Something even Osama Bin Laden couldn’t resist!
Why spend your life hopping from cave to cave when you could prosecute your atrocities from a much more comfortable location?... is a thought that must have crossed OBL’s mind countless times. And indeed much to our collective surprise he was finally captured at his $1,5 million mansion ( Yes you heard right $1.5 M-I-L-L-I-O-N ) in a high brow area of Ottaba , Pakistan.
But really, should we have been so surprised? Recent history has taught us that War Lords have a penchant for luxury living. Besides, we all know that hardship can be rather tiresome… and let’s face it, notoriously difficult to sustain if you have options.
The truth is human beings are hard wired to seek comfort and protection from the minute we’re born . It is necessary for the survival of the species. Yet somehow somewhere along the line the message has been skewed and we have been enjoined to embrace poverty.
A life led with a taint of poverty is upheld as clean wholesome living and anybody that aspires or who may even consider any other form of existence is deemed somehow not to be morally upright. Yet Poverty is antithesis to survival. Wikipedia defines poverty as a lack of basic human needs such as clean and fresh water, nutrition, healthcare, education, clothing and shelter. This is the extreme version usually found in underdeveloped countries and understood clearly as such. But then there is also the more pervasive ‘relative poverty’ defined as a condition of having fewer resources or less income than others within the society. While this is more prevalent in developed countries, it is not so obviously visible, so not understood as clearly, but equally debilitating. The fall out is bad housing, poor diet acute mental and physical health stress and shorter life expectancy – Not a good model for survival.
And there my friends lies the conundrum. To suffer or not to suffer - that is the question?
Short bouts of suffering may sharpen the intellect but a continuum of suffering will eventually dull it. Poverty does that! Therefore in order to be able to think and act effectively we have to be removed from the constraints associated with poverty. This is why the Pope lives in a palace and why our religious leaders fly first class… (Yes even Mother Theresa). Luxury is our attempt to separate ourselves from Thomas Hobbes description of the human condition when he said “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Luxury is not to be confused with excess and all the negative baggage that excess brings (imoderation, unrestraint, overindulgence…). Luxury is simply not just a matter of more is more! Luxury means an attention to detail and an improvement or refinement of the existing to create a better object.
We naturally gravitate towards luxury because as human beings we are programmed to continuously look for ways to improve the human condition, that is why the best among us never settle for our lot and always aspire to do more and be more.
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