Rebater, Anthony Robert, F.

Ethics
BSE SS 1 8/21/23

As the saying goes, "Money is the root of all evil". We people tend to
think money is an evil element that bring people to greed, yet we people
are a bunch of hypocrites. Many will be mad at me and will be offended, yet
we do not realize the reason why we are becoming hypocrites when we say
the above-mentioned quote: blind consumerism and materialism.

Blind consumerism is the term used to define the ways how our
economic system relies on trends to work, such as posters of several stars
or putting the likenesses of someone or something viral to some novelty
items such as t-shirts and phone cases. This was the case in Fidel Castro,
the Cuban dictator, or to some signature brands. The effect is many people
will buy repulsively and continuous spending, making them cluttered with
new items and lack in money. That leads to Materialism, the belief system
which gives more importance to material objects and money than basic
necessities and others. Every single person is prone to those things as the
human person is frail to temptation and peer pressure and what's worse,
our society becomes a materialistic society. Once a materialistic society
filled with blind consumerism, we will be fed up with mindsets that will
benefit those who capitalize this. This is the current disease of our times,
we are fed up with capitalists who make such items, leading us to buy
more, and to work ourselves to death to fund those unnecessary spending
instead of our basic necessities. This mindset of working long hours to
death will not benefit us, but those capitalist oligarchs who feed us with
unnecessary items to buy so that we can work to them for money that we
will use for those spendings. Our moral and ethical behavior itself, because
of this mindset, becomes materialistic itself. We forget our neighbors in
need by wasting resources on excessive self. We completely ignore and
forget the dignity of human life for measly amounts of cash. We completely
remove in our minds the importance of dignity, honor, ethics and morality
for more money, best example of which is vote-buying during elections,
were many give the dignity of free will for measly a hundreds worth of cash,
dehumanizing them and saying "your dignity is just a couple of bucks".

To live simple and be content in what you have are the cure and
prevention against materialism and blind consumerism. Temperance and
Abstinence is also good for you to avoid these things as it can help you be
content with what you have as well as Generosity, for as the Holy
Scriptures said, "Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God
what belongs to God (Mt. 22:21)". Money, for me, is not evil, but also a
basic necessity, but as the renowned late comedian Rene Requestias said
in one of his movies, "Sino ba naman ang hindi nangangailangan ng pera?
Pero dapat naman, gamitin natin ang pera, pero huwag nating hayaan ang
pera ang gumamit sa atin". We must be the masters of our money, not the
money be the masters of us, the society will crumble if we become total
slaves of materialism. We are superior to those things, so be simple in
order to be the masters of material thing, which all be ceased in the future,
but our eternal dignity, ethics and morals, be our standard always.