Less Pride and Greed, More Humility and Charity

Dr. Will Tuttle

The month of June has been designated Pride Month by the powers that be. It goes without saying that it is essential that our gay brothers and sisters be fully included and protected in our society, and that the pride movement has been helpful in raising awareness about this issue, to help ensure that gay rights are fully protected, as indeed they must be. Nevertheless, words have power, and extolling pride as a virtue to be celebrated seems problematic in the bigger picture. Our compassion can be weaponized against us to serve the nefarious agendas of the plutocrats who control governments and media narratives. It behooves us to question everything, and to make diligent efforts to understand what is actually going on behind the deceptive facades erected on pretexts of caring.

These agendas are designed to make us much more easily controllable and exploitable. We live in an empire of lies, and are surrounded by sophistry. We can see this more clearly as we engage in the difficult process of freeing ourselves from the official narratives that promote unquestioning obedience to authorities. These narratives aim to instill in us a mentality of naïve gullibility, and are reinforced by our educational and governmental systems, and by the media.

Using the pretext of caring about gay people, the globalist plutocrats are now inundating us with messages promoting pride. What is pride, exactly? In terms of psychological and spiritual health, it is one of the most harmful poisons, and yet it is being celebrated as a virtue. A hallmark of sociopathic forces is the tactic of reversal, of turning things on their head in order to confuse and dominate others. The more we can be corrupted to abandon spiritual values such as humility, integrity, and self-reliance, the more easily we can be controlled.

It is foundational to all spiritual teachings that we make an effort to purify our actions by reducing egocentricity and cultivating genuine kindness for others, summed in the universal teaching of The Golden Rule. In keeping with this, there are Seven Deadly Sins in the Christian tradition, the first and most harmful of which is pride. The other six are greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth. The way things are going, perhaps before long we’ll have a Gluttony Month and a Sloth Month as well because these poisons, like pride and all the rest, are relentlessly promoted. Why? They boost profits and weaken us socially, ethically, and psychologically so we are more easily exploited.

Exploring these seven poisons and their brazen promotion by the wealthy ruling class that controls government and media narratives, we begin with pride. What is it about pride that makes it particularly harmful? For one thing, it makes us unteachable. With pride, we close our minds and hearts. We are typically conditioned from childhood to be proud of being recognized for our accomplishments, but this tends to disconnect us from genuine self-respect that is not based on pleasing others. Pride also promotes a tendency in us to discount or disconnect from the harm we cause others. We are all born and raised in a culture that imprisons, sexually abuses, and kills millions of animals on a daily basis, and the underlying legitimization for this toxic violence is that we are superior to animals and nature, so we can own them and do with them whatever we like. We are superior and they are inferior, says the narrative in which we are embedded from birth. Their suffering at our hands is deemed inconsequential. Ask cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals what they think about human pride. There is no more destructive force in our world than this, and yet our culture celebrates this pride in an ongoing orgy of wasting animals, ecosystems, and each other.

This is the hidden fury driving our diseases, wars, and unhappiness. Pride goeth before a fall, for a reason. If we study the ancient Greek tragedies, where the tragic hero always suffers a fall, we see that it is due to his own character defects, which are mainly two: hubris and obtuseness. Hubris is the overweening pride that distorts perception, and leads to obtuseness, the inability to understand the truth of a situation. We see it today playing out as toxic gullibility, as many of us comply with, and fail to question, medical, political, and food agendas that turn us from sovereign and creative individuals into consumers, and into mere livestock to be exploited.

The same is true of the other deadly sins. All are promoted and celebrated in our corporate-driven media and culture. Looking at the second one, greed, it is obvious that those who are the most honored and respected in our society are those with the most greed. It is those with extreme wealth whose wasteful lives are not only emulated, but who have been able to turn their wealth into power, and who control not just our governments but every institution in our culture, for their own benefit. The agendas being promoted by these plutocrats through their organizations such as the World Economic Forum, the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and so forth, seek to concentrate and centralize power in the hands of a few. If allowed to continue unchecked, this rule by the greediest among us will reflect the same tyranny which we relentlessly inflict on livestock animals. The entire foundation of our society—consumerism—is based on greed, and the delusion that greed will bring us happiness, and that those who consume the most conspicuously are worthy to enjoy the highest status.

