Where has the assertion of the virtue of profit led us? What does the evidence show? Where profit is the accepted norm, we inherit a world in which some are inordinately wealthy while the vast majority of human beings, when they can survive at all, live in squalor and misery, where children regularly die in their earliest years. The popular song of the Depression days of the 1930s epitomizes the situation:

“There’s nothing surer,

The rich get rich and the poor get poorer.”

What of the prospects of our world, of the human race, in a system where greed and self-seeking are the accepted attitudes for human beings? We see them everywhere – while the great majority of children and “the wretched of the Earth” (per author Franz Fanon in his book of that name) go without the basic necessities, endless billions of dollars are devoted to producing the means of extermination, including weapons of mass destruction, the ultimate method of obliterating humanity and wrecking our Planet. Great intelligence, skill and resources are applied to ruining rather than elevating humanity, endless wars are pursued in which the innocent suffer and die in multitudes. It is a true Hell on Earth, and it is the lot of the vast majority of the human race.

This situation is the embodiment of collective madness, the antithesis of reason, humanity and morality. It threatens even its perpetrators.Unless we, change course, we SHALL destroy both ourselves as a species, and the Earth that is our home.

Profit and the profit motive (i.e. our own gain at the expense of others) is not a virtue, it is a VICE. Unless we renounce it, and replace it with a system based on Humanity, it will spell the end of the human experience.