Opinion (from Psyfactor): “‘Prophets of the Old Testament called those people who worshiped objects and things that they made with their own hands “the idolaters.” Their “gods” were things made of wood or stone.

‘The meaning of idol worshipping is in transferring all feelings, the force of love, and power of thought onto external objects. Contemporary people are idolaters. We perceive ourselves only through things we own.’ (Eric Fromm)

“The world of things continues to grow. A human being becomes smaller next to so many objects. Contemporary people define their existence by announcing: “I buy, therefore I am.” Being a “thing,” we confirm that we are alive only because we communicate with other objects.

“Costs of houses, furniture, cars, clothes, watches, computers, TV sets are the basis for the social status of an individual. When people lose a part of their belongings, it’s as if they lose a part of themselves. When they lose everything they have, they are totally lost.

“During economic crises, those who lose a significant part of their property commit suicide; they jump out of skyscrapers’ windows. Their wealth was in fact a substitute for their personality. Committing suicide as a result of financial bankruptcy in such a system of cultural values is very logical. Suicidal acts signify the bankruptcy of a personality, individuality.

“Previously, people also associated themselves with things, but never before did inanimate objects occupy such a high ranking in the system of social recognition as happened during the last decades, when consumption turned into the means of evaluating the status of an individual.

“The program of upbringing of those who subordinate their lives to work began; a new phase was launched – a stage of turning people into ‘consumers.’ The economy needed not only disciplined workers; good, disciplined customers who kept buying new goods as they showed up on the market were extremely essential.

“Advertising of consumer behavior was meant to get rid of the centuries-old traditions of buying only necessary things. Propaganda of a new ideology made people think that happiness was all about a non-stop buying process of new things.

“Consumers stay assured that they are the ones who make a choice of whether or not to buy certain products. However, advertising expenditures frequently reach more than 50% of the cost of goods sold. This fact speaks for itself: figures show how much energy and talent are being contributed to the process of persuading consumers to continue buying.”

Comment: At this time, we evaluate and realize previous developmental stages. as we move away from the current, consumption model of society. It is happening not because we became internally richer and thus don’t need any external signs to demonstrate our significance. Rather, the desire that requires a new type of fulfillment, a realization of the purpose of our existence constantly evolves in us.

Even though affectations on stages and screens push us back, still evolvement of our aspiration to reveal the essence of life is inevitable. It will eventually lead us to acknowledgment and recognition of the wisdom of Kabbalah.
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 References:

Predatory Things of the Century, a sci-fi story by Soviet writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, written in 1964 and published in the Soviet Union in 1965, and then, after a long break, in 1980. The book has an epigraph : “There is only one problem – the one and only in the world – to return people to spirituality, to spiritual mutual care.”

Erich Fromm Zeligmann (23 March 1900 , Frankfurt on Main  – 18 March 1980, Locarno), German sociologist , philosopher, social psychologist, psychoanalyst, a representative of the Frankfurt School, one of the founders of neo-Freudianism and freydo-Marksizm.

Erich Fromm was born in a family of orthodox Jews. His mother, Rose Fromm, nee Krause, was the daughter of a rabbi, who emigrated from Russia. Father, Erich Fromm Naftali, was also the son and grandson of rabbis, and while engaged in trade, preserved and maintained the family in orthodox religious traditions.

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In the News (from Slon): “Only five percent of the vote separated Scotland from independence; meaning, that almost half the population wants to secede from the United Kingdom.

“The right-wing party in Sweden has doubled the number of seats in the parliament: the economy is growing, but the standard of living – not; the standard of living of the middle class around the world after the crisis of 2008 has fallen.

“Society intuitively feels that the welfare of the rich multiplies, and middle-class income decreases. As a consequence, nationalist sentiments are growing around the world. The right-wing parties have become the leading parties in Poland, Spain, Germany, Bulgaria and Lithuania. In Ukraine, national independence is on the rise. In Spain, the Catalan separatists were granted the power to call a secession referendum.

“All the efforts of politicians of the 21^st century, aimed at political and economic alliances, can be broken against a simple ordinary person’s question: why is my life not getting better? Separatist sentiments and the growing influence of the ultra-right is just the beginning of the crisis of the world order.

