy and free. Meanwhile, the Money System continues to erode our freedoms, perhaps until we have no freedom left at all.

Gambling is the most direct and immediate attempt to use money to defeat the Money System. Gambling, although like investing, differs in that there is no product involved with gambling and the percentages, over the long run are basically fixed. Gambling’s attraction is it’s potential for large paybacks, simplicity, no product hassle and immediate results. However, the truth remains, that the house always wins in the long run, and that most gamblers end up losing. Sadly, nearly all gamblers know this truth. But people gamble anyway, because the thought of ending the excessive fear and shame, escaping the rat race, ending one’s time crunch, and ending other painful aspects of being enslaved to the Money System (that could come with winning the "big one"), impinges on such a strong Money System survival drive that it clouds one’s ability to judge accurately that one will most likely lose. The house lets a few big wins occur to advertise that big wins occur. This stirs excitement, and those who are damaged to the degree that they think with their feelings get caught up in the fear/excitement and just can’t help themselves. A gambling addiction can develop quickly. When a person expects to win and then loses, he/she experiences even more fear and shame as he/she now has less money than before, and relives the depression of childhood conditional performance failure to obtain what was rightfully hers/his – true parental love and the associated experience of security. Often he/she is compelled to keep trying, hoping for the big win and the "feeling" of being truly loved and financially secure. Much more often than not, the loses just get bigger, along with the feelings of worthlessness, and the loser’s life is made even more miserable – by the Money System.

Gangs occur as a defense against the Money System. The excessive fear, neurotic competition and distrust aspects of the Money System combine to keep money scarce and mostly in the hands of the elite. The vast majority barely has enough money to survive, and a large and growing percentage of our population is destitute. Gangs thus form in poverty stricken areas (especially suburban areas where the population is dense) as a collective defense against poverty, and poverty is caused solely by the Money System. The gang carries out illegal activity (drug running, protection rackets, hits, etc.) in a collective attempt to freely earn large sums of money quickly. The more people in the gang, the greater the gang’s earning potential. Gangs operate like small countries, with leaders who determine who in the gang will have the most money, who will have less money and who will do what – all for the survival of the "country". Gangs cause people to get hurt and die prematurely. However, law makers fear gangs, not so much for the personal damage they do to people, but because gangs don’t pay taxes on their gang type Money System transactions and thus pose a threat to government income and thereby pose a threat to law makers’ salaries. Therefore law enforcement concentrates mainly on stopping the tax-free transactions of gangs more than on protecting innocent people from the byproducts of other deadlier forms of gang activity. Were it not for the Money System -- the sole reason gangs exist -- there would be no gangs and gang activity.

High blood pressure is caused by prolonged exposure to stress. All aspects of the Money System combine to form the number one cause of stress in our country, and there isn’t even a close second. Although scientists may argue that some groups of people are more genetically susceptible to high blood pressure than other groups, to write off high blood pressure as a "genetic disorder" is folly. It does not matter that some people can tolerate short of heart attack the ravages of Money System induced stress while others cannot. What matters is that the Money System is nearly the exclusive cause of the stress that greatly facilitates high blood pressure, heart attacks and stroke. Coping with the stress of the Money System through delusions and addictions doesn’t lessen the effects of stress – high blood pressure and its effects still occur. The Money System is at fault, and when the Money System is gone, stress-induced high blood pressure will also disappear, and so will "scientifically based" delusions about causation.

High prices are the norm. This is part and parcel of the Money System. Everything costs too much. Necessities tax our budget to the breaking point. Our income is never enough. Couples fight, over how to spend their money, with irreconciliation often leading to divorce. People go to war over high prices, resulting in needless deaths (Viet Nam War). Why is this misery so necessary? The answer is that it isn’t. We can do better. But the Money System can’t. It demands high prices because of its scarcity and neurotic competition aspects. It’s not that products are scarce; we have the ability to fulfill all product and service needs. It’s that the Money System’s scarcity aspect creates a profit motive that is so very strong in the form of the business owners’ desire to get as far from the wolf at the door as possible that they "price out" the vast majority into material poverty. So owners set prices as high as they can and still sell all of what little they manufacture and distribute. The result of all this is that homes, cars, food, clothing and other basic living necessities are priced too high for the vast majority of us. Fun items are also usually out of reach. There’s no reason for this. We can do better. The Money System just won’t let us.

Homelessness is caused by the Money System. Homelessness can strike anyone who loses his/her job that he/she depended on for survival from paycheck to paycheck. When the unpredictable, diabolical effects of the Money System strike a worker, manager, company, community, etc., jobs are lost and people suffer. All too often the unemployed person cannot find another job, let alone one that provides the same level of income as the lost job. And even when one is employed, the way the Money System pits us against each other, landlords and tenants are constantly battling over high rents, a battle the tenant most often loses.  Excessive shame is experienced. When income is not there and one cannot pay the rent or mortgage, the home is lost. This can throw a person into a major depression from which he/she may never recover as long as he/she is homeless and without a job. Unemployment insurance is way too small to help, and there are too many circumstances that prevent the unemployed person from collecting it. Those who are allied to the Money System say the homeless are mentally ill and that’s why they can’t hold a job and are thus homeless. But the truth is that the vast majority of homeless are capable and stable workers, and the homeless who are damaged beyond such ability to work consistently (a condition severely exacerbated by homelessness itself) were at one time in their life less damaged and capable of being stable workers. The Money System’s aspects directly and indirectly damage people into homelessness.

Hopelessness occurs when a person begins to experience that he/she can see no way out of his/her problems. This describes the vast majority of people in our country. Such hopelessness contributes greatly to depression. People fall into addictions to divert their attention from their hopelessness, but they cannot escape their problems through addiction. The Money System causes nearly all of these problems and it places all the false hopes and roadblocks in the way of true hope. Hopelessness can grow gradually over time or hit all at once out of the blue. When hopelessness exacerbates depression, suicide can occur. Again, the Money System is to blame.

Hunger still exists in our country. Hunger is not just a third world problem. People still die of malnutrition and hunger here. People in our country have trouble making ends meet. Parents are forced to eat less and feed their children less just to survive. When job loss occurs there is often no means of support. Welfare payments are too small. When homelessness occurs it becomes very difficult to find a job, even if only because the applicant has no base for the prospective employer to contact him/her. Food money grows scarce and people eat one small meal a day, if that. The elite say this doesn’t happen here. But their egos lie to protect them from feeling afraid, and all too often their lies become "the facts". The truth is that the Money System causes hunger by creating scarcity and that a large number of the people in this country suffer from hunger. We have the means and materials to feed everyone well. Sadly, the Money System just won’t let us.

Illness, too, can be accurately blamed on the Money System. The Money System causes excessive and prolonged stress. This taxes our immune system and is conducive to facilitating colds, flu, cancer, nervous disorders, etc., etc. The Money System causes hunger. Such malnutrition also taxes our immune system. The Money System causes us to be mentally centered which deprives our soul of much of its heart-monitored regulation of our bodily functions. Left more or less on its own, and with substandard assistance from our mind, our soul is severely hampered in its ability to coordinate bodily activities and manage our immune system. Because safe and effective inoculations are too expensive, many diseases, which could otherwise be wiped out, are allowed to regain strength and flourish again, even though we have the materials to inoculate everyone. The list of ways the Money System functions as the root cause of illness is like an endless domino chain. Trace an illness back to its origin, and the Money System is there holding the root cause and withholding the prevention.

Impersonal service is a rapidly growing trend in our country. The Money System continues to make it difficult for companies to prosper. So, with the advent of new technology, people are replaced (and usually rendered unemployed) by machines. This would not be so bad if the people being replaced would be transferred and/or retrained and if the machines would be performing impersonal tasks while people performed personal tasks. However, the Money System dictates that the first to go are the most non-productive to profit. Thus most companies today have done away with the receptionist and customer service person – the people heretofore most often spoken with by the phone caller. So the caller is now required to push many buttons and wait longer periods of time for computer messages before selecting touch-tone phone options. A process that used to take a few seconds with a receptionist can now take several minutes with a computer. We humans end up spending more time listening to and talking with computers than with the person we called. One is often not allowed, by the company he/she has called, to talk with a customer service person. One is instead forced to enter all pertinent information via touch-tone or "speak clearly" at voice prompts. One never knows if a person got the message. And if there is a priority, urgency or emergency involved, it can be extremely frustrating and stressful not to have an interactive discussion with another human being, someone of like kind. The Money System is again at fault for creating an impersonal world, which appears to be run by computers without anyone running the computers.

Immigration would not exist in such massive numbers were it not for the Money System. That’s why immigration is such a puzzling phenomenon. Who would ever want to leave his/her homeland, the origin of his/her earthly existence, family and friends? Sure, adventure and climate may lure a few away, but the overwhelming vast majority prefer to live in their ancestral home, as long as the land will support life. But the ravages of the Money System have made survival difficult in many places. Poverty, illness, war, population non-management, political corruption etc., etc. have rendered many otherwise hospitable lands in the world virtually uninhabitable. So people flock to other countries in droves – legally and illegally – in search of a place to actually just live. But since the Money System is everywhere, the mass influx of people to a seemingly more hospitable region exacerbates the same problems there that existed in the place the immigrants just left. Then immigrants are looked upon in their new world as an "infestation". They are scorned, discriminated against, and asked to leave. Prejudice-oriented segregation forms from the need for mutual defense. Yet, no one really puts tremendous effort into removing immigrants or preventing even their illegal entry. That’s because the Money System demands cheap labor, and immigrants – especially illegal ones – are the cheapest form of labor – and everyone knows this. So problems created by the Money System merely move from one location to another, making everyone miserable. Were it not for the Money System, people would stay in their homeland and repair their problems there. Then they would live at home, visiting other countries in their free time. But the Money System makes some countries so unlivable that revolution and war seem the only course of remedy. It is understandable why many would rather leave than starve, fight and die. Once again, the Money System creates misery on a global scale.

Inadequate medical care is created primarily by the scarcity aspect of the Money System. Everyone deserves equal and total medical care, and we have the resources to provide such care for everyone. However, the Money System has priced medical care beyond the budget of nearly everyone. Thus, health insurance (a form of gambling) has become the only way the vast majority can receive medical care. Much of the present medical care available through insurance is of the HMO type. HMOs are notorious for bureaucracy and substandard care, because their primary motivation is profit, which comes at the expense of quality care. Also, one must be employed full time to afford insurance (which is often offered comparatively inexpensively only through one’s work). Part-time employees and the unemployed are often not allowed to participate in a company medical insurance program. They understandably can’t afford to buy their own insurance, and are forced to lean on the welfare system that drains everyone via taxes. And welfare medical care suffers from similar problems as are found in HMOs. Recent proposed solutions to this problem met with quick and decisive resistance. The solutions smacked of socialism, and the socialist control form of the Money System puts additional burden on the rich to help the poor, thereby debilitating profit as a motivator. This potential situation threatened the Money System-owned minds of the rich elite with "frightening" thoughts of equality, such that they reacted to block these proposed "solutions" to this problem. Such a radical attempt at "system conversion" would have met with such dismal failure anyway, and would have thrown our nation into chaos, and eventually, after many premature deaths, we would have been left with socialism, which is just another damaging form of the Money System. Ironically, it is the damage done to our psyches and bodies by the Money System that accounts for the tremendous amount of medical care needed in this country. Were it not for the Money System, there would be such a drastic reduction in illness and damage that we could very easily provide everyone with quality medical care many times over, both preventative and curative, at all ages.

