My Vision
I heal affluenza by exposing the myths around money and wealth. Anyone, regardless of their net worth, who believes that they must be rich, that more is always better, is a self-condemned prisoner of the 'golden ghetto'.
-- Jessie H. O'Neil
Excerpt From The Book - The Golden Ghetto
The truth is, we who have so much can't afford to hide fearfully in our golden ghettos any longer. The wealthy control the majority of the earth's natural and financial resources, and we have made a mess of things. Greed and denial prevail over wise use and altruism. We shove our heads deeper and deeper into the sand with the hope that no one will see us, with the hope that someone else will clean up the mess we have made, with the desperate hope that if we look the other way long enough, things will get better.
In reality, all the gold in the world can't buy us peace as long as we live separately from each other, from the world, and from our true selves. Money is powerful and transformational, but money has no intrinsic spiritual value. For money to have meaning, we have to control it, creating the context within which it becomes a spiritual entity. It will do what we demand of it, but we must be strong enough and focused enough to know what it is that we want it to do. Left to its own devices, it controls us. Our lives speed by in a flurry of financial caretaking, time-consuming "responsibilities" that allow no opportunities for listening to our hearts or the cries of those around us.
The unprecedented affluence that followed World War II has lulled us as a nation into a false sense of entitlement much as it lulls an individual who inherits money. We somehow think that we not only deserve wealth, but that it is our right. We pout and sulk when it does not appear. One only need look back in history to realize what a preposterous and damaging assumption that is. What we have failed to do is to use our affluence for the benefit of the earth and humankind. As a culture, we have been on a mindless, selfish binge to see how much money we can individually accumulate. Material wealth became the earmark of success, the way we kept score; but one day when we weren't paying attention, we became addicted to it. If this much feels good, we told ourselves, then more would feel better.
Somewhere many years ago, we lost ourselves in the process. Money was originally invented to barter for the essentials of survival. But then the money itself became the primary goal and the essentials became secondary. We have lost track of what money is for, and it is time to do a cultural intervention on our abuse of money. We must begin to make conscious choices about the disposition of our wealth before we no longer have the luxury of making any choices at all.
Because there is currently such a vast chasm in our world between the haves and the have-nots, we have perhaps naively assumed that what is missing is more money -- that if only the poor became rich, then everything would sort itself out. What we have failed to realize is that we don't need more wealth; we need to use what we have differently. But before anyone is going to be willing to do that, we have to understand the nature of the beast. Hating and resenting the rich because they have more than you do is downright counterproductive in terms of eliciting change. No one and nothing changes through hatred. People change when they feel safe enough to look at the darkness within.
If you must be angry, be angry with the dysfunctions of affluenza, not with the individuals, perhaps including yourself, who have been unthinkingly trapped in the illusion of the American dream. Make a decision to change individually and to use your resources--financial, intellectual, and spiritual--to make a difference within the cultural institutions that continue to perpetrate the lies about wealth and money.