I'll come out right away and say I support Bernie Sanders and his attempt to become President. That said, let's talk about greed.

What is it that causes one person to become so greedy he'll step on his own mother to pick up a stray dollar, while another person will go out of his way to remain poor?

I will admit to big dreams when it comes to money, mostly due to my writing taking off, but mostly, I'm content with a place to live, food to eat and decent Internet. I'm not driven to make more money than I need.

I suppose some of it is genetic, look at the Koch Brothers and the Walton family. I will never understand how people will go out of their way so they can have more money. They even go so far that they'll hide their earnings in offshore accounts.

But off-shore accounts aren't free. Neither are bribes. For that matter, neither are donations to charities, So I'm guessing everything is carefully calculated so as to pay the least amount of taxes possible, right down to the legal fees required to make everything go as smooth as possible.

Power corrupts, or so I'm told. I've never had any real power. But what if the corruption exists not just in the genetics, but in the soul itself? I've heard that babies learn to hate and be greedy, they aren't born that way. But what if instead of Nurture over Nature, where children are taught to hate, or something happens that changes them into uncaring monsters, something else is responsible?

And I'm not talking about genetics, or brain damage, I'm talking about a damaged soul. No one really knows what the soul is, though my stories and dreams often stray to what makes a soul. One of my characters even goes so far as to say that souls are made of the same thing as everything else: atoms. So what makes one soul different from another?

I'm a real believer of reincarnation. Once the body dies, the soul finds an unborn body to inhabit, losing most of its memories in the process. I won't get into what makes a soul to begin with, or if there's such a thing as human-only souls, but what if, in a previous life, a soul gets physically damaged? Say, the body gets burned, and an atom or two of the soul gets destroyed?

I've already had visions of victims of the atom bombs, those at ground zero who got vaporized, having their souls completely destroyed in the process. *Shudder*

Anyway, what if damaged souls are responsible for overwhelming greed and lust for power, lust for war and destruction?

Something to think about, and one of the things that keep me up at night and my imagination humming.