OPINION (AN COLÚN): A time for the beautiful, the sacred & being kind

ONE of the reasons I like the Christmas season is the increased decency and kindness we see around us. True enough, some of it may be a sham, but at least we have the illusion for a short while that people are following the guiding light of their better natures. It's good to see more people being generally kinder in their dealings with one another.
The festive season is smothered beneath an awful lot of commercialism and hard-boiled capitalism, but beneath that hardened, ugly carapace, lies the beating, decent heart of Christianity inspiring us to be more warm-hearted, forgiving and patient. As we engage with the world it is pleasant indeed to experience this changed atmosphere in our societal environs. As I believe in a loving creator who created the universe, and as I believe in life after death, I like to look upon this period as being a foretaste of what paradise will be like.
Christmas can stand in stark contrast to people's behaviour during the rest of the year, time and again proving the truth of a quotation by one of my favourite writers (Hesse) who said we each, each one of us, carry within ourselves the divine spark (the Abraxas); but we frequently fail to connect with this divine spark, because we prefer the external world to our internal truth. Gravitating too much towards the outer, daily show of life we pivot away from our authenticity, a pivoting which, ironically, makes us lead unreal lives. “The true profession of a man,” wrote Hesse, “is to find his way to himself.” Christmas shows us that a great deal of our lives is spent in a state of spiritual blindness where our ears are dull, our eyes are closed and our hearts are hardened. Sometimes this spiritual blindness is of our own choosing, sometimes it is because of the excessive pressure of the world around us.
True manhood, I believe, lies in holding onto your inner authenticity while simultaneously navigating the difficult world around you.
In my own life, in my own thinking and outlook, I try and achieve a healthy balance between the negative and the positive; between the sceptical and the believing. Therefore, I know the crucial importance of a decent legal system binding people into certain ways of behaving, because when we look at history, from the ancient world right up to the present day, the depravity, greed and viciousness on display is appalling and terrifying; especially in our unhealthy relationship with money. It is always interesting to see people's attitude change when the subject of money is raised. The tone becomes more reverential, more serious. By contrast, when you mention the beautiful, the sacred, or God, you are often met with mockery. Like all invented things, money is simply a means to an end, a tool. We as a race should be masters of it, not the other way round. Unfortunately it's often the other way around.
Creative people, thinkers and dreamers have often grappled with, in their minds, the problem of money's malign influence and ways of overcoming it. People often deride such thinking as nonsense talk. However, we are constantly telling ourselves what an intelligent species we are. Surely we are not so very intelligent when we are still excessively burdened by this problem? Some thinkers talk about creating a Free Access Economy. In an FAE, all essential needs (food, housing, education) and even luxuries are freely available. Work would no longer be driven by the need for compensation. Instead, it would be motivated by personal fulfillment, community needs, or shared goals. In this enlightened society, the focus would be on managing Earth's resources efficiently for everyone's benefit, not profit. In such a world our wealth-based class divides, so often the source of bitter, ugly feeling, would be removed. We would dwell in a true democracy where human life is given its proper value. With the end of money would come the end of poverty and corruption. War, with the loss of its self-aggrandising allure, would seem a pointless exercise.
The Donegal writer Mark Boyle wrote a well-received book called “The Moneyless Man” in 2010. Inspired by Gandhi's story, Boyle lived off-grid and without money from 2008 to 2011. He now lives near Loughrea. I would not be able to live the ascetic and austere lifestyle which Boyle chose. He also has thoughts and opinions which I simply do not share. However, many of his thoughts I do agree with; wholeheartedly. In The Moneyless Man he rejects money and emphasises that true wealth is connection, self-sufficiency and community, not accumulation. “Poverty is a funny phenomenon,” he wrote. “It is always defined financially and always relative to what other people earn.” He also wrote: “Friendship, not money, is real security.”
Bearing all of this in mind, I was very interested to recently read Elon Musk's comments about a possible future world where advanced AI and robotics makes money and human labour a thing of the past. In Musk's vision, robots and advanced automation would do our work; and work for us would be optional, like a hobby. Perhaps his heart is in the right place? I don't know much about Musk, so I can't really say. However, I have a natural aversion to the world of oligarchs, billionaires and power which makes me instinctively suspicious of people like Musk. I could be wrong of course, but would take a lot of convincing. I greatly enjoy Science Fiction and I was interested to see that something like Musk's vision is replicated in the Star Trek universe. I've been enjoying “Star Trek: The Next Generation” recently and I was fascinated to learn that the story is set in a “post-scarcity” future where Earth and the Federation has abolished money because replicator technology provides all basic needs (food, shelter, goods), eliminating material want and shifting the focus to self-improvement and exploration.
It is interesting to also point out how far away Ireland is from such enlightened thinking. In Ireland we are plagued by housing and cost of living crises. We are living in a world where we seem to be caught in a capitalistic web which we cannot extricate ourselves from.