Way back in 2011, there was a post on a Google group called Minds Eye in relation to the word GREED. The post started making the following point:
“The word “greed” is tossed out so often and it always intrigues me just what people mean by it. Just what is “greed?” Some people (no names) toss this word off their fingertips all the time and frankly I HAVE HAD ENOUGH. Webster defines this word as… : a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed.
Ok, let’s take a more careful look at that definition. Let’s say a very rich person spends a million dollars on a painting that he just loves. He thinks this painting is so remarkable, so beautiful, that he is willing to buy it for a million dollars so he can look at it every day in his house. Me personally? I would never spend a million dollars on a painting, but that is just me. That painting, or ANY painting, is not something I am interested in buying at that price, even if I was filthy rich. But the things that I buy would curl your hair as they might seem so “strange” to YOU, but not to me. Everybody is different, and this is a very important thing to consider. NOBODY can judge what another person finds important, interesting, beautiful, desirable, or worthwhile…” {emphasis fonts added}
Here was my reply (with a few updates). (It appears, this problem hasn’t yet been solved ;-))
I think the word greed explains a lot of the tragedy that we see in society today. We could address that tragedy better if we saw the contribution that greed was making to it.
My first point is that greed has been known to be a problem for a long time – like 10,000 years! It is often listed as the second most egregious of the SEVEN DEADLY SINS. (The “Seven Deadly Sins” , by the way, as described here, are NOT presented as religious issues.) This is important because I believe a sociologically based Seven Deadly Sins can explain most major problems in human society ascribed to human psychology. I spend a lot of time on this in Collapse 2020 Vol. 1.
Second, I think this person’s point got off on the wrong foot. We need to read Webster’s definition more carefully. It says, “more of something than is NEEDED.” Specifically, this phrasing does not limit greed to the environment of a single person. In fact, what makes greed, and all the Seven Deadly Sins, rank so highly as human faults is their SOCIAL expression in a SOCIAL context. The first example is a good example to explore this.
If a person, who lives in an expensive tenement in NYC spends a million dollars on a painting, it may not be greed. But if the same person happens to live in one of the few surviving houses in Haiti, while people are starving to death in the street outside his front door, then society would label that greed. If the same millionaire, in Haiti, stockpiled just 2 weeks worth of groceries, an amount that no one in most of the U.S. would even blink at, while everyone else was living hand to mouth, society would label that greed.
The point is, this directly contradicts the notion stated in the first post that, “NOBODY can judge what another person finds important …” In fact, the whole concept of greed, and the basis of the other SINS, is entirely based on social implications.
To make the meaning of greed clear, as used in society, Webster’s definition needs a few more words: a selfish and excessive desire for more of something than is needed IN THE OPINION OF SOCIETY. And that’s the stickler!
Here is how the poster sums this up in the last paragraph of the post. It says, “if you have REASONABLE plans for every single dollar? THAT IS NOT GREED…” The devil in this notion is in the word “reasonable”. And what society means by “reasonable” is what SOCIETY accepts as reasonable.
The reason this is so important right now is how it will play out as the social injustice disasters of the past are addressed. Note well, this “greed disaster” is NOT about an amount of money itself. It’s about the impact of privileged wealth distribution in the face of massive poverty and mistreatment of the core people of the world.
For example, during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, over 1.5M people were left homeless! The world saw this. There was instant international relief efforts. YET, in the U.S., after the 2008 home loan scandal, the banks, with government enforcement, created its own mass homeless crisis. All told, it was equivalent to 6 Haiti earthquakes of U.S. adults and children thrown into the street. It was the equivalent of another Haiti earthquake every 3 months during 2011!
And what was the justification for this? PROFITS! .. to get the level of bank executive bonuses back to the pre-crash level… to get the level of stock market gains for U.S. investors back to what it was before the crash. Almost 9M Americans were “thrown under the bus” to do this. And YES, for those “influential” wealthy elite Americans who made this happen, this was ALL about Greed. The same justifications will be used by the same elites to avoid facing the current U.S. eviction scandal caused by Covid-19.
For those interested, here is where you can read more about The Seven Deadly Sins.
