First this:

Whenever you want to talk about people, it’s best to take a bird’s-eye view and see everything all at once. – Plato

Then this:

In outer space you develop and instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. – Edgar Mitchell (astronaut)

Taken together they emphasize the ever-present reality that it is not about me, it is about us. Maybe the Buddhists are right, maybe it is the ego- and not money- that really is the root of all evil. In Buddhism, the idea that there is no true self is a key tenet, and ties back to something referred to as “emptiness”, which is  one of the harder concepts in Buddhism to understand. In the case of ego, or, anatta , it means that the “I” we perceive as ourselves does not exist. We cannot point to the part of us that is us . So in Buddhism there is no self, it is an illusion.