Inconsistent government policy is the bane of free enterprise and every citizen who has ever had to deal with the government. This is understandable. There is the local city government, the arbitrarily regional county/province government, the larger, arbitrarily regional state government and the national federal government. Then there are the governments of other countries and the United Nations government, both having significant influence on the federal government. All of these governments are substantially dissimilar and they intertwine like a mess of spaghetti, so that it’s difficult if not impossible to tell which branch is ultimately responsible for what, and thus policy differences are the norm. A traffic light issue in one’s city may be a county responsibility requiring state funding. Local highway carpool lanes are a federal coercion requiring states to comply or lose federal funding for adequate road improvements, even if carpool lanes don’t make sense in a local community. The local decision on creating a scenic vs. sports oriented park may hinge on a recent United Nations’ policy regarding the needs of the cultural preferences in the area. Contact the government official who is reasonably the correct contact and (if you are very fortunate to get through to him/her) you will be referred to another person in the branch. This person will refer you to another branch, where you will be referred around again. Often you will be returned to the person you called in the first place. And the court system at each government level is even worse. Then we are highly taxed for this inefficiency. No wonder so many people hate the government(s). Yet, it is the Money System that is responsible for this nightmare. Governments spring up on the fly like they do in the cheapest form possible. So once they exist, there is never any money available to reorganize ancient forms of government into one effective, efficient, fair, responsive, democratic entity. Although we throw tons of money at government via taxes, nearly all of that money is spent just keeping the old, inadequate, highly inefficient forms of government barely functional while attempting to provide services for the people. The Money System knows it would be threatened either by tying up large sums of money in government or by an effective government, truly responsible to the people. Thus the Money System allows just enough government to keep its transactions flowing and no more, and we all end up hating the government. Were it not for the Money System, our attitude -- toward a government truly of, by and for the people -- would be a positive one.

Insurance is the plague. Anything anymore is insurable. We insure our life, health, loved ones, home, real estate, cars, appliances, etc., etc. Insurance is expensive. But we have to have it, that is we do if we want a place to be buried, any form of health care, to avoid astronomically high repair bills, and protection against catastrophes that could cause major debt and bankruptcy leading to homelessness. We’re stuck. And why is all this "gambling" necessary? Simple. The Money System. The Money System’s scarcity, neurotic competition and distrust aspects cause: the creation of low quality products and services, prices for the aforementioned products and services to be way beyond the means of well over 95 percent of us, and at least momentary reckless behavior. But we absolutely must have these products and services or we will be at a serious competitive disadvantage in the Money System, a disadvantage which could more easily facilitate premature death. So along comes insurance. We pay high prices to gamble that we will have a failure in the aforementioned areas. We gamble that the savings on the price of the replacement product or service, which we would have to pay for at nothing or at a greatly reduced price thanks to the insurance, will offset the cost of the insurance itself. Of course, insurance companies would not be in business if they didn’t win a very high percentage of the time. Thus, we all, in the long run, lose monetarily. And so, we pay high insurance premiums, further stressing us regarding our budgets, while we partly hope we will have a problem that will allow us to use our insurance. This is sick. But it is reality. And then if we do use our insurance to pay for something, the insurance company often penalizes us by raising our rates! Were it not for the Money System we would make high quality, long lasting products, and burial, health and replacement services would be available to all – without cost – and we would not be neurotically compelled to episodes of recklessness that could damage ourselves and our belongings. But the Money System rules our lives, and insurance is just one of many ways it rubs our noses in the reality that it – the Money System -- is in charge of our lives, and we are not.

Internationalism is the latest form of political boundary dysfunction inflicted on us by the Money System. The Money System wants more transactions. So it searches out cheap labor markets. Naturally, it finds most of these in poor countries. So businesses are encouraged to export materials to other countries to do the labor, or simply purchase goods from other countries at cheaper prices. Thus more people are made unemployed here and more people are made employed in other countries. We lose our ability to make our own stuff, and our standard of living is lowered across the board while other countries’ standard of living is raised. This equals us all out economically – which is the objective of internationalism. We are also encouraged to learn more about the history and culture of countries we would do business with, incorporate their ways, eliminate our ways, and, in short, reduce the strength and sovereignty of our economic borders. We begin to lose our national respect for the sake of the Money System. We become unpatriotic, weaker and have less energy – to replace the Money System. This is the Money System’s goal with internationalism, to protect itself from people who have grown strong enough to replace it. Coincidentally, this is also what happens to damaged people on a personal level. They have little concept of healthy personal boundaries. Thus they don’t respect the boundaries of others as well. They are constantly reaching into others personal space and abusing others or sacrificing themselves to abuse – crossing personal borders inappropriately and without acceptable permission. Were it not for the Money System, we would have strong personal and national boundaries, we would be more self-sufficient, and we would trade more intelligently with other countries, to create a win-win transaction, without sacrificing our own people, and other countries would not suffer either. Internationalism is a form of abuse at the national level.

Latchkey kids are the result of a more recent trick by the Money System. During the 1960s, the Money System was slowing its post World War II economic boom. The Money System realized it needed more and faster transactions. So it told business and political leaders, via economic indices, to fuel the flames of the women’s movement. This lead to more women entering the workforce. At first there was no visible adverse effect from this. A wife’s income would supplement her husband’s income. The family was a little better off economically and the wife could work part-time without too much sacrifice by the kids. But little by little, almost unnoticed, the diabolical Money System raised prices at a faster rate than the increase of income, so that after a few years the family was back where it was prior to the wife working, but the wife was still working! And a few years later the family was behind economically. So, many wives were not only compelled to work from then on, but to work full time as well. Pretty soon, both spouses had to work in order to maintain a standard of living that previously required only one spouse to work. Thus children would come home from school, use their own key, enter their home, to find it empty of a loving and caring parent. No one was there to greet them, talk with them, find out how their day went, smooth over problems, care for them when they were sick, help with homework, or, in short, meet their healthy, normal needs at various stages of development. This situation is damaging to kids in the form of emotional and physical abandonment, which is abusive. And when moms arrived home from work they, like their husbands, were in need of attention and care from abuse at the hands of the Money System’s work environment. Since there was no one to give these parents such reparative attention, they often released their pain on, you guessed it, their kids, who become damagingly enmeshed in their parents problems. Kids in this situation often try to get as far away from their parents as possible for their own protection against enmeshment, or they get into trouble just to get any kind of "caring" attention from absent parents. Their homework suffers, they just do nothing but play, join gangs, seek sexual solace and get pregnant, etc. It would have been different if when wives joined the workforce en masse that they were limited to a 4-hour workday and husbands’ hours were reduced to a 4-hour workday. This would equal an 8-hour workday for the family. Parents could work different shifts to insure one parent would always be home for the children, and women could get out of the home, learn a skill, and be more financially independent without giving up totally on the home. But the Money System had another agenda. And again the rich got richer, while most people suffered – especially our children.

Mental Illness is caused solely by the Money System. Mental illness is not a genetic disorder. The mind gets "sick" because it is doing more than it can handle. The mind just blows out. Mental illness starts in childhood, when a child is abused by parents and others who are abused at the hands of the Money System. Siblings, playmates and other authority figures continue the abuse. Young children, depending on the nature and quantity of the abuse, soon develop a mentally centered defense life at the expense of their heart. The child’s mind takes over and develops a "false heart" at the nexus of the ego and the superego. The mind via the false heart tries to take over the job of the true heart, and fails miserably. This overtaxes the mind and keeps the child mentally centered. As the child grows into teen years, the mind increases in activity, with his/her hyper-mental activity additionally exacerbated by his/her direct encounters with the Money System. The false heart tries to deal with puberty, and fails. Eventually, if sufficient damage occurs, the mind becomes very unstable, pulled more to the ego, superego, back and forth between the two, etc. The result can be neurosis, mania, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, manic-depressive disorder, schizophrenia, etc. The Money System does this to us. Mental Illness comes from nowhere else.

Multi-culturalism is a by-product of internationalism, and thereby owes its creation to the Money System. Multi-culturalism encourages us to learn and adopt the cultures of other countries at the expense of one’s own personal culture, and for the sake of increasing international commerce. Multi-culturalism is the liberal social facet of internationalism. If conservatives can be criticized for putting up too many barriers (physical, psychological, political), liberals can be criticized for lacking any form of healthy boundaries (although both succumb to both of these extremes, just less stereotypically to be noticed). Healthy boundaries are an integral part of one’s psyche. Experiencing where one leaves off and another begins gives us respect for both our selves and others, and is an aspect of a heart-centered life. Multi-culturalism compels us to break down our boundaries and encourages our mind to rule our life, with emphasis on the superego. And, of course, all for the ultimate sake of increasing international commerce – for the benefit of the Money System.

Murder is the ultimate act of evil. The Money System’s scarcity, neurotic competition, distrust and excessive fear aspects compel the mind’s ego to kill so as to lessen its experience of the pressures of these aspects. Ever since the Money System was created, people have murdered others in the battle to attain or retain higher levels on the food chain ladder. The Money System presents us with its reality that many will be poor and die of poverty, thus compelling the mind’s ego to any action to prevent this. Murder can be one-on-one (personal), one-on-many (tyrannical dictator), many-on-one (mob vengeance), or many-on-many (war). Those who lean more to the superego side of their false heart (with its often-attendant over-responsibility and guilt) will argue that murder from personal passion is not Money System oriented. But it is the Money System that makes our minds the way they are, creating in us an ego that is half of our false heart. Were it not for the Money System, our heart would rule our life, and our heart only kills in response to a dire, direct and immediate threat on our life, which is not a personal passion initiated issue. Nevertheless, although each individual must hold him/her self accountable for her/his own behavior, we humans are not responsible for the cause of murder. Murder is caused solely by our damaged, domineering mind from the damage we’ve received at the hands of the Money System.

Nationalism is the opposite of internationalism. Whereas internationalism is about valuing the aspects of other countries over one’s own country’s aspects (superego), nationalism is about valuing the aspects of one’s own country as superior to those aspects of other countries (ego). Like internationalism, nationalism stems from damage and insecurity caused by the Money System, affecting the entire nation. In pre-World War II Germany, generations of abusive "child rearing", the World War I defeat and drastic reduction in income of Germanic people lead to a national insecurity that was compensated for by the collective false heart  "superman" syndrome of German nationalism (with disastrous results). In America, the 1970’s recession, failure in Viet Nam, disgrace of President Nixon, and the liberal, ineffectual Carter administration left us experiencing national shame. President Reagan whooped up nationalist fervor to compensate our damaged national egos and won major victories. Nationalism’s primary promise is to restore economic stability. However, such restoration usually occurs only for some (often the few) and always at the expense of others. This is because whatever serves the Money System must harm people. The Money System’s hierarchical nature abhors an equal distribution of money (there must be winners and losers in every Money System transaction). Thus, nationalism is never an answer for all. But nationalism sucks everyone into its frenzy by playing on the eternal quality of human hope (substantively a false hope that the Money System can be "tamed") and this false hope is a powerful political tool used by leaders to seduce the people into letting the leaders make their desired changes. Yet, unbeknownst to the leaders, all entirely for the sake of the Money System.

