letterhead

Zen-ish Thoughts About Greed

At first blush, the problem with greed appears to be that while it is good for the individual who embraces it, that is in contention with what is good for other people. In fact, there are two reasons why greed, or individualism more generally, is not good for society. Yes, one is that greed ensures cruelty between people despite us needing mutual support and cooperation rather than solitary gluttony. The other is that greed, and other expressions of individualism, are paradoxically not even good for the individual who lives by them.

To keep things clear, let's distinguish between individualism and individuality. Individualism indicates a loss of recognition of the interdependence among individuals, and how natural, inescapable, and valuable that is. Individuality recognizes that people have significant natural variation in their brains, personal histories, feelings, thoughts, and self-expression. These are good, even necessary for goodness to reach its peak, and in any case ever-present whether anyone likes them or not, whether any culture likes them or not.

Even so, why do I say that greed is bad even for the self-serving individual who excels at it? Because it doesn't work.

Greed comes from the state of mind: "I can never have enough". If our analysis stopped right there, we would already have proven the point. To live in a constant state of "I can never have enough", of constant need, of emptiness of pleasure or value or satisfaction or contentment even in the midst of abundance is a torturous life. This militates directly against a good life for the individual who is greedy. Perhaps this explains the pain that so powerfully misguides them.

Let's assume that at least for a short while, greed meets with a temporary elation, a temporary reprise from that aching, unanswerable emptiness. I suppose it does, which is to say that it is a form of what we now popularly call dopamine addiction. Crave, crave, crave, then numb with a shot of dopamine, only to crave again when the dopamine is metabolized away and another, even stronger hit is required, or a series of small hits renders you comfortably numb.

Comfortably numb does not seem to be the aspiration of the greedy. They forever want more and more, like any narcotics addict, accommodated to each previous exposure and so requiring subsequent exposures to be greater in intensity. For most of us, in our most trying times we may aspire to be comfortably numb instead of in pain, yet even then we know that this falls far short of the enthusiastic love of life we truly wish to feel.

Thus far, we have seen that greed evidences an aching emptiness, and that it can lead to a comfortably numb but empty life, or more likely, an addictive and torturously unfulfilled, discontented life. Yet it doesn't stop there.

Assume once again that each acquisition made in the life of a greedy person precipitates a brief period of contentment, satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment, a boost in self-esteem, and to be honest, esteem in the eyes of others who admire the seemingly positive results of "successful" greed. What then? What happens before the greedy person gets to the inevitable let down and the unstoppable urge to addictively get another, inevitably unfulfilling hit?

One of the earliest, primary, central teachings of Buddhism is that a great deal of suffering comes from misdirected desire, that such desires cannot deliver the happiness they promise, and can instead only lead to more dissatisfaction. Even without the concept of addiction, Buddhism points out that as soon as we have something that we formerly craved, we fear the loss of it, or soon end up craving more of it, or crave something else since what we have obtained so far has done nothing to extinguish our sense of not having enough. It goes on without end. No, Mr. Gekko, greed is not good.

In all of the above, we see that when we desire something inherently unfulfilling, and even when we desire something good but in an excessive way, instead of delivering peace and contentment, we only end up with more discontent, and superficial, fleeting peace at best. So how has greed actually served the greedy? It has not. It has utterly failed. Greed actually serves no one at all.

Even in the extreme case where exceptionally powerful people make lots of greedy gains, not only do they remain in a depleted state of never having enough, encouraged only to get more, not only do they do great harm to others in the process, not only are they wrongly admired and lionized for their so-called accomplishments, but by their conspicuousness they acquire similarly powerful competitors and enemies. What has greed served other than intensified unfulfillment and discord that can reach to the level of ecological destruction, societal harm of immense magnitude, and war?

Lastly, and most importantly, is the concept of opportunity cost. If we commit time and energy and perhaps other resources to A, we surrender the opportunity to invest those same resources into B. Whatever time, thought, money, and other resources one puts into acquiring things that never satisfy anyway, those resources were not made available to the pursuit of something that could have been much more satisfying for the individual and or more valuable to the larger population.

To give but a single and obvious example, if one were to buy yet another piece of expensive and ostentatious jewelry instead of buying lunch for a multitude of homeless people, that is a massive lost opportunity. Whoops. It turns out I can't resist giving a second example. Chose one of these:

Greed is not only bad for depriving others in exchange for the benefit of one who already has much. It is also a profound loss for the one it is meant to serves, as it doesn't serve (if it worked, it would be short-lived instead of chronic), and it lays waste to that person's opportunity to grow as an individual or to help others.