Must charity begin in the gambling den?

Are those gambling kingpins blind to the fact that families are destroyed in this entire scheme of things? Have we not, in this cut-throat capitalist system, used people enough to maximize profit from them, that we want to continue destroying generations ahead?

Psychologically, how could children in a family of gamblers live to learn that life is about working hard and earning an honest living and not playing with chance that, in the case of sports betting, can always be rigged?

The mind of the child needs to be filled with consciousness that gambling can become a pathological condition and one not only can lose everything but will be hunted down by debtors and gangsters.

How might the family live a peaceful life if the father or mother is a compulsive gambler and that this is possible through the state provisions of legal betting/gambling? Gambling is a psychological trap and kills the mind, spirit, and eventually the body.

Political and economically, how could a country allow the free flow of proceeds from gambling to permeate into the public sphere and to be used perhaps to buy votes and to maintain an already corrupt political system that thrives on whatever means necessary to maintain power? How could we live with a government that blatantly and arrogantly allows gambling licences and rationalise it via utilitarianistic arguments – that the tax paid will go to building social institutions? How could one build moral institutions based on immoral business instruments?

Free enterprise and freedom to do business does not mean the freedom to set a long-term agenda to imprison society and its subsequent generations. That would be a blue ocean strategy of feeding our children to the sharks.

Capitalism itself is essentially based on immoral premises, particularly one based on Keynesian and Friedmanian economics that do not look at the deep social impact of developmentalism and how it produces and reproduces human beings like cattle addicted to green grass called money and moves with its velocity.

We have created Frankensteins

Already we have institutions whose development we cannot control – the malls, golf courses, country clubs, cheap-labour factories, conveyor-belt educational institutions, vote hungry race-based political parties, junk-selling media enterprises, etc. – that are based on exploiting human gullibility and create classes of people whose pattern of consumption affect each other. Already we have created Frankensteins out of the technologies of dominance we continue to develop mindlessly. We now want to legalise more and more forms of gambling.

In the whole scheme of sports betting, the question remains: how have we come to a point in our evolution that sports as what the Greeks conceived as one of the ars liberalis (arts and skills of a free man) has become a reason to gamble and to have fun with it? From the arts of a free man to the science of the imprisoned self, must we now conceive of sports and its postmodern life as a game of chance?

We must come back to our senses and to reclaim our lives as ethical beings. We must support any political party and any government that will not allow our children to live in a society wherein the streets are no longer safe because gamblers and kingpins are having their billion Ringgit shoot-outs. Gamblers are losers and a government that approves gambling licences is a loser and will be a losing government.

Charity begins in one’s heart and not in the gambling den.

OUR USUAL REMINDER, FOLKS: 

While the opinion in the article is mine, 

the comments are yours; 

present them rationally and ethically. 

AND — ABOLISH THE ISA — NOW!