“Further population growth and life expectancy with simultaneous reduction of resources will only make matters worse. If the political elites do not reconsider the distribution of wealth in society, then tension will bring about their painful shift.”

My Comment: The solution is only in achieving a reasonable standard of living, moreover, one equal for everyone. This is possible only after active integral education and upbringing for everyone. Humanity must become different: unified and global. Otherwise, it will not survive in our present limited planetary conditions.

Excuses like “there is enough for our lifetime” are not correct, because the crisis breaks out much earlier than resources run out and begins to emerge from the incongruity between humankind and the new future conditions that are automatically supported in the still, vegetative, and animate levels of nature. According to Kabbalah, we are more than a hundred years behind in our development relative to our next state.
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In the News (from International Business Times): “The world faces a global job crisis if the current employment growth trajectory continues, according to a joint report from the World Bank, the International Labour Organisation and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

“The organisations said there will need to be 600 million extra jobs created across the world by 2030 to cope with expanding populations, and there will be not be enough quality jobs.

“’There’s little doubt there is a global jobs crisis,’ said Nigel Twose, the World Bank’s senior director for jobs. …

“The weak labour market performance is also threatening economic recovery because it is constraining both consumption and investment, with more than 100 million people still unemployed in the G20 economies and 447 million ‘working poor’ living on less than $2 a day in emerging G20 economies.”

My Comment: The solution is not to create jobs. Unemployment will continue to grow with the development of new technologies. Working “in vain” means depleting resources only to occupy people. In the long term, no more than 2-3% of the population will be engaged in work in order to provide for the world’s population with everything necessary.

The solution is to include everyone in integral education, and then, to the extent of its assimilation, changing the social structure to a society of rational consumption.
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Opinion (Umair Haque, London-based consultant and author, Director of Havas Media Labs):

• “Immiseration. Marx claimed that capitalism would immiserate workers: he meant that labor would be ‘exploited’ — not just in a purely ethical sense, but in a narrower economic one: that real wages would fall, and working conditions would deteriorate. How was Marx doing on this score? I’d say middlingly: wages in many advanced economies — notably, the most purely capitalist in a financialized sense — have failed to keep pace with productivity; not for years, but for decades. (America’s median wage has been stagnant for roughly 40 years.) In macro terms, labor’s share of income has plummeted, while the lion’s share of growth has accrued to those at the very top.
• “Crisis. As workers were paid less and less, capitalism would be prone to chronic, perpetual crises of overproduction — for they wouldn’t have the means to purchase or invest in enough goods to keep the economy humming. As Marx put it, there was likely to be ‘poverty in the midst of plenty.’ …
• “Stagnation. Here’s Marx’s most controversial — and most curious — prediction. That as economies stagnated, real rates of profit would fall. How does this one hold up? On first glance, it seems to have been totally discredited: corporate profits have broken through the roof and into the stratosphere. But think about it again, in economic terms: Marx’s prediction concerned ‘real profit,’ not just the mystery-meat numbers served up by bean counters, and chewed over with gusto by ‘analysts.’ …
• “Alienation. As workers were divorced from the output of their labor, Marx claimed, their sense of self-determination dwindled, alienating them from a sense of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. How’s Marx doing on this score? I’d say quite well: even the most self-proclaimed humane modern workplaces, for all their creature comforts, are bastions of bone-crushing tedium and soul-sucking mediocrity, filled with dreary meetings, dismal tasks, and pointless objectives that are well, just a little bit alienating. …
• “Commodity fetishism. A fetishized object is one which is more than a symbol: it’s believed to have actually the power the symbol represents (like an idol, or a totem with magical properties). Marx claimed that under industrial age capitalism’s rules, commodities became revered talismans, worshipped through transactional exchanges, imbued with mystical powers that give them inherent value — and obscuring the value of and in the very people who’ve worked labored over them in the first place. It’s one of Marx’s most subtle and nuanced concepts. Does it hold water? Again, I’ll merely pointing to societies in furious pursuit of more, bigger, faster, cheaper, nastier, now, whether it’s the retail temples of America’s mega-malls, or London rioters stealing, not bread, but video games.”

