Bob Moore passed away on February 10, 2024. He was 94 years old.
The grief remains for loved ones, but he is surely in the heaven he toiled to attain. What a social legacy to leave behind, which goes to show that the problem with spirituality and religion is not the message of love attainable by meditative rumination on a higher realm of social harmony. Rather, the flaw remains as ever in the organised religions’ hypocritical capitalism on the message of compassion. By profiting from our sensitivities, they limit our enlightenment to manifest and live in harmony!
Harmony relieves organised religion of its duties much like peace relieves the UN of its purpose. Equality and unity is possible; it is not a utopian dream that American Ivy League schools reject. Combined, these systems and structures continue to force capitalism down our throats in dog-pill fashion, wrapped in the bacon that we are taught to love; but the public is educated today. We buy into the delusion much less today than we did during the gold rush era over 150 years ago. Back in 1848, when gold was found at Sutter’s Mill, hopeful prospectors called the forty-niners were among the three hundred thousand people who migrated to California in search of gold. Just as the 49ers who in the 2020s just consistently come short of a Super Bowl win, much of California’s success story was not written by the gold rush forty-niners. And Americans in southern states today certainly stand their ground much more firmly than in the era of the great migration which started a century ago.
Moore’s legacy is the quiet but successful fight against giant corporations, profit prioritisation, and capitalism. He never bought the drug, never injected, never felt the high of its poison, never appeased his ego by greed. He built for his family, community, and global consumers. There are many North American business owners with established businesses simply dreaming of the day a giant corporation knocks on their door with a price to sell their effort. Less than ten thousand registered businesses in USA and Canada are employee-owned, even though over two thirds of them started this way. Many businesses advertise badges like B-corp and other certifications on their website. This is supposed to make them appear responsible and sustainable, somehow better than the competition.
What is social responsibility if it does not entail equality and does not prioritise compassion? To treat others equally, fairly, and compassionately, to “do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12). This is also reiterated in Luke 6:31: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” This message, the Golden Rule, is repeated in other religious texts too. This was Bob Moore’s version of Jesus, of godliness, of divine living… harmony, nirvana.
Surely, we must elevate Bob Moore’s understanding of the Bible over that of methodologies of empires like the Vatican where raping children is a hobby, Wahhabism where terrorism is negotiation, or Zionism where genocide is advancement. All aimed to bully others out of their rightful and equal slice of the pie of life. Love is just that elusive choice for those addicted to money, and the valuation of life by capitalist metrics of wealth and power. We should rehabilitate ourselves spiritually before our entire legacy and momentum is reduced to a postmortem statistic on an insurance policy balancing our mortgages and debts. We must stop the peddling of this poison before the order ushers a fresh wave of addicts to replace inefficient and overdosed capitalists. We must defend against this danger by prioritizing compassion, choosing equality, and leading with love always.
