[Buddha-l] Wealth and excess

[jkirk]

Thanks Alberto for this article link. 
Here's a telling excerpt that fits right in with what I wrote
last night about the insanity of money-madness-excess:

""A sign of health in the mind", Donald Winnicott wrote in 1970,
"is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and
accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of
another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to
us." To live well, we must be able to identify imaginatively with
other people, and allow them to identify with us. Unkindness
involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens
not just our happiness but our sanity. Caring about others, as
Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, is what makes us fully human. We
depend on each other not just for our survival but for our very
being. The self without sympathetic attachments is either a
fiction or a lunatic. "

Wall St pyramid schemes and money-mad accumulative delusions
could only thrive under the absence of caring described in the
article (a review of a book on the phenomenon of dumping kindness
from human behavior.)

Best, Joanna
=======================

I just came across Reagan and Thatcher in this essay about
kindness being out of fashion:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/03/society-politics

The article mentions a host of other people, such as Hume,
Rousseau, Freud and Richard Dawkins. I imagine the book
introduced by this article would make interesting and relevant
reading for Buddhists.

Best,

Alberto Todeschini
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