Heavenly Creatures

Are there billionaires in heaven? Setting aside whether or not you believe in heaven, it seems to me that every one of us would argue that, no, billionaires probably do not exist in heaven for the simple reason that money itself has no use in the afterlife. Moreover, if heaven is the closest aspect of perfection that human souls can visit, it seems oxymoronic that in a place of maximal abundance, some would have more than others. “Wealth” becomes oxymoronic in a system of perfect – and here I’m going to use that annoying, Ezra Klein-ian buzzword – abundance.

In a heavenly scenario, what would abundance look like for a soul? All needs and wants accommodated without strain, perfect cooperation among souls, and an excellent playlist of ad-free music.

A heavenly soul, therefore, would have no concerns about its own needs. Instead, it would seek purpose in assisting others with their own needs. But because in a heavenly realm, the other souls would also have no needs, they would turn their attention to baser realms in order to feel purposeful. Maybe they’d assist lesser, earthly souls. Maybe they’d find purpose through creativity. Maybe they’d look to other places for exploration and growth. The point is, once basic needs are met and there is no fear of future want, continual accumulation for personal gain becomes nonsensical, even perverse. Doing so would seem to contradict heaven itself.

The question of billionaires in heaven only matters, though, if there even is a heaven. Lots of people seem to think there is although, personally, I’ve never seen it. Which raises the question – where the hell is heaven?

We’d have to look for a place that has heavenly attributes. Does such a place exist? My off-the-top-of-my-head definition of heaven stated heaven is the “closest aspect of perfection that human souls can visit.” I then said that such a place would, of course, be able to accommodate all human needs. What are those needs? Food, water, shelter, rest. But also healthcare, education, community. I would also argue that a human requires purpose. Purpose demands challenge. Therefore, humans must also have challenges.

A still from Peter Jackson’s 1994 film, Heavenly Creatures. I saw it in the theaters because I’m cooler than you.

It’s through challenge that people grow. Does it follow that difficult challenges create more growth? A tree grows hardier after surviving a drought, but too much drought will kill the tree. People, I think, are the same. We’re resilient creatures, made more resilient by our ability to work cooperatively with others in order to solve our challenges.

When we look around for where we might find heaven – a place that has the ability to provide for our needs and wants, but which also provides incredible challenges for growth – we discover that we actually live in such a place. Or, at least, we live in a place which has all the prerequisites for heaven but which, at least a lot of the time, kind of sucks.

Do we live in ghetto heaven?

What prevents our planet from becoming, in a literal sense, heaven on Earth? What would people need to feel divine and what, or who, is preventing it? It’s too reductive to say that billionaires, in and of themselves, are responsible for our earthly privations. The rich are only symptoms of the larger disease. What is the larger disease?

And yes, I’m purposely using the word “disease” to contrast with “heaven” because I’ve been paying attention to the work of the biologist Bruce Lipton* who argues that the human community of seven billion souls is exactly analogous to the individual human body of fifty trillion cells. Those trillions of cells manage to cooperate for the greater good of the larger community, which is the human body. In exactly the same way that misbehaving cells create disease for the human body, misbehaving humans create misery for the human species.

What is “misbehaving” in a global sense? Hoarding of resources, for one. We all condemn it even though we’re all guilty of it. Yet, hoarding of resources makes perfect sense in a system in which resources are scarce. Do we have such a system? In the past, yes. Now, not so much.

This planet, combined with human technology, is more than capable of producing enough food, clean water, and shelter for every person, and billions more. We can do so in an ecologically responsible way. We can provide education basic healthcare. Community follows since cooperation naturally emerges when everybody know they have enough. Many individual nations are already practicing this model. Not perfectly, of course, but enough to satisfy basic material needs, which raises happiness, which raises cooperation, which further raises happiness, and the next thing you know, you’ve got yourself a virtuous cycle.

Another way to misbehave is to exert control over others. “Control” in the sense that I mean does not mean “enforcing agreed-upon rules.” Rules are imperative so that everybody operates within the same framework. Nature has rules; there’s no reason people shouldn’t. The control I mean is the ability of some to thwart the purpose of others. Maybe that means limiting the roles a woman can perform in the culture, for example, or forbidding somebody from expressing themselves how they wish. Control in this way is no different than the hoarding of resources. The resource one hoards in this example is power.

All of this is well-known and well-understood. So why is it so hard? Fear, which is intimately tied to ego. By ego, I just mean the internal mechanism that distinguishes one person’s conscious experience from another. We tend to frown on the ego, mistakenly (in my opinion) believing that the ego is synonymous with selfishness. To have a puffed-up ego, for example is to think too highly of one’s self, which is a form of selfishness. Grasping all we can is also the ego protecting itself, ensuring its own survival over the needs of others because the ego has a difficult time recognizing that its existence is dependent on the existence of others. Which is ok – the ego’s purpose is survival of the individual. The individual’s purpose, however, is growth. Growth is best achieved in concert with community. Such cooperation is also known as “love.”

And love, of course, is fear’s opposite.

Somehow, if we’re ever going to move closer to establishing some kind of heavenly realm with its attendant excellent ad-free playlist, we’ve got to figure out how to move from a fear-based world to a love-based one. How do we do that? There’s no mystery - guidebooks have been written across eons. They can be found in every culture that’s ever existed. Bizarrely, the guidebooks all say the same thing – love each other. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, etc. Again, all of this is well-known and well-understood. Has been for thousands of years.

There are different ways to be a billionaire. One can have too much money or too much power or too much ego. The billionaire is only somebody who takes more than their share and who seeks only accumulation rather than growth. In biology, this is known as “cancer.” Am I saying the billionaire class is a cancer on humanity? Why yes. Yes, I am. So, to rephrase my original question: “Is there cancer in heaven?” I don’t know, but here on Earth we’re devoting a lot of time and energy to curing that particular disease. Perhaps it’s time to start doing the same with billionaires of every sort.

*I don’t have the requisite scientific background to examine Lipton’s ideas about biology, which are criticized as “pseudoscience,” but I’m not interested in proving or disproving his ideas so much as borrowing them for metaphor.