Your Lying Eyes

"Who are you going to believe -- me, or your lying eyes?"

-Groucho Marx

"Any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth,
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth."

-Rush, Subdivisions

"This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult--once we truly understand and accept it--then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters."

-F. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

So let's start with a basic and undeniable set of premises:

1.  There is a limited amount of wealth in the world; and
2.  There is an ever-expanding number of people in the world to possess that wealth.

Then you come to an undeniable set of conclusions:

1.  Those who do not have wealth will have to acquire it from those who do; and
2.  Those who have wealth will seek to aggrandize and protect it from those who do not.

It is game theory.  Call it the unattractive truth.  And the rest is just mythology, a fancy and fanciful lie.  All of the other ideologies and sloganeering theories and economic models and governmental systems are just noise, something to distract you from what is right there for all to see.  All of the slogans and values and capitalisms and communisms and "self-made men" and economic systems are just a clear bright shining lie.  There are those who have.  And then there are those who have not.  And they will inevitably, forever be in conflict.  Just accept it.

Because once you have accepted this truth, then you can appreciate the difficulty presented to you in your situation:  If you don't have wealth, and you desire it, you must come up with a way to accumulate it, and your time is limited to just this life time.  You see, most of the wealthy weren't limited to just this lifetime to accumulate it because they made it the old fashioned way, they inherited it.

And once you have accepted this truth, you are better prepared to deal with it.  You can see through all of the ideologies and sloganeering theories with economic models and "self-made" men inheriting sunshine and better living nonsense.  You are better prepared to deal with it, instead of wasting your life laboring, as did Sisyphus, pushing a rock up a hill incessantly, thinking that just one more time ought to do it, only to see then the false summit, and yet another hill behind it, and yet another rock to push.

And once you have accepted this truth, you can transcend it.  Wait one second.  "How do I transcend it?," you may ask.  How do I go about undoing this game board that has been put in place for millenia or longer, and that is reinforced not just by laws, governmental and extra-governmental institutions, but by all of those who still believe the lie, who still buy into the mythology, who will remain forever locked in their Sysiphean struggle?

And once you have answered that existential question, my friend, you are most of the way there.