The third deadly sin is lust. We have billion-dollar industries promoting adornments, beauty products, fashions, films, music, and other products that promote harmful lust in our population. Sex is used to sell virtually everything, from cars and tools to clothes and food. Women are sexualized as objects to be used, and it is getting so extremely perverse now that even children are being sexualized. Lust turns beings into things. The lust for flesh turns cows into burgers, and turns other human beings into objects to be used for one’s own pleasure and gain. This is a sure foundation for suffering and misery that never ends.

The fourth and fifth deadly sins are envy and gluttony, and it is obvious that our society celebrates and promotes these as well. Envy is weaponized as a force to boost profits by propelling us to buy more, consume more, and always be comparing ourselves to others, and competing with them not just in amount and quality of our possessions, but in the image—the mask—that we project into the world, and the addictive yearning for approval from others to validate our worth. In a similar way, gluttony has perversely become a virtue in our consumerist culture, and consuming to excess is seen as a mark of success, and as a right that can never be questioned or criticized. We have armies of scientists working to create addictive tastes and textures in food to compel us to overeat, and similar legions of advertising companies urging us to be proud of our over-consumption and of our obesity. With gluttony, we not only exploit; we are also being exploited.

The final two vices, anger and sloth, are also blatantly promoted in our society, and are reinforced by the other five. Anger is an energy of exclusion and reinforces our sense of separateness from others, and is also, like all of these poisons, harmful to our overall physical and psychological health. We are encouraged to cultivate anger against enemy nations and leaders, and against those we are told are dangerous and other, such as those of different political views or vaccine status, and we are encouraged to censor and cancel them. Identity politics thrives on self-righteous anger, and on the culturally-promoted notion that we have the right to be righteously offended by what other people say or do. This is the opposite of cultivating understanding, respect, patience, and awareness, and feeds right into the globalist agenda of the few dominating the many by dividing them and promoting conflicts within society.

The entirety of our technological culture is based on encouraging sloth, with the primary appeal of scientific orthodoxy being that we can be more comfortable and secure and save work by using all kinds of machines and devices that allow us do more sitting, relaxing, and self-indulgent consuming. President John Kennedy appealed to citizens back in the early 1960s to cultivate vigor and decried what he saw as a terrible encroaching softness in the American people, challenging everyone to get in sufficient shape to be able to successfully complete a 50-mile march. In the sixty intervening years, our sloth and obesity have both increased dramatically, unfortunately, and it is not just physical sloth, but more insidiously, intellectual laziness as well. This manifests as the devastating toxic gullibility that is rampant in our world today, with vast swathes of our population blindly accepting, without vigorous questioning, whatever narratives and mandates are proclaimed by the technocratic establishment. Even if it means unparalleled losses of freedom and basic human rights, we find there is a well-cultivated inability to make the necessary efforts needed to protect our human dignity and sovereignty, and assure them for our children.

The only solution to the massive web of problems facing us today is to awaken out of the cultural trance that erodes our spiritual strength and purpose, and make the necessary efforts to bring our lives into alignment with the ancient wisdom teachings that promote authentic spirituality. The essence of these teachings is The Golden Rule, and this in itself, if diligently practiced in a way that includes all living beings within the sphere of our concern, would help us enormously. We are being bombarded from birth by viciously anti-spiritual and anti-ethical messaging and narratives, and these erode our health, freedom, and wisdom. We are called to proactively counteract these dark forces with our full awareness, and to recognize them clearly and name them, because unmasking them and seeing them takes away their power. These harmful vices often hide behind deceptive facades that trick us into embracing them.

