I’ll have to look into that! My first thought was Jesus Himself also warning against it.
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” Mark 8:36
They serve their greed, it becomes their god, and when the billions aren’t enough, it becomes about power and influence in world events. It never stops. They basically become the paperclip apocalypse machine for shareholder profits.
Like someone else here who mentioned Tolkien: absolutely “dragon sickness.” We watched Thorin Oakenshield forsake his brethren and become a total bastard just to sit on a mountain of coins and stare at a pretty rock.
These guys are the very same, just with their stonks.
Somehow along the way, our societies evolved to serve the dragons, to elevate their madness and sociopathy to virtue. Like the wealth-hoarding, worker-eating monsters of old, they must be brought down.
Tolkien’s dragon sickness comes from the whole Nibelungen cycle, in which the dwarf Fafnir turns himself into a dragon to keep the gold hoard. Depending on the version, the gold is created by a ring that Odin and Loki tried to claim but its owner cursed it because fuck those thieving gods. Several of the Germanic variations of the cycle put a lot of focus on greed for that hoard leading to the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom, including Atli (Attila the Hun) trying to get a piece of it, until the gold is tossed into the Rhine so that no one can have it.
Large parts of the same Germanic tales are heavily inspired by the feud between two Frankish queens, Brunhilda and Fredegund, the murder of Brunhilda’s husband Siegbert, and the migrations of the Burgundian tribes that ended in the modern French region of the same name. They (or rather their predecessors) were all involved in the defeat of Attila at the battle of the Catalaunian Plains. There’s no particular record of gold greed being involved in any of it, but it’s curious how that’s what the Germans remembered of it.
I’ll have to look into that! My first thought was Jesus Himself also warning against it.
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” Mark 8:36
They serve their greed, it becomes their god, and when the billions aren’t enough, it becomes about power and influence in world events. It never stops. They basically become the paperclip apocalypse machine for shareholder profits.
Like someone else here who mentioned Tolkien: absolutely “dragon sickness.” We watched Thorin Oakenshield forsake his brethren and become a total bastard just to sit on a mountain of coins and stare at a pretty rock.
These guys are the very same, just with their stonks.
Somehow along the way, our societies evolved to serve the dragons, to elevate their madness and sociopathy to virtue. Like the wealth-hoarding, worker-eating monsters of old, they must be brought down.
Tolkien’s dragon sickness comes from the whole Nibelungen cycle, in which the dwarf Fafnir turns himself into a dragon to keep the gold hoard. Depending on the version, the gold is created by a ring that Odin and Loki tried to claim but its owner cursed it because fuck those thieving gods. Several of the Germanic variations of the cycle put a lot of focus on greed for that hoard leading to the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom, including Atli (Attila the Hun) trying to get a piece of it, until the gold is tossed into the Rhine so that no one can have it.
Large parts of the same Germanic tales are heavily inspired by the feud between two Frankish queens, Brunhilda and Fredegund, the murder of Brunhilda’s husband Siegbert, and the migrations of the Burgundian tribes that ended in the modern French region of the same name. They (or rather their predecessors) were all involved in the defeat of Attila at the battle of the Catalaunian Plains. There’s no particular record of gold greed being involved in any of it, but it’s curious how that’s what the Germans remembered of it.