My Comment: Marx was right in the fact that he believed that only human education and upbringing would lead a person to the transformation of the capitalist system into a true socialist, and if it happens violently, by external pressure (a revolution), and not by the freewill of the corrected people, there will be a German or Soviet-style Nazism.
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Opinion (Michael Khazin, economist): “Processes follow global trends and are against them. From the 1990s to 2005, has been a global trend in increasing globalization, but regional integration processes went against it, and it was very difficult and expensive to maintain them.

“Since 2008, a mechanism to stimulate demand through emission, the issue of the dollar, stopped working, and it remains either to endure the fall of living standards, or to change the mechanism for maintaining demand with the dollar issue for regional emission centers.

“The end of capitalism is ahead, which Europe and the USA are not willing to admit. Regional integration has become a global trend. Globalization is crumbling. Everything will be decided in the framework of regional integration processes.”

My Comment: Everything will be solved only through connection in circles. Let it be called regional integration. Gradually, its borders will expand to cover the whole world.
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Opinion (Karlheinz Ruckriegel, happiness researcher at the Georg-Simon-Ohm Hochschule, University of Applied Arts in Nuremberg): “There, where people go through the daily struggle to survive, they are unlikely to be fully satisfied with their lives. They have a direct relationship between income and satisfaction. They say that happiness is not money, but in its quantity.

“However, starting from the GDP per capita of 10 thousand dollars a year, this dependence weakens and after 20,000 is lost completely. Previously, workers simply worked hard from start to finish, got paid and did not require anything else.

“Today, what is important is self-realization, to be engaged in interesting matters. In work, people seek success, friendship, recognition, projects with future and opportunities to reveal their talents. In general, gross domestic product is not an indicator of public satisfaction.

“The greater the social inequality, the less happy its citizens are. This is particularly evident when already at birth, people have unequal chances, and throughout their lifetime, they cannot change this situation. This affects both objective indicators, such as life expectancy and health.

“The level of well-being is effected by social contacts, active participation in public life, work that brings satisfaction, benevolence, health and inner freedom.

“The theses of the science of happiness are no longer controversial, but scientifically proven.”

My Comment: Our egoism is growing and requiring greater qualitative fulfillment. So today more than ever, people are very seriously studying the sources of happiness.
[138633]

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In the News (from VOX): “The link between higher national income and higher national life satisfaction is critical to economic policy making. There is a clear, positive relation in the poorer nations and regions, but it flattens out at around $30,000–$35,000, and then turns negative.”

My Comment: Many similar studies have been conducted out today and they all come to the same conclusion. Kabbalah says the same things: A person needs rational satisfaction of his bodily needs (his animal level), and all other contentment (of the soul) he should receive only from revelation of the Creator.
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In the News (from ABC Net): “In a commentary piece in this week’s Nature, Dr Robert Costanza, chair in Public Policy at ANU, and his colleagues argue that GDP should be replaced with a more sophisticated metric that represents a more comprehensive account of a nation’s economic well-being. …

“Whatever you think it is that makes life worth living, as Robert F Kennedy pointed out in 1968, it’s almost a sure bet that it isn’t measured by Gross Domestic Product, or GDP.

GDP simply measures a nation’s raw economic activity in terms of production and consumption. It makes no attempt to factor in the depletion of natural resources or the degradation of the environment. It cares not for income inequality and all the ills that come with it. It doesn’t pretend to discriminate between beneficial economic activity (new infrastructure, investment in education, disease prevention, etc) and negative activity (the cost of crime, pollution, etc). And it entirely ignores whole swathes of fruitful activity, such as housework or volunteering in the community.

“One sign of how destitute GDP is as a metric of well-being is that it tends to go up after a natural disaster. Reconstruction and remediation spur intense activity that is registered by GDP, while the destruction, lives lost, suffering and disruption to families and communities in the wake of a flood, cyclone or bushfire are ignored.

“One of the frontrunners to replace GDP is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). It was proposed in 1989 and has been developed since to accurately measure not just economic activity, but also how that activity impacts the well-being of individuals living in that economy, and how sustainable that activity is.

