I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s when parents still told their kids to go outside and play. My friends and I would spend all day in the yard and when we got hot and sweaty enough we’d run to the back patio, open the water spigot on the side of the house and get down on our hands and knees so we could get low enough to turn our mouths up for a drink of water that splashed all over our faces and down our necks.

In the evenings I remember seeing my parents shaking their heads as they watched the oil crises in the 1970’s unfold on the nightly news. Gas prices skyrocketed to 73 cents a gallon! “Turn it off,” my mother would say to my dad. “Good grief! The wheel’s are coming off but they make it sound like the world’s ending.”

“To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy . . . is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imagine that within you was a genie, a veritable creation machine capable of bringing you anything you desired – good and bad. Let’s imagine that you were unaware of this genie within or had heard about it but disbelieved. Perhaps you’d tried to believe and discovered that it was bogus – the whole thing about the genie within was just so much superstitious mumbo jumbo.

“Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral, and subject to change.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

There is nothing wrong with self-interest as such. We need to take care of our biological selves, make sure we have adequate food, water and shelter, avoid danger, take rest and ensure our other basic needs are met. Without this basic level of self-interest none of us would survive for very long.

Today, however, we in the more developed countries need to spend very little time and energy fulfilling these physical needs. If we are hungry or thirsty we simply go to the refrigerator, or we can get in our car and drive down to the supermarket – in the middle of night in many cities.

The story you are about to read is, of course, fiction. But if you found it to be disturbingly close to the truth and would like to know who Fabian was in real life, a good starting point is a study on the activities of the English goldsmiths in the 16th & 17th centuries.

The Beginning…

Fabian was excited as he once more rehearsed his speech for the crowd certain to turn up tomorrow. He had always wanted prestige and power and now his dreams were going to come true.

He was a craftsman working with silver and gold, making jewelry and ornaments, but he became dissatisfied with working for a living. He needed excitement, a challenge, and now his plan was ready to begin.