Spoils of the Spoiled.

The movie Blood Diamond is a movie based on what is going on the world today. This article is not going to give all of the details of the movie. I just noticed a couple of lines from the movie that would serve to sustain a very true point regarding the fallacy in every human heart. This fallacy is known as “greed.”

Leonardo Decaprio plays the role of Danny Archer, a diamond smuggler from South Africa that takes diamonds from Kenya across the border into Libya. From there, the diamonds go to India and eventually London, and then around the world. There is a vault in London underground in where thousands of diamonds are stored. The goal is to keep the diamonds out of sight so that he demands stays high but the supply is thought to be “low.” Therefore they are now rare and should cost more than they are actually worth.

These are called “blood diamonds” because they are being used to purchase arms and finance civil war.

This is a story displaying genuine greed. Millions are killed or put into concentration camps while others are put to work. That is, to look for diamonds and give them to the oppressors.

At one point in the film, a man that operates an orphanage for refugee children asks Danny Archer “Would you say that people are inherently good?” Archer responds, “No. They are just people.” The man says, “Exactly. It is what people do that make them good or bad.”

“No. They are just people.”

They are just people.
They are just people.


These men conclude that men and women are completely neutral in the world regarding morality and that their morality is ultimately determined by what their actions say. A man’s actions make him either good or evil. But doesn’t this sound backwards? Shouldn’t our morality determine what we do? Shouldn’t what we do be conceived in our minds before we actually do something? This is the only thing that makes sense.

Thoughts precede actions.
Blueprints precede constructions.

Later on, Archer says in a moment of reflection, Archer says to a journalist, after she continues to pry into his own evil life, trying to help him come to grips that he too is an oppressor even though he may not be directly holding the whip in hand… “I sometimes wonder will God ever forgive us for what we’ve done to each other? Then I look around and say, ‘God left this place a long time ago.’ So what’s the point, huh?” He says this in such a regretful tone as his eyes tear up.

I’m listening to this song called The Spoils of the Spoiled right now and the lyric says it all…

“But, it's all in fun and sin until someone calls it in. The cycle comes around again. But, I'm older now, and don't you know, I've figured out the antidote. It overwhelms, engulfed in smoke. It's all we can to cope. Goddamn these idle hands as hindsight can. Our hopes and plans are unfulfilled. It's overwhelming.”

Sounds pretty honest.

Did God leave because we are evil or is it the fact that we are so evil that we think God left? I bank on the latter.

Even looking at the conversations that Archer has, he believes that:
1. That actions determine one’s moral condition.
2. That God is absent because our actions are evil.

This is what depravity looks like as it comes to fruition. Besides, his whole life as a diamond smuggler, Archer obsessed with greed and this tells us that he is dead to God, not that God is absent.