Greed has corrupted this world

Nowadays, we can easily see how the power of money can give us anything, whatever we want. Money rules our lives and can even decide whether a person lives or dies. This is the issue that Pound addresses in his Canto XLV.

Our society is obssessed with credit: houses are more beautifully decorated, cars become more and more luxurious and debts get bigger and bigger. People are not aware of the risks they take and yet still they sign the contracts and flash their cards wherever they are, whatever it is that they are paying for.



And we keep growing greedier and greedier. Credit knows no limits, and apparently neither do people. Never satisified with what we have, we constantly try to 'keep up with the Joneses', without realizing how rich we already are with the life we are living and the things we have. The best people we have ever known were never  greedy, they came not by Usura; they gave all they had, worked as much as they could for the sake of simplicity and humility. In the words of the African-American athlete, Arthur Ashe, "start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can".  


We keep working in jobs we hate to buy things we need not. Our daily lives do not revolve around what we can contribute to this society, but rather around what we think we need to have to become "better" people.

This way usura has corrupted every aspect of our lives, leaving us with corrupted leaders who work in our communities just for their own purposes, and not for the sake of their people. Wherever we are we can see greed and superficiality, extended to each and every single one of us: artists and their work seen through the eyes of a merchant, or the laws and all that seems logic against the rules of free market economies.

We are in charge of modeling humility and simplicity to the coming generations, so that, when their time to lead their communities comes, they work to move away from sufficing superficial 'needs' and to completely abolish practices such as usury, that only create more problems for some to live 'better', surrounded by unnecessary luxury.