Overcrowded prisons are a measure of the effects of the Money System on the population as a whole. The greater the per capita damage the more active the Money System is. The greater the damage the more anti-social and impoverished people there are. The more anti-social and impoverished people there are the greater the incidence of crime. The more crime, the more criminals needing incarceration. Thus, no matter what the politicians and newspapers say regarding any supposed reduction in crime, if prisoners are being released with only partial sentences served and still prisons are overflowing to where administrators are begging for funds for new and larger prisons, the truth remains that the damage inflicted by the Money System is increasing.

Political scandal is known to be commonplace. It is the politician’s job to manage political resources and functions via managing the money of the body politic. Thus politicians have a great deal of contact with the Money System. Naturally they will become damaged by it, and to the point where they will misbehave. Sometimes their misbehavior is in the form of direct dealing with the Money System (inappropriate or miss-utilization of funds). Other times it is simple personal misbehavior compelled as compensation for pain from the damage they experience at the hands of the Money System. Regardless, our superegos experience our politicians as a reflection of ourselves. So our false heart reacts with "disgust" and "excitement" to political misbehavior and scandal. Nevertheless, we are unfortunately becoming desensitized to this problem, as we are more concerned with our immediate personal dealing with, and surviving the ravages of, the Money System, such that we just don’t have time to care about the lack of morals or ethics of politicians. Also, if we are surviving better than in the past, all we care about is to not risk changing the status quo by removing key politicians. Thus scandal increases and the moral fiber of the people in our nation erodes. All, again, thanks to the Money System.

Pollution is a byproduct of the Money System’s activity, and the amount of pollution is directly proportional to the amount of Money System activity in a given area. The Money System creates a false demand for many, many products. People are seduced by the advertising glitz to clamor for these products. The Money System then demands that these products be produced, and finds the cheapest (lowest wages, lowest quality, highest profit, highest pollution) method of doing so. The production and distribution process creates pollution. The more people in a given area the greater the false demand the greater the pollution. Sexual addiction also contributes greatly to pollution by increasing the masses. As population density increases, natural vegetation is destroyed to make room for building residences and businesses. Not only does pollution increase as a result of population increase, there is less foliage to produce oxygen and combat the pollution. Rain forests are being destroyed all over the world. The result is a large growing hole in the ozone for damaging solar rays to enter. Were it not for the Money System, we would eliminate non-essential products. We would also modify our manufacturing processes to prevent pollution while creating the quality products we really need and want. Sexual addiction would also cease to exist, and people would have quality conception prevention at their disposal. Pollution would diminish and we would restore the natural vegetation in our world. But, the Money System has other ideas – our destruction. Pollution is just one of its methods.

Poverty stems from the scarcity and neurotic competition aspects of the Money System. The Money System’s hierarchical survival ladder was created in ancient times. It was designed to insure the survival of a tiny percentage of the people (leaders and hunters), at the expense of any others. This aspect of the Money System has evolved to where today only the political and business leaders are assured of survival (and then only as long as the Money System whims it to be so). This amounts to less than one percent of the population. The rest of the population must contend with the wolf always lurking near their door. The overwhelming vast majority live in the misery of poverty. This is a terrible way to live one’s only life. Were it not for the Money System there would be no survival ladder and we would all survive, indeed thrive, on an equal basis. But there is a Money System. And it is bent on destroying us.

Powerful corporations run the world. This is because corporations and other businesses have the ability to make large profits. Profits are the sales money left over after costs. Profits are the illusion of excess money, and people are compelled toward that illusion like a moth to a flame. Corporate owners can keep some of the profits (millions and sometimes billions) but they must re-invest the greater amount to make more profits or their businesses will fold. Since profit is the single attraction of business ownership in the Money System, and since money rules the world, governments (with some exception regarding taxation issues to keep the business of government running) are compelled to do what business owners want. Since the antagonist of high profits is high costs, powerful corporations tend to create cheap products while paying low wages. Thus the average worker is the historical victim. Meanwhile, corporations, compelled by the neurotic competition aspect of the Money System, act out ancient rites of war, while we "soldiers" succumb as usual to joblessness and reduced buying power when a "defeated" corporation no longer brings product to market, thereby fulfilling the Money System’s self-fulfilling prophecy of scarcity. And so only 10% of new businesses survive their first year, and the ratio of owners to workers is extremely small. Thus since not everyone can be the owner (greater than 50% controlling interest) of a successful business, the overwhelming vast majority must suffer on or at the brink of poverty. The impoverished have no recourse. Businesses only "care" as long as there is enough money in the population to buy products, and even businesses are at the mercy of the whim of the Money System’s scarcity aspect. Government won’t help people out of poverty, as this would cost too much in taxes, and businesses tell government to keep taxes as low as possible to businesses so that only the barest of social services are provided, and then just to facilitate the flow of monetary transactions. Those very few non-owners who can afford to buy some stock gamble that someone else who owns the invested businesses knows what they’re doing, and often people lose the money they invested. So people suffer due to the complex nature of the Money System, which cannot be controlled, while corporations grow richer and more powerful, to the degree that they, instead of the people, run the country.

Premature death is the ultimate damage at the hands of the Money System, and it occurs all too often. The poor starve to death. The homeless die from overexposure. The over-worked die from heart attack, stroke and cancer. Those suffering from excessive shame induced guilt commit suicide. Those experiencing excessive fear, neurotic competition and distrust, kill. The threat of premature death is the Money System’s primary weapon, and the damaging degree of just the threat of premature death ranges from the minute to the gigantic. Those who challenge the system are ostracized, exiled, imprisoned and sometimes murdered by business owners and government officials. Population non-management leads to too many abortions, murders, the death penalty, traffic fatalities, riot deaths, etc. And on, and on, and on. Money System addicts will say that this is a natural method of trimming the population. But the human heart believes that premature death at the hands of the Money System is a violation of God and love. Certainly premature death leads to tremendous grief and hardship for the families of those who died. Statistics are one thing. Preventable, needless human tragedy is another. The only way to prevent the vast amount of premature death is to eliminate the Money System.

Public construction/maintenance delays are common, especially regarding transportation. This, again, is due to the Money System. Although it may take a couple of months to execute a given project, the ubiquitous lack of funding often drags out a project for years. Freeway construction/maintenance in our cities takes forever, snarling traffic and exacerbating road rage in the process. Since the Money System abhors saving at the expense of transactions, it doesn’t allow sufficient funds to build up for necessary projects. When funds are finally allocated, they must be allocated only in small chunks, reinvesting the rest over time to make a transactional profit. If the profit has not yet occurred by the time the money is needed for the project, the investment continues, and the project suffers. So administrators purposely keep construction slow and paced, so that the next "phase" of a project won’t begin until a likely substantial investment profit is made. Also, since public works projects come from taxes, the understandable anti-tax attitude hinders funding. Things are worse when private companies administrate public projects. Either the profit motive makes costs soar, thus slowing production even to the degree that a project is forced to abort in mid-stream, or the neurotic competition aspect of the Money System creates a bidding war where the winner cuts quality and safety to meet the bid. Were it not for the Money System, we would simply allocate sufficient people and materials to a project and get the project done expediently and relatively painlessly. But, then again, the Money System doesn’t care about human suffering, it only cares about its precious transactions.

Rape is always perpetrated by a damaged individual – and the Money System is always at the root of the damage. A rapist is not a genetically inferior individual. A rapist was damaged as a child and as a teen in such a way that he tends toward both violent behavior and a twisted sexual dysfunction to get pain relief from his damage via physical pleasure and "acting out" vengefully via sex. The unsuspecting child or woman is the tragic and innocent victim of the specific damage the rapist endured in his family of origin that made him become "small", enraged and in contempt of women. The only way to stop rape is to first stop the Money System, because the Money System is the foundation of all damage.

Religious scandal is also caused by the Money System. When a religious leader exhibits financial or sexual misconduct, he/she is reacting to pressures and damage caused by the Money System. The misconduct is an attempt to release the pressure. The nature of the damage determines the nature of the misconduct. What makes it a scandal is that the perpetrators are supposed to be "immune" from such behavior because of their high standing in the religious community. But the truth is the damage of the Money System is way more powerful than any person, even a person of the cloth.

Religious intolerance is the basis for some of humanity’s greatest tragedies. Great wars have been fought in the name of religion. Millions have died; indeed entire populations have been exterminated, in the name of religion. The craziness bread by religious intolerance can again be traced to the Money System. The Money System’s constant threat on our life, coupled with the actual damage it perpetrates on us via our family members and other authority figures, makes us experience a lack of love and a spiritually painful disconnection from the universe. Sometime soon after the Money System came into being, so did religion. Religion helps us experience reconnection between our self and the origin of our being. Religion helps us re-socialize by creating a pseudo family of like values, which we hope is less dysfunctional than our family of origin (but usually isn’t less dysfunctional). We hope that such a pseudo family would give us the sense of a "loving" family we may not experience in our natural family. Religion also functions as a sanitarium, where people can (supposedly) go to heal from damage, with protection against further damage from the Money System. Religion attempts to lessen the anxiety of premature death at the hands of the Money System by comforting us with thoughts of a potentially heavenly afterlife. And religion attempts to coerce "good" (supposedly non-damaging) behavior out of us by hitting us with everything from natural family guilt to threats of "fire and brimstone". Thus religion developed as a coping defense against the ravages of the Money System. Religion was a spiritual fortress; religion was a place to hide. But not long after it developed, religion, too, was invaded by the Money System. Religion, like all organizations, needed things, and things could only be obtained directly or indirectly with money. Since religion was not a naturally occurring phenomenon (like family of origin), and since it exists outside of our body, its formation was via mental activity, and such activity is owned by the Money System. Religions began to legalize their values into rules of thought and behavior. The mind began "innocently" to codify religious values for purposes of power, protection and presentation, thereby creating doctrine, which functioned to reduce the activity of the human soul in religious practice. People became frightened as their religious leaders pushed the religious doctrine, doctrine that naturally could not fit the religious experience of many. Religions fragmented into denominations and completely new religions, weakening the power of religion against the Money System. Politicians, seeing the value in organized religion to control the masses, seduced religious leaders to their causes. Money via donations had crept its way into the church. With money came its damage, and religious leaders and practitioners succumbed to more aberrant behavior within the church. As the Money System grew in its power to damage, people became more and more "addicted" to their religion as a defense. The strength of this addiction compelled practitioners to experience other religions’ doctrine as a threat on their culture, pocketbook and/or their lives. Political leaders needed to exert little effort to compel people to go to war for their benefit. They just exhorted the real, imagined or contrived "evils" of the enemy’s religion and that was usually sufficient motivation. Today, religions are constantly at odds. Each one controls its members, who care little about personal individuation and mostly about "hiding" from the Money System and the truth of its damage. The vast majority of church leaders spend more energy on donations and administration than on the lives of the people in their care. And the Money System uses religion for its benefit however and whenever it wishes. Yet, people still experience their religion both as a hiding place from their family of origin damage and a defense against the "raw" Money System in the "secular" world, albeit this experience is mostly unconscious. Understandably, they experience any form of threat to their "defense" with intolerance. They would rather denigrate and even destroy others and the religions of others than become conscious regarding the truth about their own damage, how they use their own religion, and about the damage-inflicting Money System within which live all practitioners of all religions. The truth is that the Money System is destroying us, and that those who hide from the Money System in religion hide in the way that works best for them. And that "religiously" hurting someone because of his/her religion – or lack thereof -- is an act of misdirected abuse similar to that which one received as a child in the first place. Nevertheless, the truth remains -- that beating each other up because of our religious differences, and hiding from that which we together must fight and destroy and which we can fight and destroy – the Money System -- is ultimately an act of mentally centered cowardice.

