Ponerology

In our phone Theology Discussion on Monday night, in connection with the subject of greed (avarice) I brought up the issue of power as another "source of (all) evils". It seems to me that in the contexts of states, empires, and world-spanning corporations, the love of wealth and the love of power are tightly connected.

Although material resources and their control are the subjects that Marxist/Marxian approaches take as basic -- a point of view which I, as a "cultural materialist", share -- human society also seems to be afflicted with the presence of an all too common free-floating urge to dominate for domination's sake, as well as for economics' sake.

Control freaks, psychopaths/sociopaths, and dominators/empire builders of all sorts, regardless of their particular psychopathologies, seem to me to be disproportionally involved in the creation and operation of the institutional "structures of sin" that some of us have been discussing.