PLUTOS THE GREATEST EVIL AND GOOD
Written
by Konstantinos Konstantinidis Amphiktyon According to
Hesiod, Plutos is a deity who personified wealth and abundance. He was born in
Crete and is mentioned as the son of the goddess Demeter and Iasion. He appears
in the retinue of Demeter or Persephone. He is depicted as a young man holding
the "Horn of Amalthea". Later, however, playwrights present Pluto as
blind, as he indifferently scatters goods and money. According to Aristophanes,
Plutos was blinded by Zeus so as not to destroy the world. This tells us a lot.
In the previous play, we briefly touched on Virtue. It was deemed appropriate
to also write about its antithesis, Pluto. People are born good by nature, but
later their vices make them evil and deceitful. Wealth exerts the strongest
attraction on man. The matter from which he was created and is sustained in
life makes him literally a slave to matter. And matter has infinite tools to
lure him towards evil. Of course, the rich do not know good, because wealth
distances them from it. It does not allow man to think and investigate himself.
For the rich, such thoughts are a waste of time and a loss of profit. This
makes him extroverted and dependent on chance and, in this case, on the changes
of the Market. With the continuous increase in wealth, they lose their reason
and jump into another dimension outside of reality, doing "crazy"
actions (see Musk, Trump, etc.) Wealth is also brazen, deceitful, arrogant,
arrogant and haughty. Usually the rich acquire bad or even unnatural appetites
and become insatiable in abnormal pleasures, because they want to taste
everything in this life (Epstein and his company). Deep down, however,
internally, he is like a hare because he thinks that what he has acquired may
change hands tomorrow. That is why you will never see him complacent. In
reality, he is unhappy and unable to enjoy what he has acquired. When Wealth is
used, it brings destruction and when it is not used, it brings misery. Look at
what is happening in Ukraine and Gaza where wealth is preparing to invade to
acquire new wealth, but also in underdeveloped countries where wealth does not
go and people are starving. There is no satiety for Wealth. The more it
acquires, the more it wants because then competition with its equals and richer
people begins. It is always in distress and anxiety when it thinks about the
changing market factors and its lenders. For the creative and hardworking
person, Wealth is slavery because it turns him into a servant of money, while
he could be engaged in some other more creative work. The rich person attracts
a crowd of people around him who flatter him in the hope of some profit or to
boast that they have acquaintances with money. Wealth is not a good thing, on
the contrary, it causes the envy of many and everyone wants to acquire it. The
rich are deprived of the greatest goods that make a person happy. Countless
plots are hatched against Wealth (murders of kings, oligarchs, bankers, etc.)
and none have security and freedom of movement in their lives. They must always
have an escort for their own safety and that of their family. Most rich people
are indifferent to spiritual goods because on the one hand they do not have
time to deal with them, but also because they despise them as useless, given
that they became rich without them. The Rich harms his body with pleasure,
unlimited enjoyment and tenderness because he is used to loading himself with
all kinds of goods that the common man does not acquire. The constant pressure
he exerts on his body creates diseases and undermines his health. But he cannot
stop even when he is in danger, because profit is like a drug. It does not let
him rest for a moment. The more he earns, the more he demands and there is no
end or satiety. The worst thing is that it takes away his physical exercise,
and the pleasure of creative work, contemplation, social action, love for his
homeland, and even contact with the community. Usually, the rich man who does
everything to ensure a peaceful sleep has difficulty sleeping and is tormented
by insomnia when he thinks about the myriad problems that his wealth threatens.
On the contrary, people who do not have wealth but have secured their
livelihood sleep peacefully at night, even if they do not sleep in luxurious
apartments and beds covered with gold. The rich do not enjoy nature even if
they live in nature, because with their works they will have destroyed it. The
rich person becomes sensitive to both cold and heat and to diseases because he
is not accustomed to the natural environment and is not hardened to it.
And when old age comes and his
children grow up, the Homeric quarrels over the distribution of the property
begin. Then the old-rich man experiences the real tragedy. Everyone has become
his enemy. He is surrounded by flatterers and anyone who dares to tell him the
truth considers him his enemy. But he is also suspicious of their flatterers
because he is afraid that they will approach him to snatch his wealth. Everyone
waits for him to die to share his clothes and when he dies, no one really
mourns him because his peers have no feelings. National benefactors have the
power to set aside a part of their wealth for charitable and cultural purposes.
When this is done while the donor is alive, he feels the love of society. But
each of us can become a donor even with a small amount that contributes to
good, but also the spiritual person who works selflessly for the benefit of the
whole society. They also deserve honor. Everyone asks for help from the rich
for various reasons that it is not possible to satisfy all of them. Therefore,
he will have created several enemies in his life who will accuse him of being a
miser. Ultimately, most evils come from wealth and countless evils would not
exist if there were no wealth. Because of it, murders, sacrileges are
committed, friendship is violated, marriages and companies are dissolved, wars,
revolutions, disasters occur, it erodes society and creates corruption. And for
all this, profit is the motive. Even homelands are betrayed and there is no
hesitation in committing the most heinous crime. The Greek plutocratic elite
has kept the country underdeveloped. Of course, the client state is also to
blame. Wealth, we could say, is a necessary evil because we are made of matter
and we feed on matter and when we lack it, we become beasts in the blink of an
eye. Wealth is sometimes good and sometimes bad, but always necessary for man
and life for progress and prosperity. In our modern era, humanity has fallen
into crisis because man, while he has acquired the means and wealth to make all
of humanity happy, lacks the Virtue and Justice to realize his dream. The
trillionaires on the one hand and the impoverished, homeless, hungry and bombed
Palestinians on the other, without a homeland and without a future.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
* Amphiktyon Major General (retd) Konstantinos
Konstantinidis Author, Member of the Society of Greek Writers
http://amphiktyon.blogspot.com/
http://amphiktyon.org