Riots are an attempt by the masses to both repair from damage caused by the Money System and to control the Money System. The Money System’s excessive fear, excessive shame, scarcity, population non-management, under work, neurotic competition and distrust aspects combine to oppress the masses. When the oppression becomes too strong the pain it afflicts surpasses the people’s collective tolerance. They erupt enraged in a desperate attempt to release the pain. Rioting is the result. In the short run they experience some release from the pain. They inflict damage on buildings and merchants and authority figures and on each other. They loot stores, taking items they can’t afford to buy. They first get some release. Then they continue, hoping to change the aspects of the Money System and thereby control it. Then, they hope, the Money System will not inflict pain upon them. However, what always happens is that the military thwarts the riot and rioters get killed. Many rioters go to jail. Then the riot ends and, although many experienced some release, the Money System is not changed. The masses at best just develop some new coping techniques to help numb them to their plight. And then, the Money System tightens the screws again, increasing the pain infliction, until the masses reach their new level of tolerance and once again riot.

Road rage is a new manifestation of an old phenomenon. When too many people get too close, impeding each other too much, in a neurotically competitive environment, exacerbating each others anger and frustration beyond tolerance, people attack each other in an attempt to release the pain of their frustration. Overcrowded city sidewalks used to be the usual battleground for such rage. Now the Money System has created a new arena for frequent rage release – the roadway. All of the Money System’s aspects combine to create pain that exceeds individual tolerance. Especially active here is the population non-management aspect of the Money System. As the population density exceeds tolerance levels and spills out onto the roadways, traffic becomes a nightmare. People, who are already out of time, have to spend even more time on the road. This makes them late for work, which exacerbates their excessive fear of losing their job through no fault of their own. The anger and frustration at their plight grows while they sit still on overly congested expressways, watching others travel more freely in carpool lanes, simply because these others unintentionally find themselves with two or more people in their vehicles. The dead-stop drivers fume that carpool lanes are both extremely impractical to be used intentionally and they rob one of one’s increasingly infrequently experienced adequate personal space, and that if carpool lanes were open for all, the traffic might flow more smoothly. Then someone leaves too much space between the car in front of them or drives too slowly, etc. and – "snap" -- someone else erupts and takes his/her hostility out on the slow or reckless driver by honking incessantly, screaming and threatening, ramming the other person’s vehicle and even shooting the other driver. This phenomenon is happening everywhere and with increasing regularity – thanks again to the Money System.

Robbery is like burglary, only the perpetrator’s damage tolerance has been so exceeded that he/she is willing to take great risks to take that which doesn’t belong to him/her, almost as if the robber's target is a stand-in for "someone else". Again, the Money System’s damaging aspects combine to inflict both pain and poverty. The robber is willing to risk being identified and even take the life of another in an act of defiance and to steal as a hedge against poverty. The human heart would never do this. This is the act of the false heart, whose very existence is characteristic of the dominant mind in the damaged psyche. Without the Money System there would be no poverty and there would be no socioeconomic-geopolitical inflicted pain. Robbery would end. The mind doesn’t think this could ever happen. The heart knows that it can.

Segregation is the condition whereby people are grouped by race, color, ethnicity, religion, financial status, etc., and then each group is compelled to stay unto itself by socioeconomic-geopolitical factors outside the control of the groups. Each segregated group is isolated somewhat from the others, because each group fears the other group for some reason(s). The group that is somewhat better financially fears the less fortunate groups would steal from them. The group that is somewhat worse financially fears the other groups will exploit them. Two groups with exploding populations bump boundaries and have gang wars. Language differences segregate groups. So do cultural differences. These, however, are just surface reasons for segregation. The foundational reason for segregation is the Money System’s excessive fear, non-population management, neurotic competition and distrust aspects. These combine to compel people into defensive (and defensive-aggressive) postures, and groups are formed. It is one thing to have no boundaries and self or group identity, it is the other side of the extreme to be compelled to a segregated group identity by the Money System. Were it not for the Money System, we would live and learn about each other, without losing our personal boundaries. We would all cooperate socioeconomically. Segregation would disappear. But the Money System likes conflict. And we – brown, red, yellow, black and white – suffer.

Sexual addiction is real. The "pleasures of the flesh" are a compelling distraction to the pain of damage. The damage caused by the Money System inflicts pain on our soul. This damage occurs over time, and thus we gradually adjust to it. Were ten to twenty years of damage to hit us all at once it would make us sick or maybe even kill us. But, increased more slowly over time, we just cope each time by stuffing our feelings more away from our heart so the mind can maintain control. Yet, when we experience pleasure, and then the pleasure ends, we are hit with a rush of discomfort from the pain of damage, which we are aware of until the mind acts quickly to stuff these feelings again. But we remember the pleasure. We are again compelled to it unconsciously. Sex as an addiction acts in conjunction with the excessive shame aspect of the Money System to attempt to relieve the unconscious excessive shame and the pain of abandonment. However, it often adds more shame as well as guilt if behavior is traditionally immoral. Sexual addiction feeds the Money System with more people to perform transactions, via unplanned pregnancies and births. And, when we get a little relief from the Money System’s damage, we are often able to increase our tolerance of damage a little and continue playing the Money System’s game a while longer. Either way, the Money System wins. Sexual addiction is just another way of being the good self-sacrificial pawn.

Single-parent families are on the rise, not because of some new cultural movement or breakthrough in supposedly "healthy" personal freedom, but because the Money System’s damage is increasing in strength and scope, and the amount of single-parent families is a measure of that increase in damage. The Money System’s damage causes sexual-addiction, and people get married for the wrong reason. Then they suffer from all the problem aspects of the Money System and they grow miserable. Children are born. More problems occur. Stress greatly increases. Divorce follows as an attempt to get relief from the pain by separating from the person who is "supposedly" exacerbating the pain. And children are left losing a parent. This is a devastating blow, one which carried into adulthood compels a repeat of the same behavior leading to that adult becoming either a missing or single-parent. Were it not for the Money System, we would be healthy and not compelled to either create children out of wedlock or marry for incomplete reasons. But, the Money System exists. And so does this problem.

Special interest groups are all the rage. The ravages of the Money System compel us to one of the oldest and most natural forms of defense – in numbers there is safety. So we form a group. Technology has afforded us with facilities to communicate easier. So now we can form groups quickly based on any old reason. The human mind thinks that the problems are caused by big business, government, genetics, lack of religion, or whatever -- and not that the Money System is to blame. Thus our minds compel us to group together to form defensive and offensive strategies and tactics for dealing with our agreed-upon yet foundationally incorrect enemy. We collect money and we spend it on lobbyists who take our group’s cause to whatever other group has money and power and will listen and (we imagine) will help our cause. Such delusions are fed by the group mindset. The special interest group mindset works like the cult mindset. It compels us to focus on the group issue to the degree we feel less personal pain, pain caused by the Money System, and we experience the illusion that we have control over the problem. The cause we support is often fueled by emotions whipped up by the ubiquitous incomplete set of irrelevant facts we use to support our special interest. Debates between conflicting groups are commonplace and fill the nightly news. But real change for the better rarely if ever occurs. People generally waste their time compared to letting go of their mind, focusing on personal healing and working to replace the Money System itself. But the group mindset is powerful. So the Money System once again uses one of our natural defense mechanisms to protect itself.

Social tension is the effect caused by segregated and special interest groups doing their "group" thing. There are so many, many groups, which usually form for diametrically opposed causes, causes that miss the mark in dealing with the Money System, thereby making the Money System stronger. The Money System continues to grow in power while we waste our time in ineffectual groups. As it does it spawns many additional new reported problems. Special interest groups form to deal with these new problems and social tension increases. Social tension spawns anti-social behavior and de-individuation via the group mind-set. Thanks again, Money System.

Smoking is caused by the Money System. The Money System’s damaging aspects create depression. Depression can manifest itself in different ways. One way is by disrupting the normal healthy flow between brain cells of the brain chemical neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Acetylcholine depression is a very common form of depression. Tobacco contains nicotine. Nicotine is a primary agonist of acetylcholine. Thus when nicotine enters the blood stream and makes its way to the brain it stimulates the flow of acetylcholine. The smoker gets a lift and temporary relief from his/her depression and psychological experience of tension, and is able to cope. The downside is that this unregulated injection of nicotine can cause constriction of the blood vessels and lead to stroke, other circulatory problems and heart disease, and the burning-tobacco delivery system causes lung and other cancers. Another downside to smoking is that it allows the smoker to cope with his/her depression and deludes her/him into thinking the problem is biochemical in genesis, rather than face the truth about his/her damage, repair from that damage that causes the depression that causes smoking, and work to replace the Money System. Sadly, very few smokers either realize they are suffering from depression or realize why. They just smoke their way to pre-mature death, thus satisfying the Money System’s evil desire to destroy us.

Spousal abuse is a byproduct of damage caused by the Money System. The old cliché of the man who returns home each night from the rat race and kicks the dog and beats the wife is nearly as old as the Money System itself. Such behavior has become traditional in dealing with the Money System’s damaging effects. The scapegoat custom of taking sins and giving them to the goat and sending the goat and the sins off to die in the wilderness is an ancient ceremony that celebrates the psychic phenomena of transference, displacement, and projection. Anger displacement is releasing the pain of damage caused by one source (usually one's parents, boss, etc. as compelled by the Money System) onto another source that is not the cause of that pain. We damaged humans do it all the time. We do it because we need the release to keep from going crazy. But our mind can’t determine who or what is causing the damage. The need for release is so powerful that it overwhelms us, and transference can occur. And once we're really worked up projection can occur, as we just can't help but wipe a little of our "dark" side onto our mate. We may know that the object of our disaffection is not the cause of our pain but our cowardly mind doesn’t care, or we are simply unconsciously compelled to do it because of the nature of our damage in our family of origin. Now that both spouses work full-time, both come home from the office and beat each other up emotionally, if not physically as well. Absolute nothings can turn into monstrous battles in an attempt to release the stress of the day. Such behavior is abusive. It damages what otherwise could be a great marriage. But the mind can’t help it. It is enslaved to the Money System, which, of course, "can’t possibly be the problem". If we were conscious of the origin of our damage we would release our frustration harmlessly into unoccupied air or appropriately in therapy and support groups or appropriately in a healthy, non-abusive manner to a more deserving person, and work to replace the Money System. Sadly, most therapy on this issue stops at the childhood experience with the abuser’s parents, and all too often the guilt incurred with focusing the problem on one’s parents shuts down the therapeutic process. Were therapists able to portray the truth that the parents are innocent victims themselves, in an ancient oriented chain cycle of abuse spawned by the Money System, then there would be much, much less guilt incurred with focusing on the damage perpetrated by one’s parents. Then therapy could more easily succeed by allowing one's anger to be fully directed appropriately at one’s parents (and whoever else) as the instruments of damage, and, once the emotional truth is fully known by the client, follow with a uniting, healing concerted effort by all parties, including action to replace the evil Money System that caused the damage in the first place. This way parents would be more likely to receive the child’s anger, taking responsibility for their own behavior, but without inflicting debilitating self-guilt, knowing they themselves were damaged in the same manner as their children. And the cycle of spousal abuse can begin to end. Unfortunately, therapists are also enslaved by the Money System. Too many therapists are either unaware the Money System is the problem or they know that they depend on the Money System for their own livelihood. Sadly, too many therapists and self-help book authors are deluded into thinking that with healing comes financial stability – nothing could be further from the truth, we just don’t shoot ourselves in the foot as much when we recover from damage, but the Money System keeps firing away! So way too many therapists won’t name the Money System as the true abuser for fear they couldn’t command fees to earn a living and that they might eventually be out of a job. Thus spousal abuse continues, thanks to the diabolical Money System.

