Greed – excessive or reprehensible acquisitiveness: “Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more” (Ephesians 4:19).
Game or reality
When I was a boy between ten and fourteen years old, I just loved the board game Monopoly. I did not take long after a rather modest phase, before I understood the game’s underlying and ruthless rule; – the more you buy of the available streets, and get a flush of two or three of the same kind, the higher the possibility is that you can build enough houses and hotels on the estates, to ruin your playmates when they are stranded there.
The Monopoly board game
For that reason, I always borrowed from the bank, many times my starting capital, when I had the chance to purchase estates. I was reckless and self-centered in my gaming, and very often won the Monopoly game, because I had no limits in my desire for more and more streets.
Greed in America
This was only a game however, and I was young and immature. But its seems to me that in the 1980’s and 90’s, and in 2007 and 2008, that ruthless game was realized in its full potential in real financial America.
In their book with the elusive title; “Greed is Good”, Daniel Murphy and Matthew Robinson (2009), cites Gordon Gekko from the 1987 movie “Wall Street”:
Michael Douglas as the greedy Gordon Gekko in the movie “Wall Street”
“Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies. Greed cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of it’s forms, greed for life, for money, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called USA.” (Gordon Gekko)
Greed embedded in the American dream.
Robinson & Murphy link the deviant and criminal acts of American Corporate Business life to the concept of greed embedded in the American Dream. The American dream means by their definition; – to achieve more wealth than you already have, regardless of much you have. Here the individual’s striving for a better and more prosperous material life, go hand in hand with a general American notion that there are no limits to how wealthy you can be, if you put all your energy into it.
Liberty at least for all Financial and corporate business people in America
At the same time, corporate life, institutions and laws seem to be built on a culture that promote selfish, competitive and even reckless behavior if you want to succeed in the game.
Earlier the American dream was mostly realized by the white population. Nowadays not even the white population can achieve that dream.
Business comes before anything else.
The authors are pointing at the fact that the US. remains the only advanced industrial democracy without paid family leave, national health care , and without an extended family vacation policy. (That was written before “Obamacare” – now to be ended by Trump) This is so, even though the US. ranks number 2 among 34 countries, in terms of the importance of the family.
Why is that? Robinson and Murphy claim that the needs of business are given precedence over everything else in the American institutional order. In other words, – material greed before human needs.
And this is a crucial point. Greed goes far beyond human needs, because greed is: “A selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed. A continual lust for more.” (Press Release Point, September 25th, 2016)
The Financial collapse on Wall Street 2008.
We have now experienced that this greed was the main contributor to the big 2008 Wall Street crash that the US. and Europe still strive to overcome the negative effects of. Not primarily the financial sector and its money makers are struggling to overcome the recession. The crisis primarily hit ordinary people, the vanishing middle class, public welfare, and stately institutions that had very little to do with the crash.
Financial Genius or Dangerous greedy Crook. Dick Fuld, the top leader of Lehman Brothers that started the world’s economic crash in 2008.
The top people, however, that had ordered the creation of the large and complex portfolio of unsecure loans and toxic assets, usually pulled out their own investments days before the crash. As for Lehman Brothers who started the crisis, Lawrence G. McDonald, the co-author of the New York Times best-seller “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense”, writes: “At Lehman, there were 24,992 people making money and eight guys losing it.” In other words, most of the staff were operating seriously while the top leaders behaved scrupulous.
Greed , capitalism and human needs.
Greed is not an American phenomenon, alone. In a continuum from normal pursuit for happiness and economic growth, via the desire for even more, greed is at the extreme end of the continuum, comparable to gluttony, and insatiable lust. We find it all over the world, most often however attached to global capitalism.
Humans have like animals an inbred or genetic disposition for self-preservation. That’s organic life, sustaining itself to a certain extent, in any environment. For species on top of the neuropsychological hierarchy, however, for primates like chimpanzees and human babies, the psychological environment plays a much more important role in sustaining life.
The initial and needed “lust for life” that is satisfied when parents or caretakers meet the child with loving care, is necessary to nourish the child physically and psychically.
When this love together with physical nourishment is lacking early in life, the physical health of the child will most likely be impaired.
There is a theory in dynamic psychology, that serious neglect, will not only predispose for mental illness. It will also most likely transform psychologically into unsaturated hunger for love, power, sex, fame or money.
Greed as compensation for neglect and lack of recognition.
The initial survival instincts in the pursuit for self-preservation, are very far from this state of all-compassing unsatiable hunger at the extreme end of the continuum from need to greed. Such trans-formed psychological urges has nothing to do with meeting needs. Here it’s the basic human longing for recognition that has run amok. This most likely occurs when unconditoned love and recognition have been lacking in the parental relation.
Very often this goes hand in hand with a family culture were recognition has been conditioned by economic success.
Psychologists like Benjamin(1988) and Schibbye(1992) have anchored their relational psychodynamic psychology on the foundations of Hegel’s philosophy of recognition and dialectics.
The desire for much more than necessary must not be gratified by the child’s parents, even though the desire should be recognized as ok. It is the yielding to the craving or desire that is wrong, not the desire in itself.
In my understanding of Hegel, it seems that the ubiquitous “human desire”, or “human craving”, must face opposition. If not the desire or craving will grow to infinity. And this opposition or unwillingness to gratify the desire for more, when basic physiological and psychological needs are met, – is a main contributor to psychological growth. Above all it is crucial for developing the ability to perceive and empathize with the other.
The capacity for feeling with the other. Empathy.
If any desire and requirement are fulfilled when growing up, and every urge achieve gratification, the person will paradoxically never feel gratified. And here we have the final product; – greed!
Greed and distribution of worlds wealth.
18 January 2016 the Oxfam report found that the 62 richest in the world had as much money as half the world’s population “- The explosive growth in their wealth has come at the expense of the poorest.”
There is no trickle down from rich to poor. And one year later, in January this year 2017, the British “Guardian” writes that; “The world’s eight richest billionaires control the same wealth between them as the poorest half of the globe’s population. In my opinion this is a dangerous demonstration of limitless greed.
Even the world’s Economic Forum(WEF) in Davos this year, addressed it as a big global problem. In view of the gradual deregulation of the financial system since Reagan and Thatcher, there has been no real opposition to counteract the greed inherent in the game of globalized economy. In a psychological perspective to my opinion, there has not been any real “parental supervision” of the financial sector from neither the states or governments. There were little or no resistance to the extreme manifestations of this sector’s financial transactions.
This has resulted in a situation where the need for earning money, have grown to infinity, and reached the stage of insatiable greed.
Greed is number three of the deadly sins.
But before greed kills the billionaires in their helicopters, swimming pools and yachts, it is most deadly for the poorest half of the population. Even the earlier privileged and now the less fortunate middle class, is vanishing by the hour in the US. And that fact is, as the American professor of Economy Robert Reich states, – a national disaster.
Psychological Universe would therefore recommend the financial sector to release their “capacity for greed”, in the game of Monopoly, instead of on the real life national and international financial arenas.
Even though we may not like the effects of capitalism, there has been versions of it with less uncontrolled greed, and more responsibility for the employees and the community.