“It effectively uses GDP as its foundation, but then scrutinizes economic activity in more detail, making subtractions for negative activity and adding in beneficial activity that is overlooked by GDP. …

“It also factors in the environment, in terms of the cost of pollution, the loss of wetlands and farmland, the depletion of natural resources and the emission of carbon dioxide. It also takes account of the cost of crime, not only in terms of direct impacts, but also the cost of policing, prisons and even the amount of money spent on locks and alarms.

“GPI isn’t the only alternative to GDP, but it is one of the most respected by economists and public policy experts around the world. The question now is: what’s stopping us from adopting it?

“’It’s going to take some therapy to make the transition to a sustainable economy that isn’t based on growth or GDP but on improvement of well-being,’ Costanza said.

“While the unbridled pursuit of GDP growth has not done much to increase our well-being over the past few decades, it has been a triumph for big business and the finance sector, i.e. those who disproportionately benefit from raw economic activity. Not surprisingly, as a result of this windfall, these sectors – and the politicians who serve them – are likely to resist any move to a more comprehensive metric of national economic well-being.”

My Comment: No matter what is measured or how what is important is the principle, the purpose of development, for what? It is necessary to curb appetites, take from nature only what is needed, and use our free time to re-educate humanity. Otherwise, we are heading to a looming confrontation with nature, which will be reflected in all aspects of our life.

Usually people understand nature of the world around us at the levels of the still, vegetative, and animate, and exclude ourselves from this definition. This is our fault; after all, we are also under the control of nature and under its laws. We use these laws erroneously, harm ourselves, and use the intelligence that was given to us against ourselves. Kabbalah warns of the impending retribution for our disregard of nature.
[138155]

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In the News (from PostScriptum): “During the last decade, the elite cell in the American Treasury honed tools of economic warfare, with which it is possible to bring to its knees almost any country in the world – without firing a shot.

“The strategy is based on the hegemony in the global banking system, supported by a network of allies. This is a new kind of war, which aims to stop the financial flows of the enemy.

“At the moment, when the bank falls under its action, when it is accused of money laundering or financial terrorism, it becomes caught in a deadly embrace. This is the death penalty, even if the financial institution does not work on the US territory. European banks do not dare to argue with US regulators. They would sever all the transactions with the victim.

“Nauru, Burma, North Cyprus, Latvia and Belarus were forced to obey the American demands. North Korea was paralyzed. But today the world is too interconnected, and sanctions may generate a chain reaction.”

My Comment: Today, the United States dominates the world, and that is why China, the EU, and Russia want so much to raise their currencies to the world level. But the US will not allow this to happen by any means. A great financial war is ahead. This will bring us to the awareness of globality, negative globality, from which we will have to move to positive globality, because we cannot change globality itself. There is no turning back in history and evolution.
[137147]

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Question: Why is the power of connection very successful sometimes and sometimes not? For example, in the United States, the unity of many states led to the creation of a very strong nation, whereas unity in Europe didn’t bring success.

Answer: In Europe the destructive power of Babylon, the confusion and mixture of various languages, is active.

Question: How can we be sure that the power of connection that we are creating will not make the situation worse?

Answer: This depends upon whether we are in a period in which it is possible to freely disseminate the wisdom of Kabbalah and the knowledge about the correction of the world . Have we reached this time or not? For us this question does not exist because  this was written by a great Kabbalist.

Question: Has the whole world, in all of its strata, in all of its forms, already become ripe for accepting this method and realizing it effectively?

Answer: The world is ready to the extent it feels the crisis: either in children’s education, in the family, in unemployment and in work, in social relationships, or the general economic crisis.

Question: The crisis in Europe has already been felt and they are trying to stop it. These attempts have already continued for a number of years but without any success.

Answer: They will never be ready to do it themselves. Somehow it seems to us that if we wait, then people will be able to get the correct knowledge from their lives and suddenly become wiser, receive the desire, and understand it themselves. But this will never happen. They won’t understand anything by themselves.

From their receiving a few more blows, they will not become better and wiser; on the contrary, they will be more stubborn and worse off. Only through our joint activities with them and through our method will it be possible to correct the situation.
[136880]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/08/14, Writings of Baal HaSulam

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