Substandard products are caused by the Money System. The neurotic competition and scarcity aspects of the Money System create a corporate profit motive that causes things to be made as fast and as cheap as possible. As long as a product can be marketed to the degree that its cheapness won’t be detected until after the product is sold, then no more needs to be spent on improving the quality of the product. Consumers can protect themselves against the cost of replacing cheap products by purchasing warranties. But the warranties are costly, and, as a form of gambling, are constructed to cause the "house" (the Money System) to win and the gambler (the consumer) to lose, and, in effect, make the cheap product even more expensive. Since all companies function this way (or the Money System’s neurotic competition aspect puts them out of business), switching brand names is essentially useless, and often a product is made by only one manufacturer, even though marketed under multiple brand labels. In the rare event that a quality product does appear, it is so expensive that only the rich can really afford it. "Everything costs too much, and either doesn’t work right or breaks" is the consumer’s truthful lament. Were it not for the Money System, we wouldn’t be concerned about profit. Instead, we would make products that work and last and would be recyclable. This would reduce the need to constantly manufacture replacement products, thereby reducing manufacturing pollution and reducing worker’s hours. Product litigation would be drastically reduced, freeing our overworked courts of many cases. But the Money System is happy the way things are, even if we are not.

Substandard transportation is a growing source of rage in our country. "You can’t get there from here" is becoming all too true within our cities, and even when you can get from one place to another, it takes far too long and is a very frustrating journey. The Money System’s neurotic competition, excessive shame and population non-management aspects have combined to increase population densities many times beyond the limit required to maintain healthy personal space. This problem is very evident in the crises on our streets and highways. There are so many cars and trucks on the road that going to and from work is a time-consuming and dangerous nightmare. Politicians’ primary coping method has been to put more people in a vehicle and give us more to do while we’re waiting (stereo, cell phone, navigation computers, corporate meetings, etc.). But this often increases accidents, and can only eventually fail after a short time and then the only vehicles left will be trucks and busses, along with herd-mentality humans. Some say rail systems are the answer. But the present concept of rails is a form of train. There isn’t room for all the tracks, and trains can only follow tracks. Besides, if only a tiny fraction of a percent of commuters used rails, the rail systems would be as congested as the roads. Some say working at home will reduce the load. But only those who sit at a computer all day and need to have very little physical contact with co-workers and customers can do this, and this again is a tiny fraction of the population. And why would anyone want to reserve and "pimp" their home to the Money System that is damaging them, or isolate themselves from others, even if they had the room in their home to do so?! This is just another step in losing one’s personal space, being owned by one’s work and, by coping with this problem, thereby making it worse and thus contributing to conditions where no one can travel anywhere at all. In our hearts we know there is no solution to this problem within the Money System, because the Money System wants as many workers packed together as possible near workplaces to facilitate money transactions. Whether the topic is immigration, family size, construction, etc., politicians won’t broach the truth about these aspects of substandard transportation for fear the Money System will boot them out of office. Yet, if we do not soon address all of these issues and more, a trip to the corner grocery store will soon take an hour’s commute.

Suicide is increasing and the Money System is responsible. The Money System is evil because it threatens the life of human beings. Only our heart keeps us alive. All of the Money System’s aspects cause personal damage. Especially active are the excessive shame and excessive fear aspects. Depending on the nature of the damage, some people are driven to be so mentally active that their heart barely functions at all. Since only the heart can love, these people are essentially experiencing a life without love. Suddenly, they either become so mentally centered that they execute the Money System’s threat on their life in an unconscious attempt to appease it, or they experience hopelessness about their lack of love to the degree that they are overwhelmed by guilt and don’t experience that they belong here. Then, suicide, for the sake of pain relief. This is the Money System’s greatest victory, and humanity’s saddest tragedy.

Taxation is everyone’s lament. Not too many people have ever complained about their personal taxes being too low. High taxes are at the foundation of everyone’s complaint about government. Some political parties want to eliminate government altogether, simply because taxation interferes with their private attempt to control the Money System. Taxes provide products and services that are not profitable, that no one would pay for otherwise or that are collective in benefit and buyers for these products and services are many but either indefinable or not yet classified to the degree they can be charged. Taxes are the only security blanket for the poor. So we end up hating the poor because they make taxes too high. Taxes pay government workers’ salaries. So we end up hating the government workers. Taxes pay for military forces and roads and schools and water pipelines and sewage treatment and schools and administration and so on. So we all, in some way, end up hating these services and those who support them every time we see how high our taxes are or hear about a malfunction in these services. Taxes take away our buying power. Taxes reduce the received value placed upon us by the company we work for. Yet, the services our taxes purchase are essential – especially essential to facilitate monetary transactions in some manner (keeping us working). So we want the private sector to do government services so we can have a voice in the price. Ironically, we then get cheaper services, that break, because the uncontrolled profit motive within the neurotic competition aspect of the Money System demands cheap products from the bidding process. Then we later end up paying the same or more for the service because of repairs than if government had done the work. Sadly, it is the tax-based hatred of government that prevents us from naming the Money System as the real culprit. Were it not for the Money System we would make changes in government and business that would foster quality services at a realistic "cost". Instead, we end up mistaking government for the villain, and we act to compromise our country’s personal boundary and its ability to function by fighting necessary monetary taxes. And the real villain – the Money System – not only gets away scot-free, but also receives accolades in the process.

Teen violence is escalating. Within the past few years we’ve witnessed many and massive deadly acts of violence by teenagers on the streets and in our schools. It seems like this is a more recent phenomenon, as such behavior was comparatively rare a few decades ago. Again, however, the root cause is the Money System. Ever since the 1960s when the Money System began pushing both parents into the work place, more and more children are growing up without a parent emotionally and physically available to them. Today, thanks to the Money System’s subtle and seductive cost increases over the years, both parents must work in most families just to provide what one parent’s work provided forty years ago. Not only that, there is so much overwork in our country that parents come home from work long after the kids have arrived home. So the Money System damages the parents further – both of them --, cementing the damage the parents experienced when they were children. The parents are left physically unavailable and emotionally blocked; their heart is walled off from communication with their children. The child, who needs a direct connection with his/her parents’ hearts in order to remain heart-centered is deprived of this experience which is so crucial to the child’s thriving life of love, health, fun and fulfillment. When the child is denied this connection he/she so greatly craves, he/she is left with damage that causes pain, anger and frustration – the key ingredients of rage. This isn’t so much to say that the child suffers from "bad parenting". Rather it is that the parent is psychologically/emotionally absent to the child even when in the child’s presence. The parent doesn’t even know that he/she is not connecting with his/her child because the damaged parent has no conscious clue as to what such a healthy connective experience is like. No matter how much time the parent spends with the child, the connection just does not occur, and is unfortunately often replaced by damaging abandonment or enmeshment. So the child grows up with a seething rage, a rage that he/she controls at best, until something pushes the teenager off the edge down to the pit of violence. Since each one of us lives at the unique center of a dynamic universe, with personally unique experiences and damages, there’s no way to compare kids and determine why one kid went violent and another didn’t, even though we waste a lot of our time trying to do so. The truth is that both kids in any comparison were damaged, one more so than the other and in a form and substance that created a violent release. Life was tolerable for kids when the spiritual fortress – the mom – remained at home and was "somewhat" shielded from the ravages of the Money System. She was thus more likely to make some slight degree of healthy connection with her children that the children so greatly need. But now, with both parents working in so many families, there’s no one healthy for the children to connect with. Yes, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the teen violence epidemic that is about to begin. Once again, however, people are not at fault. The origin and continuous foundation and perpetrator of violence – the Money System – is the single fault in teen violence.

Terrorism is a constant threat. Terrorism is not limited to backward and third world countries. We have never been immune from terrorists, and lately our newspapers describe more terrorist threats and activity leveled at our country than ever before. Again, the Money System is to blame. The Money System’s scarcity, excessive fear, excessive shame, distrust and population non-management aspects combine to create excessive poverty that affects entire cultures, regions and nations. Then, when people in these cultures see other cultures, regions and nations doing better than they are, animosity occurs. Engagements, deals and conflicts between the "haves" and "have nots" most often go the way of the "haves". In time, anger and rage develop. Impoverished regions often have no power to level the economic playing field. Thus conditions grow worse. Differences in religion, cultural practices, language and demographics exacerbate the tensions (although these factors are never the cause of the problem). Then when the pent up rage reaches its breaking point, hostilities develop. Impoverished governments rarely risk war with governments with more stable economies. So clandestine militancy often occurs on a smaller scale. There are some African and Middle Eastern terrorists who are famous for conducting their own little war on isolated segments of strong, stable governments, but terrorists exist in all countries. The terrorist has reached a breaking point and is intent on taking matters into his/her own hands in what he/she thinks requires a last resort military solution. Bombings and mass murders are the usual result. Although most agree that terrorism is wrong, we usually agree that it is wrong because people consciously involved in a military struggle nearly always victimize individuals who are not engaged in a military struggle or who are unaware a military struggle is going on, or who are, in short, innocent. This is what irritates us about terrorists. This frightens us too, as anyone of us could be a terrorist’s victim at any time. Yet, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. And terrorists will argue that all people in a region are guilty if that region is involved in "economic oppression" of the terrorist’s region. The problem, however, is that both sides blame each other. They can’t (or won’t) stop to see that they are both pawns in an escalating game of win and lose conducted by the Money System. Nevertheless, neither point of view is capable of removing "people" as the false cause of the problem in this issue and replacing "people" with the true culprit: the Money System. Were it not for the Money System there would be no win or lose; there would be no grounds for terrorism. But, the Money System does exist, and so thereby do the needless deaths caused by terrorism.

Too many laws exist on our books. It is difficult to start a business or speak out against injustice or take a vacation or mow the lawn or walk down the street without violating some strange, obscure law at the international, federal, state, county or city level. There are  laws that attempt to regulate the non-life-threatening "bedroom" behavior between consenting adults behind closed doors. There may even be laws against speaking the truth about the Money System (although we of the Heart Political Party are unaware of any such unconstitutional law at this time)!  Why are there so many laws? The answer is the Money System, and for three reasons. First, the Money System damages us to behave abusively, thus personal behavior laws have been created just to attempt to keep us from hurting each other and to keep the human race alive. Second, law is the mind’s way of controlling behavior, and the Money System has damaged us to become mentally hyperactive and controlling. Third, laws function to reign in our creativity and ability to really solve problems, thus keeping the Money System in power. Laws, which guide us in functioning cooperatively (like traffic laws), are valuable and necessary. But way too many laws exist that serve only to curtail our freedom of expression and enterprise – simply because our heart is not in charge of our life. So laws keep us in control to serve the Money System. No wonder there are so many laws, they thwart our efforts to function freely and enact healthy change for the better, making us good pawns instead – and that makes the Money System happy.

