All of humankind's wealth is blood money.

[PowerToThePeople]

All that we 'have' is build off of death and abuse of weaker people. This is the history of man-kind. (there still may be a few pockets of indigenous people where this is not so)

We all need to accept this fact. We all need to think on this fact. In the end we all need to divorce ourselves from this and start a new history of mankind. One where we help the least among us instead of abuse them for personal gain. One where we do not kill another for gain. One where we wash off the stain that is our present and past economic systems based on abusing those less powerful than ourselves.


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EDIT

My point being - there is so much talk about wealth, inequality, etc. It is a primary topic of this board and the world as a whole. We need to remember that this wealth is all built on the blood and lives of the unwilling. We were not the "superstar" who created our own wealth free and clear of these abuses. It doesn't not belong to us. It belongs to those who paid the price for it.

[NoPasaran]

1. Heavy

Have you ever looked at your hands?

I mean, really looked at 'em?

[PowerToThePeople]

2. does coffee make one do that?

[rrneck]

3. Another axial age?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age
Characteristics of the Axial Age
Jaspers argued that the Axial Age gave birth to philosophy as a discipline.

Jaspers described the Axial Age as "an interregnum between two ages of great empire, a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness".[11] To the extent that the Axial Age represents an in-between period, a period where old certainties had lost their validity and where new ones were still not ready, it has also been suggested that the Axial Age can be considered a historically liminal period.[12]Jaspers was particularly interested in the similarities in circumstance and thought of the Age's figures. These similarities included an engagement in the quest for human meaning[13] and the rise of a new elite class of religious leaders and thinkers in China, India and the Occident.[14] The three regions all gave birth to, and then institutionalized, a tradition of travelling scholars, who roamed from city to city to exchange ideas. After the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period, Taoism and Confucianism emerged in China. In other regions, the scholars were largely from extant religious traditions; in India, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism; in Persia, the religion of Zoroaster; in Canaan, Judaism; and in Greece, sophism and other classical philosophy.

Jaspers argues that these characteristics appeared under similar political circumstances: China, India and the Occident each comprised multiple small states engaged in internal and external struggles.

Anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out that "the core period of Jasper's Axial age [...] corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented. What's more, the three parts of the world where coins were first invented were also the very parts of the world where those sages lived; in fact, they became the epicenters of Axial Age religious and philosophical creativity."[15] Drawing on the work of classicist Richard Seaford and literary theorist Marc Shell on the relation between coinage and early Greek thought, Graeber argues that an understanding of the rise of markets is necessary to grasp the context in which the religious and philosophical insights of the Axial age arose. The ultimate effect of the introduction of coinage was, he argues, an "ideal division of spheres of human activity that endures to this day: on the one hand the market, on the other, religion."[15]

[factsarenotfair]

4. Some of my ancestors were slaveowners.

I'm sure that further back in history there were also many more examples of profiting from the exploitation or extermination of others. (I'm not wealthy but I do have some assets.)

[PowerToThePeople]

5. a little afternoon