The Triumph of Folly

In most philosophical traditions greed anger and stupidity, or ignorance, are regarded as the root causes of human misery. In Buddhism these three traits are called 'the three poisons' and they are contrasted with the three positive qualities of courage wisdom and compassion that are associated with the Buddha's enlightened life state. The thinking behind this is fairly obvious, stupidity is associated with pestilence and environmental mismanagement, greed causes inflation and anger leads to war. Of these poisons stupidity is thought to be the worst because it underpins greed and anger. Greedy people are also stupid people because they are never satisfied no matter how much wealth they may acquire and of course material riches mean nothing when Death comes knocking at the door. Greedy people compete with other greedy people and the resulting conflict causes anger which creates the conditions for warfare.

In this picture the procession is led by Stupidity sitting astride the three-headed beast that represents Anger. Greed follows sitting upon a globe that represents our planet, the globe is resting on a huge ingot of gold and this is being carried by paramilitaries in much the same way as pallbearers carry a coffin. The Trump lookalike symbolises Greed although he could easily be any one of the three poisons. He has a halo and wings because the love of gold is like a religion for many people and he is surrounded by imagery indicating warfare and industrial pollution. At the rear of the procession we see the figure of Death wearing a bow tie and a wig and rolling forward the machinery of destruction. The vultures indicate those organisations that profit from despair and misery. The burning woods in the background show the inevitable devastation that occurs when the three poisons run rampant.

I don’t often paint pictures that have a message but the tumultuous events of recent times have forced my brush. I’m not a natural when it comes to art drawn purely from the imagination so I’ve used some of the ideas of my old friend Paul Rumsey. Paul is a very talented artist who mainly works in charcoal and pen and ink. The following sequence of images show Paul’s drawing and then my copy of Paul’s drawing which was my main source of visual information when I was painting this picture. These are followed by a series of images showing the development of the picture