Traffic is terrible. The traffic problem has been referenced in other topics in this chapter. All forms of transportation traffic are so exceedingly congested, and so psychologically damaging that it cannot be overemphasized how important this problem is to people. Traffic hits home to all of us every day. It is a most visible, regularly occurring indication that something is wrong. Yet no politician will address this problem, because they all know that short of major systemic changes, the problem is unsolvable. The Money System’s neurotic competition, scarcity and population non-management aspects combine to crowd us into small areas for the sake of profitable production. Since the Money System will not be sacrificed, our personal time dwindles to compensate for more time on the roads. Then we have little left over for ourselves and for our interpersonal and social responsibilities. We spend more time in the process of producing (for relatively little monetary compensation) and less time enjoying the fruits of our labor. No wonder so many are raging on the road. The traffic directly creates frustration as it adds to our excessive fear of losing our jobs or "respect" (if we don’t make it to work on time, or make that delivery on time, or get the kids to school on time, etc.). Some say that we need to spread the population out. But if we did, commutes would be even longer. Some say we should spread out both the population and work centers. But that might be ecologically damaging, and who has the power to stop the developers from piling neighborhood on top of business center on top of neighborhood on top of business center, etc.?! Were it not for the Money System, we would cooperate, make only desired products, make products that would last and not need excessive manufacturing of replacements, need less health services due to improved health, etc., etc. This would allow us to work less hours, equally stagger six shifts (replacing one large shift and two small ones or have more days off), etc. We would individually manage our population and collectively take care of ourselves regarding immigration. Traffic would disappear. But the Money System will have nothing of sensible production. Excessive production for excessive profits is the Money System’s motto. And until the Money System is gone, our traffic problems will continue to increase until we are forced into riots and road wars.

Ulcers are caused by worry that is caused by the Money System. Don’t be fooled by so-called scientists who try to explain away ulcers as genetic or germ oriented. The truth is that we are damaged by the Money System. The Money System’s neurotic competition, excessive fear, excessive shame, distrust, inadequate time – well, practically all of the Money System’s aspects – combine to make us overly mental and constantly thinking about the future at a conscious or unconscious level. Since we are always out of time and feeling pressured and guilty, we are prone to worry, and much of that worry is about the impossible task of pleasing our dysfunctional parents into loving us. The nature of the damage a person experiences makes one prone to physical maladies that are psychogenic in nature; the damage to our brain leaks into our body, so to speak. One of the ways our damaged brain malfunctions that affects our body is excess secretion of digestive solutions. Some of these solutions are enzymatic and acidic. The acids that secrete, digest our food and stop secreting normally, are always there during body malfunctions of excess secretion. In absence of food, these excess acids attack our stomach and intestinal lining. They eat away our digestive system and cause sores – ulcers. All of this is caused by the Money System. Drug stores are full of antacids and prescription drugs that try to stop the excess secretion in the body. If successful, then we are altered to fit the Money System. If not, we are eaten away until surgery is required for radical removal of our digestive system. Regardless, we lose. And the Money System wins again. Sadly, we can’t seem to recognize the enemy here. Instead, we get lost in "scientific" solutions that involve genetic alteration and unnecessary and impractical environmental germ sterilization – both with deadly long-term consequences. Were it not for the Money System, ulcers would not exist.

Unemployment statistics say that unemployment is down. They say that the economy is doing well and that people are happily employed. But these statements are just another example of the ubiquitous incomplete set of irrelevant facts. The truth is that millions of people are unemployed and they don’t want to be unemployed. The truth is that just about any of us can be rendered unemployed at any time depending on the Money System’s whim and effect on the economy, a company, a boss, etc. The truth is that millions of people are under-employed and would like to work full time. The truth is that millions of people who are unemployed and under-employed have disappeared from the government records. If the government doesn’t hear from an unemployed person after awhile (like once the person is refused unemployment insurance or once that unemployment insurance runs out), the government assumes the person is employed when in actuality the person is still unemployed. The only reason the person hasn’t reported to the government is that his/her unemployment insurance has run out and the government has not been able to help the person successfully gain employment, so what use is there for that person in reporting to the government?! The truth is that millions of people are unemployed and under-employed, to the degree that the present reported unemployment rate is actually much higher. No one wants to be unemployed. Unemployment causes miseries and heartbreaks and homelessness. We all want to work decent hours for a wage we can live on at a decent, secure job, without worrying about losing our job through no fault of our own. No one who is unemployed is really happy. One would think that the Money System would want us all working 50-plus hours a week to create more transactions. But we can’t figure out or control the Money System – it is evil. The truth is that the Money System is destroying us. Unemployment is just one of its tools of destruction.

Unwanted pregnancy is an all too common experience. Methods of conception prevention are not used or are used incorrectly or are unaffordable or unavailable. Yet people will take these pregnancy risks because the sex drive at the moment is often too strong. This occurs because we are so painfully damaged by the Money System that we crave compensatory pleasure to the degree that sex becomes an overpowering addiction. Since our mind is in charge of our life (caused by damage from the Money System) our heart’s natural proclivity to take care of us is severely compromised. Addiction takes control of us, so that the false heart in our mind easily fails to take care of us. So people fail to take care of themselves, and those who don’t want to become pregnant become pregnant. The Money System is telling them they have no time or resources to birth or raise a child. Thus unwanted pregnancy often ends in abortion or adoption, which leaves emotional scars. Many would prefer to prevent conception, but the Money System has placed this technology out of their reach. This is especially true for teenagers and young adults who have little if any money, which they use just to survive. So the Money System facilitates unwanted pregnancies, which it then either terminates or uses to over-populate the world. Left to our own devices those who did not want pregnancy would use technology to prevent it or would abstain from having sex. But the Money System damages us beyond our ability to take care of ourselves. Via those diabolically controlled by the Money system, it also refuses people the technology to prevent unwanted pregnancies. The Money System has so many ways of making our life miserable.

War is the Money System’s method for getting us to execute its primary directive en masse: suicide. The Money System’s scarcity aspect brings countries to experience poverty for all or part of their people. Then they see neighboring countries attempting to take from them what little they have and war becomes inevitable. The Money System’s population non-management aspect creates overpopulated regions. The people in these regions must expand their territory in order to find food and breathing room. Thus, war ensues as these people invade their neighbor’s territory. People in politically and economically repressive countries try to immigrate to other lands. When they do so illegally and en masse, they take over and overpopulate the land, driving the previous inhabitants away. This builds animosity, defensive and aggressive behavior, and creates conditions for war. As the Money System spreads its activities, so increase worldwide conflicts. Were it not for the Money System, we would all work equally, manage our populations and eliminate the causes of war. But the Money System is evil. It likes to create lots of people to facilitate its transactions as it inhales, and then it kills people off at its whim as it exhales. Such cycles of destruction are part and parcel of the Money System, and are often labeled euphemistically as a "correction" by politicians, historians and economists, if not by the parents of the dead soldier.

Ever wonder why there is so much waste in the world? Our streets and parks, indeed every public place is littered with litter. Every household produces pounds and pounds of waste per week, which trash collection services pick up and deliver to barges, dumps, landfill centers, etc. Often we burn the waste, filling the air with toxic pollutants. The truth is we create way more disposable products than we otherwise could. But the problem is out of our hands, because it is created by the Money System. The Money System damages us to be mentally centered. It then uses glitz to attract our attention. Companies are thus compelled to create fancy, excessive packaging, required to lure us into purchasing their products. Such fancy packaging is otherwise unnecessary in a heart-centered environment, where product awareness is the sole basis for procuring. However, the fancy packaging is designed to get through to our unconscious and control our behavior – for the sake of the Money System’s precious transactions. So many lives are wasted in the production of needless packaging, lives which could be more meaningfully productive in more human-essential activities. After the purchase is made and the product is consumed, the packaging is waste. Much of this waste is recyclable. However, there is very little money in recycling, and few if any have the time to go out of their way to recycle. Thus, cans, bottles, paper, metal, etc., etc. get tossed into the dumpster or strewn along the road. Were we able to recycle such materials, we would save our dwindling precious natural resources. These materials can be reduced to their basics and reformed for use again. But, despite our desire to do so, the Money System says "no". And so we continue to create so much garbage, that one day soon we will run out of room for it all. But will that then stop us from creating more garbage or dumping into the ocean? No, because the Money System simply won’t let us stop creating garbage. It just doesn’t care.

Workaholism is typical of today’s reaction to the Money System. We are damaged by the Money System. We repress the feelings of pain it causes, but these feelings get stronger. So we hide in our mind from the pain in our soul. To keep hiding, we need mental stimulation. Most workaholics work in fields of mental rather than physical work, although certainly no stereotype applies to workaholism. Workaholics work long hours and then come home and do other mental things. They are emotionally distant from their friends and family members due to enmeshment damage in their families of origin, and prefer simple workplace comradeship over deeper, broader, more spiritual relationships involving intimacy. People can hide in other forms of mental activities, such as computer games, chess, reading, hobbies, etc. But what makes workaholism unique, is that those who suffer from it are engaging in activities that give them the illusion of keeping the wolf from the door. Thus they operate under the delusion that by pleasing the boss or earning overtime they are exercising some control over the Money System. This is tremendously seductive, and serves to perpetuate workaholism. The personal effect of workaholism is that the workaholic becomes more and more mentally centered and his/her heart continues to decline in power. This fosters interpersonal miseries, as such a person cannot participate enjoyably in deep emotional relationships. Most workaholics suffer from physical maladies, as their overworked mind deals inadequately at maintaining their health (which is the heart’s job to perform via the soul). When the workaholic reaches a point where he/she just can’t work any more hours, but the painful feelings are still making their way to his/her consciousness, the workaholic often supplements his/her workaholism with another addiction. Smoking and drinking and sex are addictions that often accompany workaholism. On a national basis, workaholism creates a working culture that demands workaholism for companies to stay competitive. Thus people who are not workaholics are forced to emulate this dysfunctional behavior just to keep their jobs. Were it not for the Money System, we would not suffer the damage we now suffer and we would not be prone to workaholism. But the Money System does exist. Workaholism is just another way it makes people suffer as it puts up still another roadblock to personal and national recovery.

5. A Week in the Life of an Average American in the Money System.

Karen is 32. She’s married to Bob who is 34. They have one child, Annie, who is two. Karen works for an advertising firm and Bob is a carpenter. They are no one but everyone. Karen’s typical week in the Money System could be as follows:

Monday:

Karen wakes at 5:30 a.m. Bob has been up since 4:30 and is leaving for work. He has quite some distance to travel to the new construction site, usually taking about 1.5 hours in heavy traffic. Karen has to be at work by eight. She showers and dresses for work. Annie wakes up and needs some attention. Karen spends five minutes with her, then prepares breakfast for herself and Annie. Karen’s makeup, hair, etc. is followed by washing and dressing Annie. It is now 7:15 and Karen’s running late. The two of them get into the car and Karen fastens Annie into her seat. Annie doesn’t want to "fasten" into anything this morning, and she cries and struggles. Karen tries to calm Annie, but she’s really late for work, so she drives off with Annie still screaming. Half way to the babysitter’s, Karen remembers that she forgot to feed the cat. Oh well, Bob will feed the poor, starving kitty when he gets home around 6:00 p.m. Karen drops Annie off at the babysitter’s and heads to work.

