The man who came to collect the skip from the site yesterday deserves a medal. A metal medal? The first thing he did was to free the unused, new bits of stainless steel and angle iron from being buried under the other "rubbish".
I can recognize a stallion with character in less than 2 seconds, and voiced my admiration of what he was doing, "Oh, you're going to recycle it, good!".
"Otherwise it ends up in the land. I hate waste.", he said. Further conversation revealed that the stuff he has to pick up that sometimes can't be recycled, but must be sent to landfill, so assaults his abhorrence of waste that it brings a tear to his eyes.
He is a hero of our times. His principles and values have landed him in a job that intellectuals and office bound beancurds scorn. They have never seen a dump, or a landfill site, and they wouldn't even stand the smell from half a mile away, yet they dare to scorn those who deal with their waste.
In a capitalist economy, it is those who buy goods and services who are ultimately responsible for the waste arising. This is salient in a year when financial and economic waste has finally been exposed to be the planet's grim reaper, after nearly a decade of human economic development which nobody except Al Qa'aeda succeeded in stalling temporarily.
The abhorrence of waste is deep and hidden by so many of those whom have it. The Global Human Economic Machine has ruthlessly been sucking in independent individuality and assimilating only its bodies into its Borg. The war against waste so often seemed futile, yet many individuals during those years adhered steadfastly to their value of wastelessness.
Again, lone individual moral effort is heroic and sometimes the only thing that stops humanity from killing the planet overnight. The finger in the dyke. The shame is that individual moral effort seems never to be harnessed and aggregated adequately. In a largely secular society, the priests ultimately serve the God of Money. So at the BBC, much though they occasionally try to garner moral action in society, ultimately they fail, because they all are financially dependent on their jobs. Even in a religious society, priests who serve the God of their Religion are forced to be slaves to the God of Money, which they do by pandering to the whims of the rich for their living patronage, wills and legacies.
Finance and Economics this week has been laid further to waste. Luddite Banking and Investment is in steep ascendance. Hold Cash, Gold, or Government Bonds, they all think. The Derivatives market has been destroyed, and now the Equities markets are crumbling. What has not hit Britain yet has been the destruction of the Insurance business. Lloyds of London has been keeping its head down and staying quiet, but I only last year spoke to an insurance industry retiree who acknowledged that there too, the industry had become incomprehensibly complex and difficult to control.
Insurance is the primary industry that sustains socialist values, so Brits are deluded if they scorn the USA for having to bail out AIG, and care less whether Britain might stay free of this blight. I cannot imagine living in a Luddite Economy where there is no insurance industry, but for a nation that is so heavily dependent on institutionalized socialism in the State, Britain will move faster to bail out an insurance business than it will a bank.
Of greed, on the individual level, I come to my blog to remind myself of this: life has been good to me these last few weeks, but I must not overreach. While I am free from paying obeisance to someone else's god once a week, the value of regularly stopping in one's path and appreciating contentment, and even acknowledging the inevitability of future loss (age and death if nothing else), is perhaps the surest way of killing greed. Those financiers and economists that allowed monetary greed to flourish to such extremes, should be subjected to conventional religious constrictions, something Christian or Islamic for example: secularism will never be able to control mass population emotions. The mass population is more than 6,000,000,000 times your individual self.
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