The Seven Heavenly Virtues

Additionally, we are called to proactively cultivate their opposites, and we can start by nurturing, within our actions, speech, and thoughts, what are called the Seven Heavenly Virtues. These help to raise our consciousness to a higher level where the Seven Deadly Sins, which spew perpetually from our cultural programming, have no hold on us. As part of this, it is essential to stop consuming films, television and radio, as well as corporate outlets such as the Washington Post, New York Times, and other toxic media, and to reconnect with our inner discriminating awareness wisdom.

The seven virtues, corresponding to and liberating us from the seven sins, are humility, charity, chastity, gratitude, patience, temperance, and diligence. Humility opens our heart to the beauty of others and of nature, and to an abiding sense of respect for all expressions of life. We realize that we can learn, grow, and improve the quality of our consciousness by making genuine efforts, and this can gradually liberate us from the miserable prison of pride.

Likewise, practicing charity and generosity naturally heals the tendencies toward greed, opening our heart to the joy of helping others. Chastity liberates us from the cultural indoctrination to narrow our view of ourselves and others to satisfy cravings that are constantly being stimulated by the media. We learn to establish our consciousness at the level where we recognize and value others as complete beings worthy of respect and kindness.

Gratitude is pure gold, dissolving the corrosive delusion of desiring what others have, and the misery of comparing and judging. Cultivating gratitude, we appreciate the countless small beauties that surround us, and develop our capacity to savor the immense richness, abundance, and potentialities of our brief and precious human life.

Patience arises out of compassion and understanding, dissolving anger, frustration, and ill-will, and bringing peace and harmony into our mind and into our relationships with others. Practicing temperance, we realize that consuming outer experiences never brings fulfillment, and as we free ourselves from the yearning to impress and accumulate, temperance naturally arises in us, without effort. It is nothing to be proud of. With awareness, we have no more desire to over-consume drink or harmful food than we would to put our hand on a hot stove burner. We see clearly it is nothing but causing suffering to ourselves and others.

Finally, diligence is the outer manifestation of connecting with our spiritual purpose in this lifetime. As we reconnect, through practicing these virtues, with the unique mission that is ours to fulfill during this valuable time on Earth, we are naturally filled with enthusiasm and vitality. We are inspired to do our best to unfold our potentialities so that we can contribute our particular melody to the great song of awakening and healing that is growing and singing within the heart of humanity.

These spiritual practices of cultivating the healthy qualities that open doorways to peace, compassion, and wisdom, and firmly rejecting the delusory poisons that cause addiction, misery, and unnecessary suffering, are not unique to Christianity. Virtually all religions and wisdom traditions emphasize the importance of this type of purification practice. In the Buddhist tradition, for example, there is the recognition that our minds are harmed by what are referred to as the Five Poisons: ignorance, anger, greed, pride, and envy. The effort is made, through right living, mindfulness, and meditation, to transform these Five Poisons into the Five Wisdoms. Ignorance is transformed into the Wisdom of All-Encompassing Space, anger into the Great Mirror Wisdom, greed into the Discriminating Awareness Wisdom, pride into the Wisdom of Equanimity, and envy into the Wisdom of All-Accomplishing Action.

We are here on this Earth during this challenging time to help, each in our unique way, to liberate human consciousness from the deceptions and delusions that cause us to destroy ecosystems, exploit animals, and abuse each other. The dark forces of oppression are suppressing and perverting authentic religious teachings, and are attempting to make science and technology the new religion. This scientism offers no ethical guidance, and can be easily used to justify the exploitation of the weak by the strong, and to centralize power into the hands of a few. It is time to reconnect with the spiritual clarity that shines in our hearts, and in the teachings of the world’s wisdom traditions, and be part of the awakening of human consciousness, for the benefit of all. No effort we make is ever lost.

While we may not have control over the actions of others and of society itself, we always have control over the quality of our responses to these actions. This is indeed an enormously liberating and transformational power. Authentic freedom dawns when we take responsibility for the quality of our consciousness and of our relationships. If we are negligent, the cultural poisons will insinuate into us and enslave us. With humility and patience, we can diligently cleanse the deceptive cultural poisons from our minds and actions. This protects and blesses not just ourselves but also our children and the future generations of all living beings.

We can be grateful for this opportunity, and leave the pride out of it.