«Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.» (Nelson Mandela)
Poverty is a disease. Education is the cure. Books are excellent tools to educate many people. Free books, shareware books, make it possible to educate those who can’t afford to go to university or who live in a country where schools are a luxury.
Education has two sides: fiction and non-fiction. We can learn practical skills from a manual, but we can also learn moral values and how to handle emotions from stories of fiction.
Books are important.
According to Charles Darwin, Mother Nature gave us the Seven Natural Virtues to help the fittest survive in the hostile jungle: Appetite, Economy, Sexual Fertility, Self-esteem, Efficiency, Strength and Ambition. The King of the Jungle was the animal that dominated those seven skills best. The (male) Lion efficiently orders his women to do all the hunting-work, so he can concentrate on eating more, having more sex, and fighting more enemies to get more territory. Its selfish instincts help each animal decide: I want it ALL, and I want it NOW! Okay, that’s from Queen, Freddy Mercury, but the Lion King has the same program. The Lion simply eats all the rabbits today; he doesn’t have the intelligence to think about others or tomorrow.
Dante Alighieri‘s philosophy about Good and Evil was the complete opposite of Darwin’s. He saw the same seven characteristics but called them the Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Pride, Sloth, Wrath and Envy. The difference was in the quantity: appetite is okay, but extreme appetite becomes gluttony and that’s bad. The deepest pit in Dante’s Inferno was Pride, for the selfish humans who thought they were better than others and therefore entitled to all the food, all the money, the biggest houses, the leading jobs, as many sex slaves as possible, and all the attention in both the social and asocial media. Dante preferred Balance to Extremes and valued Quality higher than Quantity. For him «success» meant generosity: share what you have and be important to everyone, now and in the future.
Those Seven Deadly Sins are instincts, emotions, feelings that every living creature gets born with. The Human Being uses its brain to decide between Good and Evil. Togetherness requires a different set of skills, Human Qualities, so we can work together for everyone’s benefit: modesty, patience, sacrifice, empathy, self-discipline, honesty, wisdom and knowledge, loyalty, justice and forgiveness, perseverance, responsibility for others and for our planet, creativity and humour, trust, respect and commitment, love and satisfaction, just to name a few.
Human Qualities are things we’ll have to learn.
That’s how you cure poverty, my friend. Well, if you’ve read Dante and believe he’s right.
With 2 billion people, suffering from overweight, and 1 billion others fighting starvation, with an elite of 1% who owns more than the poorest 50% of humanity, we don’t need to discuss who has more fans: Darwin easily wins the popularity contest.
Law of the Jungle is only good for the Lion King, and terrible for all the other animals.
Perhaps the other animals never learnt how to behave like human beings. Perhaps they should read more. Many heroes of fiction have Human Qualities, but when people don’t read those stories and only listen to the King, who shouts from his tower and orders them to build a wall, to keep poverty out of sight...
Humanity urgently needs good books, good stories, about good and evil.
If you write such a book, we’ll help you publish it.
The team is always stronger than the best player.