Karen arrives at work 15 minutes late, and enters the eight o’clock meeting already in progress. Her boss, Jill, gives her a disapproving glance, but continues the meeting without mentioning Karen’s tardiness. Karen is co-agent on national accounts. She and her partner, Peter, must create an ad campaign for a new, potentially large account. Peter does graphics and Karen writes text. After the meeting Karen and Peter review their strategy. They aren’t entirely in agreement on the approach, and Karen is worried that Peter’s approach is too crass. But she goes along with him to try it out and the two begin creating their presentation. Their deadline is Friday. Karen has other accounts to manage and can only spend some of the day on the new account. Karen likes her work because she can be individually creative in her writing and also enjoy the camaraderie of being part of a successful team. However, she’s not at all happy with her job, as there are too many deadlines and the company is always taking on more than they can accomplish with their present staff, which creates stress and overwork for everyone, and the company is very slow to augment staff. Karen has investigated other companies, but they all seem to be alike in this regard.

Karen leaves work at 5:00 p.m. Traffic is heavier than its usual tangled mess. She picks up Annie at the babysitter late, and then heads home. They arrive home around 5:40. Bob is late getting home. Karen plays with Annie for a little bit. Bob finally arrives. They talk about the day for five minutes. Then Bob gets cleaned up while Karen makes dinner. They eat around 7:15. Bob does the dishes and then they sit down and "veg" a bit in front of the TV. Annie is asleep by eight. By 9:00 Bob, who rises earlier than Karen, is ready for bed. Karen pays some bills and the two retire. Bob falls asleep quickly. Karen has trouble falling asleep. She’s worried about the new account at work. She finally drifts off to sleep around 10:30.

Tuesday:

Each workday for Karen follows the same plan and format. However, the usual exceptions abound.

Annie has a nightmare at 3:30 a.m. Karen gets up and comforts her. Annie goes back to sleep at 4:20, but Karen goes back to bed, only to be disturbed ten minutes later by Bob’s alarm. Karen tries to sleep as Bob prepares for work, but their small, two-bedroom apartment seems to amplify every sound. Karen wants a bigger home – a 3-bedroom house would be nice – but the unsteadiness of Bob’s work requires they save more money first. They’ve talked of having another child, but they just don’t have room.

Annie wakes early and is cranky. Karen says bye to Bob and tries to calm Annie. Karen is already running late. When Karen arrives at the babysitter’s the sitter reminds her that payment is due today. Karen stops to write a check, but in her haste forgets to sign the check. Then she rushes off to work, and is again late.

Today Karen is more in the mood to voice her concerns about Peter’s approach. Peter is upset with her, partially for bruising his ego, partially for not speaking up yesterday. They spend the morning "arguing" about the presentation. Finally they compromise and each begins preparing their part. At 10:30, Jill interrupts. There is an emergency with an old account, and Karen has to drive to that account’s office now and handle the problem. Karen resolves the problem with the account, but it takes all afternoon, and her day is done. She leaves the client’s building at 4:30 p.m. However, she is now farther from home than she would have been at her office, and the traffic is the usual jam. She arrives late to the babysitter’s house, whereupon she receives a scolding from the babysitter for both being late and not signing the check.

Karen and Annie arrive home at 6:45. Bob has been waiting and was worried. When they meet he is angry. He wanted her to call and leave a message, but she was too focused on picking up Annie. They manage to avoid a fight. Otherwise, this evening is the same as Monday, the same as all the other days of the week. Bob cleans up, Karen makes dinner and cares for Annie. Bob does dishes, and they collapse in front of the television. This evening, however, Annie is fussy and wants lots of attention. Bob is upset that his TV is being interrupted, but he and Karen play with Annie. Annie is late for bed at 8:30. After putting Annie to sleep, Karen showers and gets ready for bed. Bob has dozed off in the living room in front of the TV. Karen wakes him at 9:30 and they go to bed. Karen is really tired. Bob, however, thanks to his catnap is a bit revived, and in an amorous mood. They don’t make love as much anymore, being so busy and all. So she consents. They fall asleep together around 10:15.

Wednesday:

Bob’s snoring wakes Karen around 1:00 a.m. She nudges him, but try as she might he continues. She gives up and goes off to the couch. It’s not as comfortable, but the noise is somewhat softer. She eventually drifts off to sleep, but wakes off and on in discomfort. Annie again wakes early around 3:00. This time she is crying. Karen checks her; Annie feels feverish. Bob, who can sleep through a train wreck, is oblivious. Karen picks up Annie and rocks her in her arms. Annie also seems to have the sniffles. Karen takes her temperature: 99 degrees. Annie has a back tooth coming in and Karen gives her some medicine for the pain and fever. However, Karen is not yet sure if that is Annie’s problem. The babysitter won’t take a child with a fever, so Karen plans to take Annie to her parent’s house where her mom can care for Annie. Unfortunately, the trip to Karen’s mom’s house is an hour out of Karen’s way to work. Annie fusses, and won’t go back to sleep. Instead, she asks Karen a thousand questions, "Why this, Mommy?" Why that, Mommy?" Karen tries her best to remain in control, but her lack of sleep is taking its toll. Bob wakes at 4:30. He finds Karen and Annie in the living room. He asks what’s wrong. Karen lashes out at Bob in frustration because Bob didn’t get up with her to comfort Annie. Bob says he didn’t hear Annie crying, and besides, he says, he needs his sleep to handle the heavy construction at work. They argue back and forth, fighting for about 15 minutes, while Annie begins to cry louder. Then a neighbor pounds on the wall and Bob and Karen stop fighting. Bob gets ready for work and leaves in a huff.

The trip to Karen’s mom’s takes an extra hour. Traffic is very, very bad in that direction. Karen arrives an hour late for work. Fortunately her boss doesn’t notice. But Peter gets on her case. He says she’s already behind and he doesn’t want to miss Friday’s deadline. Karen apologizes and gets back to writing. Her lack of sleep, however, is taking its toll. She is slow to create, and frequently finds herself dosing off. By noon, she has accomplished very little, so she decides to skip lunch, and focuses on trying to concentrate. However, her mom calls her at 1:00 p.m. Annie’s temperature is up to 101. Karen apologizes to Peter as she rushes off. She arrives at her mom’s and consoles Annie. They head for the doctor in a hurry, and Karen narrowly escapes causing an accident. The waiting room at the pediatrician’s office is crowded with sick kids who are busy spreading the new school year’s germs. The wait is forever. Finally at 5:15 the doctor sees Annie. Nothing serious, just a cold. The doctor prescribes a children’s pain reliever, a decongestant and lots of liquids. They leave the doctor’s at 5:30. Annie has fallen asleep from the debacle. On the way, Karen remembers that she should call Bob, so she pulls over at a pay phone and leaves Bob a message. She wishes they could afford a cell phone, but the budget is tight right now. A wreck on the freeway up ahead leaves Karen in a "parking lot". They don’t get home until 7:00.

Bob has dinner ready when they come through the door. Karen is grateful, and they both apologize for the morning’s fight. Annie is fussy and doesn’t want to eat. Bob does dishes and cleans up. He plays with Annie while Karen showers and gets ready for bed. She is utterly exhausted, and hits the sack by 8:30. Bob is up late with Annie. She’s feeling better and wants to eat. He feeds her some dinner. It’s 10:00 before he gets her to bed. He’s in bed by 10:15. Morning will come soon.

Thursday:

Bob doesn’t respond to his alarm. But Karen does. She hits the snooze and goes back to sleep. Nine minutes later it rings again. Bob again doesn’t respond. Karen nudges him; no response. It takes her five minutes to rouse him up. He drags out of bed and prepares himself for work. Karen sleeps until 5:30 when her alarm rings. She too hits the snooze – four times. Her exhaustion is not recovered in just one night. It’s after six when the alarm rings again. This time she looks at the clock. Out of the bed she bolts. Bob is long gone. Fortunately Annie slept through the night. Karen begins getting ready for work. Annie wakes and Karen attends to her. Annie’s temperature is 100. She’s cranky, and will have to go to Karen’s mom’s again. They rush around getting ready, but Karen’s extra sleep has put her far behind. Karen calls Peter to apologize for her running so very late. Peter is not understanding.

They leave the house at 8:30. Karen arrives at work after 9:45. This time Jill notices, and chews her out, emphasizing that the presentation package for the new account is due tomorrow. Karen feels frustrated, defeated and angry. The deadline of the project coupled with the other events of the week have placed an unhealthy degree of stress on her. When she sees Peter he begins to get on her case. However, this time she erupts, silencing him into astonishment. Then she retreats to her cubicle. She works hard, but by 2:00 p.m. she isn’t done, and tomorrow’s presentation is at 10:00 a.m. She calls Bob to see if he’ll pick up Annie. Bob won’t be able to pick Annie up until 6:30 p.m., partially because Karen’s mom’s house is on the other side of his route home. But since Karen’s mom has Annie, it’s somewhat okay to be late. The secretary at Bob’s construction site takes the message and says Bob is on site and she will find him and have him call Karen. 30 minutes pass, and Karen has trouble concentrating on work as she worries about Annie. Finally Bob calls and he says he’ll pick Annie up. Karen works through the late afternoon and early evening. By 7:30, she still isn’t done. Nevertheless, she packs her work in her briefcase and heads home.

She arrives home at 8:15 after picking up a hamburger. Bob and Annie are home, and they’ve both eaten. Bob is tired from lack of sleep, and now he too has a sore throat. He cleans up, takes some medicine and goes to bed. Annie, however, is feeling better and she wants to play. But Karen is tired and stressed from work, and she must struggle to give Annie the attention she needs. Soon Karen falls asleep on the floor. Annie continues to play around her sleeping mother, and, although unsupervised, does not fall into any harm. After awhile Annie gets sleepy. She crawls onto her mother’s chest and falls asleep. Karen wakes at 11:00 to find Annie still asleep on her chest. This is the closest she and Annie have been all week. This feels good to Karen. She hesitates to rise, lingering instead to enjoy the comfort. Then work hits her like a ton of bricks. She picks Annie up, prepares her for bed and tucks her in. Then Karen breaks out her notes she brought home from work. She works until 1:30 a.m. – still not quite finished. Then she collapses in bed.

Friday!

Bob is up and off to work at his normal time. Karen wakes, not to her alarm, but to Annie screaming in terror. There is a spider on the wall in Annie’s bedroom. Karen disposes of the spider and comforts Annie. She takes Annie’s temperature and it is down to 99. She phones the babysitter and asks if the babysitter (who is closer to Karen’s work) can take Annie. The babysitter is reluctant but Karen persuades her that Annie is no longer contagious.

Karen arrives at work only a half-hour late. She rushes to weave her work from last night into the presentation. At 9:30 Karen and Peter review their presentation. They both realize the text is a little rough, but time is up. The meeting with the client is shaky. Jill has to work political magic to salvage the account. The meeting ends at 11:45. Jill takes the client to lunch and returns alone at 1:15 p.m.. Jill confronts Peter and Karen. The client will listen to a second presentation. If the second presentation is better, they may land the account. Jill is angry. She wanted to "wow-em", not have to beg for another chance. She leaves Karen and Peter, warning that the next presentation better be perfect. Peter says nothing to Karen, although she feels his icy chill of disgust with her work performance this week. They return to their cubicles to work. Karen is miserable. Thank God it’s Friday!

