GREED THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL

By FIDELIS SUKINA

Greed is a sign of vanity and leads to evil, people who greed too much have consequences, has anyone heard of the saying money is the root of all evil? Well to be précises we associate money with greed and perhaps both of them combined, are the root of all evil in modern day society.

When you are at the peak of your life with a senior position in the public sector you have a car, money a house and almost everything a middle class Papua New Guinean would have, you would consider yourself set for life, but wait! What if someone would offer you a bribe or an “incentive” like some would put, and to which you consider it for once, and being in a position of power you go ahead and do what the law of this land says is unjust, and you approve of the venture outside of proper protocol.

That’s greed right there and if you keep on doing it for the sake of getting more money than that is wrong. Like the saying goes man cannot satisfy its greed.

Who in their right mind would go against the fact that violence and crime is all a product of greed for money and power?

Let’s have a simple look at society, the parliamentary leader once a middle class person now a big shot in power, well some might say he invested well and so saw his money grow,

Well ok that’s a good answer who am I to judge, but let’s just say he was corrupt so as to use him in this essay, 

As he keeps feeding his greed and becomes filthy stinking rich, he suffers others, in life when you take something that is not yours and use it. What happens to where it was supposed to be?

Just take a minute and think of a few scenarios that would include the misuse of money,

I would offer a small instance, take this into account a small donation of K10, 000 for the much needed two week book keeping course is diverted somehow and it gets into the pockets of some big senior public servant.

Just imagine the people who would have been educated with that money, they would have been empowered to have better control of the little money they had and probably this time use it wisely, but the greedy person  had  to take it.

 There are two things that would happen, one the people would retaliate or two they do nothing.

So much so, for every action there is a reaction, so people end up doing nothing about it because that’s what most Papua New Guineans do,

So greed wins and people are still unequipped with basic skills, and can’t work on their own, so they resort to stealing and violence and whose fault was it?

It was greed. If participants had sat for the course they would probably have had the chance to reflect on life and start thinking about living life without fear from being caught, staying away from a life of crime, living a good life.

Society is a network of people who actually interact with each other; peace cannot come to everyone if the thought of helping others is not with each individual in society, there is someone out there suffering from the greed of others, are you not?

What happens to people who are greedy? They feel guilty, because as human beings that we are aware of emotion and action, we know when a person is greedy, oh yes word and gossip spreads out fast,

When society is robbed of funding for education and awareness we suffer big time, like the saying if you educate a nation you empower it to know the right path to follow.

People are robbing, begging and causing violence because they lack the education to take control of their lives, greed makes people take what is rightfully for others and deprives them of peace and harmony.

In the past there was no money people didn’t earn money to buy food they worked the soil to feed themselves, people traded food the barter system was strong, people knew each other, they knew their languages their ways and showed respect to each other, because they knew to trade you had to know and accept who you were trading with.

But compared to that now we are all working for money which is the new commodity accepted by everyone in society, for survival we need money, people who greed keep more of the commodity and that leaves less for others.

Just like in the past if you had nothing to trade you had to survive somehow, so that’s what’s happening now, people steal because of unequal distribution of wealth.

Even the educated become criminals because the trend is ongoing and interns and apprentices learn the art from their predecessors especially in the public sector

A hostile place it is to be Papua New Guinea, they say patriotism and nationalism lacks in most of society, well what did everyone expect? If you are poor and not earning a stable income why care for the country but your livelihood and that of your family.

What internet skeptics and so called “arm chair” researchers provide is astounding, a world view of PNG that as an educated person would see is totally demoralizing, but some are reliable like the United Nations, some things noticeable are low literacy, high rates of human rights abuse, domestic violence “rascolisim” ,poor human capital, and the list goes on,

I say the root of all this is greed; greed for power, greed for money,

Harmony and peace is something that we cannot reach unless we help each other, there is no measure of perfection, there is no perfect peaceful harmonious place,

But if we provide opportunities for poor and educate people on life skills, and perhaps bring power and water back to villages, provide a market for goods and perhaps we would defiantly be lifting the low statistics

I think settlements need to be turned into suburbs people given land titles, if the government wishes, we cannot stop rural to urban drift unless all other provinces in Papua New Guinea can provide job opportunities and better living standards than the rate of rural to urban drift would fall.

We don’t expect to see people loitering around and lurking for an opportunity to steal, we should be creating jobs for them and empowering them. 

People who are happy with their lives are happy and peaceful that’s something we need to understand a happy nation is a productive nation.