The Corruption of the Soul: Greed and Ego

The Hunger That Devours the World

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…

Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin

Greed is not an inherent human trait—it is a response to repressed desires. The ego, shaped by both personal experience and societal structures, operates from an underlying fear of insufficiency. This fear does not arise naturally but is created through repression and social conditioning, ensuring that individuals feel never quite whole, never quite enough.

The Birth of Lack: From Wholeness to Fragmentation

In early life, before external pressures take hold, a child’s experience is fluid, exploratory, and unbounded. The world is a field of possibilities. But as societal norms begin to shape the individual, so too does the imposition of limits, expectations, and artificial hierarchies.

• Desire is no longer free-flowing—it is categorized into “acceptable” and “unacceptable.”
• Emotions must be suppressed to fit into predefined roles.
• The individual is taught that happiness, success, and fulfillment exist outside themselves—things to be earned, rather than states of being.

This process creates a fracture within the self—a growing sense that something is missing. Desire is forced into pre-approved channels. Instead of being expressed, it is redirected into accumulation, status-seeking, and control.

Greed as a Compensation for Repressed Desire

The more an individual internalizes that certain emotions, impulses, and desires are unacceptable, the more those desires mutate into other forms.

Hence Greed is a substitute for something suppressed. The ego, sensing an inner void, searches externally to fill it. But no amount of accumulation—whether wealth, status, power, or influence—ever truly satisfies it. A desire unfulfilled cannot be substituted; it mutates, feeding an endless cycle of grasping.

Greed, therefore, is not about possessing more—it is about the fear of having less. The hoarder, the tyrant, the billionaire all share the same existential anxiety: that without endless expansion, they will be nothing.

The Social Suppression and Redirection of Desire: “We Have a Greed, With Which We Have Agreed”

This dynamic does not just shape individuals—it is embedded into entire economic, political, and ideological systems. Greed is not simply encouraged; it is engineered through the suppression and redirection of natural human desire.

• Capitalism manufactures lack—convincing people that they must always buy, achieve, and consume more to compensate for an artificial sense of insufficiency.
• Authoritarianism channels personal insecurity into collective identity—framing conquest, hierarchy, and exclusion as necessary for survival.
• Religious fundamentalism suppresses desire while promising deferred fulfillment—offering obedience and sacrifice as the only acceptable path to wholeness.

In each case, the structure itself does not function by fulfilling desire, but by ensuring it remains perpetually unsatisfied—dangling the illusion of completion just beyond reach. Greed, then, is not an excess of wanting, but a consequence of desire being diverted away from its natural flow into systems that demand accumulation, hierarchy, and control.

From the Personal to the Political

The unfillable void of greed is not just an individual affliction—it is the foundation of entire systems. When personal fears of lack and unworthiness are amplified through political narratives, they manifest as the need for purity, exclusion, and control.

This is where fascism enters the equation. Fascism is the ego’s survival strategy writ large: instead of confronting internal contradiction, it externalizes it onto an enemy. The individual who fears their own incompleteness finds solace in a rigid collective identity, one that promises wholeness by defining itself against a corrupting “other.”

But this is a fantasy—a neurotic dream of returning to an imagined state of purity. And like all fantasies of total control, it is doomed to fail.

The Neurotic Dream: Fascism and the Rejection of Becoming-Other

Fascism is a desperate, pathological attempt to halt the process of differentiation.

• It seeks rigid borders, hierarchies, and purity—a frozen world where nothing changes.
• It denies contradiction and uncertainty, imposing an artificial order.
• But this very refusal guarantees collapse—because life is flux, and rigidity is death.

Fascism does not decay over time—it is built on decay, fueled by the very instability it seeks to suppress. It externalizes its corruption, inventing enemies to purge, yet the rot is always internal. The more it attempts to purify, the more unstable it becomes. The more it tries to dominate, the closer it comes to self-destruction.

Conclusion: The Forbidden Fruit

Eden was not lost to an outside corruption, but the moment human consciousness divided reality into absolutes. In Genesis, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil did not bring lies—it brought opposition. The serpent did not deceive Adam and Eve outright, but twisted the truth: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

In that instant, the human mind fractured reality into binaries—pure and impure, chosen and forsaken, superior and inferior.

Fascism is a manifestation of this same fracture—the delusion that purity can be restored through division, that order must defeat chaos rather than coexist with it. It is the political embodiment of a mindset that cannot accept contradiction, a mind that cannot integrate its own complexities and therefore projects its suffering onto an external enemy.

But the eternal battle is not one that can be won. It is not a struggle for total domination of order over chaos, or light over dark—it is about balance, about recognizing that both are necessary and that attempting to erase one only ensures destruction.

The question is not whether fascism will collapse—it always does. The question is whether we see the pattern in time to stop it from taking everything down with it.

This brings us to Apocalypse—not as an end, but as a revelation. It is the unveiling of the pattern itself: collapse as the inevitable return of what was denied, and the chance to finally see through the illusion of purity.

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