Friday evening is like all the other workday evenings. Bob and Karen are too tired to go out, and they can’t afford an evening babysitter every week. They quietly watch TV and are in bed by 10:30.

Saturday:

No alarm. On Saturday that’s Annie’s job. This Saturday Annie is up once in the night, at 2:00 a.m. Bob gets up (at Karen’s insistence) and takes care of Annie. A glass of water, a story and some rocking and Bob has her asleep by 2:45. He then returns to bed. Annie is up again at 7:00 and the day begins.

Karen makes breakfast. She and Bob talk about the week. Bob has had no idea of exactly how rough things have been for Karen, both at work and on the road. They had been too tired and busy with Annie during the weekday evenings to discuss much. Bob tells Karen that rain is forecast for Tuesday. If it does rain then he won’t be able to work; in which case he will take Annie for the day. Karen is grateful but anxious. They save money on babysitting, and she can get to work on time with less stress, but in the construction business, if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. They need the money. Their savings account is miniscule, but, for now, sufficient for a few rainy days. Nevertheless, Bob’s job makes future planning difficult to bank on.

After breakfast, Bob attends to his chores (water plants, touch-up paint, washing cars, repairs, some house cleaning, make dinner, watching Annie while Karen goes shopping, etc.). Karen sits down and tends to the budget. She’s tired, and wants to go back to bed. She pays some bills and works out her day’s activities: laundry, groceries, lunch, Annie’s friend’s birthday party, clean house, dishes, etc. So goes the day. By 6:00 p.m. Karen is beat, and two loads of laundry are still left. And she forgot to go to the cleaners. Bob barbecues hamburgers for dinner. After dinner they rent a movie. Bedtime is at 10:00 – Karen collapses. Some day off!

Sunday:

Annie sleeps through the night. She is feeling much better. The alarm goes off at 6:30 a.m. Church is at nine and Bob teaches a Sunday School class. Bob goes to the fast food place and brings back breakfast. They all eat, and Bob gets ready and leaves to prepare his class. Karen and Annie get ready for church. They arrive at 8:55. She rushes to get Annie to the nursery. Annie is reluctant to be left. She misses her Mommy and is tired of strangers. Karen is late to class. She meets Bob at 10:00 for church. During the service a nursery worker taps Karen on the shoulder. Annie is crying up a storm and they can’t get her to stop. Karen goes and gets Annie and carries her comfortingly, walking up and down the greenbelt. Annie falls asleep just as church ends.

They take their separate cars back home. Today is Bob’s mother’s birthday. They grab a quick bite and drive the hour and a half to Bob’s parents. Karen’s parents are there too. They visit for the afternoon. Karen and Bob’s mom get along okay, but today there is some friction. Bob’s mom thinks Karen shouldn’t be working, and that Karen should stay home and be a full-time mom. She blames Karen, not the economic situation. She gets her little digs in whenever she can. On the way home that evening Karen complains to Bob about his mother’s snide remarks. Bob defends his mother and an argument ensues. Annie begins crying.

They arrive home. Karen and Bob remain aloof for the rest of the evening. Karen prepares Annie for bed and reads her a story while Bob watches TV. Then Karen joins him. At 9:30 they retire. Bob apologies to Karen for his mother’s behavior. They make up, and make love.

Bob drifts off to sleep. Karen, however, is unable to sleep. She dreads Monday. The weekend went by so fast and she has so much work to do for Wednesday’s second presentation with the new client. What if something gets in the way and prevents her from finishing the presentation? What if her work isn’t good enough? She can’t afford to lose her job. How will they ever afford to get a house? Work competition is stiff now, and good jobs are scarce – even scarcer for someone who’s been terminated. She knows she’s good at what she does, but there just isn’t enough time, and then Christmas will soon be here and then there will be no time or money!

Karen thinks about Annie. Annie is growing up so fast. But the babysitter spends more time with Annie, quality wise, than Karen herself does. When will the rat race settle down? Karen wants Annie to have a little brother before Annie is too much older. But how will she find the time to care for two kids?! It all seems so impossible, and she misses extended quality time with Bob too.

Karen is frightened and miserable. And the weeks ahead portend more of the same, or worse. She knows she is not herself right now; this is not how she wants to live. She realizes that something is wrong. But what can be done?! Eventually she just stops thinking about it, and begins to fall asleep.

Such is life in the Money System.

6. The Foundational Damage Caused By the Money System.

All of the aforementioned aspects of the Money System cause personal damage in a number of different ways. This damage causes the heart to lose control of one’s life to the mind. The mind grows stronger and creates a false replacement heart within itself. The soul is left in a damaged state and its healing is arrested. The false heart does a woefully inadequate job of managing one’s life, leaving one in an overall miserable condition. This condition continues to worsen, with premature death being the final outcome.

The foundational damage caused by the Money System is the loss of one’s experience of complete self -- the loss of heart-centered identity. The false heart comprises only a very small part of one’s total self. Because it focuses on the world, the mind lacks the centering and connectivity to allow one to fully experience his/her being (which is rightfully centered from the heart). Thus those who are damaged by the Money System (and that’s essentially all of us) are experiencing only a fragment of their identity. We are used to experiencing this fragment of identity, and so, sadly, we don’t know what we are missing.

Nevertheless, many of us experience a nagging sense of uneasiness and incompleteness. The mind is relatively disconnected from the soul compared to the full connectivity with the soul possessed by the heart. Thus through the mind we experience the soul almost as an otherworldly entity instead of as the body monitor and feeling center that it is. Because we are mentally centered we are out of touch with our feelings. We cannot differentiate easily (if at all) with some or all of our base feelings regarding conditions in the world and in our body which affect us (i.e. sad, glad, mad, ashamed, afraid, hurt, etc.). If we do get in touch with these feelings we experience confusion and spiritual pain, and the mind quickly reacts to strengthen its controlling connection over the soul, as if we "jump" back into our mind to get away from the pain. Thus our soul is not allowed by our mind to participate in our life as it was designed to, and it therefore does not function correctly. This has an adverse effect on our bodily health, our behavior and our ability to recognize what is happening to us at the hands of the Money System.

Were it not for the Money System, we would be able to repair the damage and prevent its return. We would return to the heart-centered experience of life that God has intended for us. Our experience of our complete being -- from our heart -- would be so strong compared to what we now experience from our mind that the secrets of the universe would be opened to us. We would thoroughly enjoy the one and only life we will ever have.

But the Money System is evil. The Money System is the codified and systemized love of money. This love of money has been perpetuated through the centuries by damaged people who loved money more than life itself. These damaged people systemized the process of this love and inflicted it on us all. Today, we are all subjected to the compulsion to love money. This compulsion is growing ever stronger. We have long known that the love of money is the root of all evil. Today we now know that evil by name: the Money System. Evil eventually consumes and destroys the lives it snares. We must deal with this evil and destroy it, before it soon destroys us all.

7. The Roadblock to Replacing the Money System.

The roadblock to replacing the Money System is the human mind itself.

The mind has grown so strong that it dominates our life. It derives its strength, not on its own, but from its god the Money System which put our mind in control via the damage inflicted on us by the Money System. Thus the mind serves the Money System, even though the Money System destroys us.

Yet, while it is destroying us, the Money System is strengthening the mind and making the mind the self-serving ruler of our life. Our culture is evidence of the mind and "thinking" worship that we encounter. The erroneous phrase "I think, therefore I am" is the anthem of our mentally centered existence. The mind and the Money System combine to attempt to tell us that the mind is the most wonderful thing in existence, and that only the mind really exists in full (anything else within us being either nonexistent or only partially existent from the mind’s point of view). Science fiction abounds with stories of our supposed coming evolution involving the disappearance of our body, leaving only pure mind and its thoughts as our ultimate existence. The mind creates games and activities to occupy and stimulate it. Extremes of work, finances, chess, gambling, religion, computers, education, politics, etc. all exist to exacerbate thinking and satisfy the mind’s desire for pure thought. Even the educational tools of reading and writing are taken to extremes, just to give pleasure to the mind, at the sacrifice of our complete self.

We think and imagine our way out of our problems by losing ourselves in our mind (which solves no problem at all). Our mind assigns only itself to work on our personal and global problems, falling far short of creating any real and workable solutions. The mind sees only black and white and shades of gray, right and wrong, the ubiquitous incomplete set of irrelevant facts, rules, regulations, principles, etc. These comprise a largely incomplete set of awareness tools for solving personal and collective problems. Thus we have ended up making problems worse when we’ve tried to solve problems from our mind’s false heart, thereby setting the stage for imminent personal and global "Armageddon".

We calibrate from our mind, which is controlled by the most powerful entity on the planet – the Money System. Thus it appears hopeless (to the mind!) that we can ever overcome the roadblock to destroying the Money System and return our heart to its rightful place as ruler of our life.

8. Overcoming the Roadblock to Replacing the Money System.

Clearly, the Money System is the problem. It must be replaced very soon or it will eventually kill us all.

However, replacing the Money System is not that easy, or we would have done so sooner. A major obstacle to replacing the Money System is that the Money System owns the part of us that rules our life: our mind.

Our mind puts up resistance whenever the thought of replacing the Money System occurs. Simply mention the need to replace the Money System with a better system, and 99 out of 100 people will reply "Communist!" or say it can’t be done or just laugh at you. In reality, their mind is severely frightened by the thought of losing its god the Money System, and so it issues a knee-jerk defensive response. This fear is not the fear of losing food, clothing, shelter, etc., although that does exist at a higher level. The fear the mind is experiencing is the foundational fear of its own disintegration.

The mind developed the ego, superego and the false heart (which exists at the nexus of the ego and superego) as a response to the conditions that created the Money System and the Money System itself. The false heart sees the Money System as its savior. Without the Money System (and with a system that incorporates trust in its foundation instead of fear) the mind fears that the heart would return to power and that it (the mind) would disintegrate its own structure to conform to the needs of the heart. This fear is a justified fear, as this is exactly what would happen. Yet, the disintegration of the mind would be to the great benefit of us all, as once the mind reintegrates again in its natural structure, the heart in power would utilize the mind to accomplish far greater tasks than the mind today can do on its own. The mind, relieved of it overburdening task of running our life, would be a much more powerful thought tool.

But the mind puts up a defense of the Money System, and this is understandable. The mind creates a laundry list of excuses that only it considers valid, essentially placing greater value on money and the Money System than on human life itself. Thus the battle against the Money System is a spiritual battle. The foundational struggle in this battle is not outside of us in the world, but inside of us, where the heart and the mind are battling for control of each one of us, with healing for the damaged soul hanging in the balance. Historically, the mind has nearly always won this battle, because the Money System threatens to kill us if the heart wins. Thus it would seem that we have little hope of ever winning this battle en masse now that the Money System is stronger than ever.

However, there is a way to win this battle, a way that appeals to and strengthens the heart, and then binds those of like heart together to create a powerful force to somewhat shield against the damage of the Money System and to successfully replace the Money System. The foundational solution contains the method of dealing with the Money System and the damage it causes. This method involves a successful way of winning the personal battle against the Money System, and this method involves a successful way of winning the collective battle against the Money System. Executing this two-pronged attack on the Money System is a guarantee of success in replacing the Money System. This method, described in the chapter "The Foundational Solution", is spiritual in nature. It appeals to two of the most exciting and personally rewarding experiences we can ever have: 1) repairing and preventing spiritual damage on a personal level, and 2) working to create heaven on earth.

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