Srimad Bhagavatam, Canto 1, Ch. 17, Text 38, Purport.
"Gambling of all descriptions, EVEN SPECULATIVE BUSINESS ENTERPRISE, is considered to be degrading, and when gambling is encouraged in the state, there is a complete disappearance of truthfulness." - HDG A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada
My emphasis. This is an area which we don't find emphasized frequently. It is actually pretty easy to avoid gambling in its most obvious forms, but the teaching is actually a bit more comprehensive if we unpack the finer points. And it is clear that speculation was one of the most important factors in both the Great Depression and the recent worldwide Great Recession, which isn't even over completely. Lately the world's economy has been subject to these "bubbles." Many of you can remember the tech bubble of the early 2000s, when money was being thrown around to any person with an idea for a new website, which of course led to a collapse. The speculators next moved on to the safest investment of all. Home values in the US had historically never gone down, always up, so the perfect thing was to somehow change mortgages into stocks. We all know what happened there.
The purports in this part of Canto Two also stress the importance of having a real value based economy. Srila Prabhupada really stood for a much reduced economy..some would say it's impossible to go back to a time when people lived simply on natural products but it fits the rest of the philosophy. With restraint on sense gratification, naturally the population would decrease to the level that sustainable living gets easier and easier. Once we don't need all the products of modern "civilization" we don't need the superhighways, cars, skyscrapers, factories. The earth, sky, air, and water get progressively cleaner and cleaner, which feeds back into an environment fit to pursue spiritual realization.
Comments
Thoughtful posting, Trinikrta trnavarta dasa Prabhu, as ever. Hare Krsna!My own thoughts which arise;
When ambition and greed overcome the power of the desire for spiritual life, then so many problems arise. When beings take more than their share, abusing others, a cycle of karma is created that leads to ill results.
Srila Prabhupada told us that we cant eat nuts and bolts! lol
Advanced civilization means recognizing that human life is limited, but that it has a purpose, and arranging to serve that purpose. We do not need a highly expensive technological culture that promises totalitarianism, transhumanism, and thus to miss the essential point of human life; to learn to love Godhead and others as themself.
Gambling includes dishonest business dealings, such as paper money. Accepting questionable doctrines from uncertain sources is also gambling, as is accepting a less-than-perfect spiritual master, or non-Vaisnava , as one's eternal Guru.
I have seen more than one man ruined by gambling with money on government managed games, such as horse racing and gaming machines. Only a drunk ass would throw hard-earned Laxmi, or risk his next lives, away like a fool.
Current economics makes no sense, as dishonesty rules, massively profitting the elite owners, and those citizens bewlidered by near-nothing interest in bank accounts, who play the markets, are usually gambling and often lose, by design. The banksters did so, gambled on derivatrives etc., and our criminal governments took our money and bailed them out, but no bail out for the citizens? We got gyped!