Greed

In contemporary social thought, still significantly defined by romantic era social constructs, greed is perceived as an especially loathsome human tendency. Other Deadly Sins, by contrast, appear to have lost much their deadliness. Gluttony and sloth, for example, have become commonplace to a degree previously unknown in human history; they are everywhere perceived in the flabby contours of our pale and adipose nation. Normative and culture-bound, they have lost their potential to dismay. Lust has evolved away its significance, like human body hair, as we tend to think of sexual desire as a good thing in all but a very few circumstances. For the record I'm relatively cool with that; puritanism is, after all, the force that propels licentiousness.

But greed maintains a hold on our psychological need to find fault in others. Every age has to have some characteristic, some fault, that the majority of people can hold high in the scornful appraisal of others. Liberals love greed for the same reason that conservatives love homosexuality: it permits them to sit in self-righteous judgment of people afflicted with faults from which they perceive themselves to be exempt. How savory it is for the deaf to judge the blind! For the tall to judge the short!

An archetype woven by the spinnerets of the 21st Century American mind is that of the greedy entrepreneur. In our heads is this template of a talkative, wheeling-dealing businessman who tirelessly accumulates wealth and prestige. He lives in a spacious home, he drives a luxury car, he has a beautiful trophy wife and tow-headed children who smell only of fabric softener. His media avatar in popular culture gets what he deserves: His wife has an affair with a blue collar worker (one of us!) and his children get addicted to methamphetamine. Eventually he goes to jail for accumulating bad karma because it is impossible to get wealthy, say the poets, without the exploitation of others.

Because this idea has its roots in the 19th Century, it applies only to the upwardly mobile middle class. The poor are nobler for ill-defined reasons and therefore not subject to this kind of moral weakness. Those who are born wealthy perceive themselves to be bound by their exalted nature to right the injustice of The Creator. They strive to alleviate the middle class of their unperceived guilt, extracting their wealth and redistributing it to the lowly. Noblesse, after all, oblige.

Much to the irritation of my friends, I view mankind as basically good, and the poor neither morally superior nor inferior to the rich. Nobleness is a guilt offering of the rich to the poor, a surrogate for the wealth that the poor would rather have. "I'm keeping my money," say the elite, "but trust me, you're better than me." If we are all really of one substance, it does not make sense to say that one class of people is exempt from certain kinds of faults and another is disproportionately afflicted. Despite our generally good nature, we all have a similar tendency toward the Deadly Sins, no matter what our demographic.

To the binary American mind the poor are incapable of greed because shucks, they don't have anything! The rich, on the other hand, have to be greedy because they have so much. But to me, greed has little to do with how much you have or how much you lack, it is much simpler than that, for one's means are affected by innumerable factors. The Deadly Sins, on the other hand, are engraved on the reverse side of human nature. Greed is not about how much you have, but how you get what you have.

If a person gives something of value to get something of value, who is the victim? If a singer has a beautiful voice and she charges us fifteen dollars for a CD, we readily pay it, for her songs give us pleasure. If she gets very wealthy by selling millions of CDs, what has she done wrong? If a physician studies hard in medical school, works endless hours in residency and fellowship, pulls himself out of bed in the middle of the night to see emergency cases in the hospital, why is it evil for him to live in a big beautiful home and have a beautiful wife and impossibly cute children? To whom do the lives of the singer and physician belong? They have invested years of their lives in the cultivation of talent, knowledge and skill and they deserve to get a fair price for the products of their life's work.

If, on the other hand, a manufacturer knowingly sells an inferior product and quickly grows wealthy, that is greedy. In the orthodox doctrine of the Left, this sort of thing happens all the time. In reality it is rare, because it does not take long for consumers to realize a product is of poor quality, or of a quality less than the price would justify, and then to stop buying it. Liberals, like Conservatives, give themselves over so completely to their doctrines that no amount of evidence to the contrary will dissuade them.

And yes the poor, being fully human, are also quite capable of greed. If a man is paid a salary to do a job and he avoids his duties, he is greedy, for he is not giving something of value (work) to get something of value (money). If a poor man feigns an illness to acquire a disability pension, he is greedy, even though the pension may be barely enough to live on. If a man gets laid off and he does not seek work until the unemployment benefits are about to run out, he is demonstrating a manifestation of greed. The only definition of Greed that stands up to the cool fluorescent light of reason is the desire to obtain something while intentionally giving something of lesser value in return.

Is it not greedy to have great wealth and not share it? No, I believe that is called being stingy or miserly or avaricious. But when the wealthy acquire political power from the poor in exchange for plundering the wealth of the middle class, that appears to conform to an accurate definition of greed. After all, the rich do not help the poor so much with their own money but with that of people of less means. Rather than give something of value to get something of equal value, the politician gets something of value (power) in exchange for something that has no value to him: someone else's wealth. Let us conduct a thought experiment: Has there ever been a wealthy political person so concerned for the poor that the individual gave away most of his or her possessions and then had to move into a modest apartment and eat ordinary foods? There must be such a case, but I do not know of it. It is not rare for a very wealthy individual to write a check for a million dollars here and a million dollars there, but when you are worth 40 million it doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice; you still live in opulence. If you make a hundred thousand dollars a year, though, and the government takes a third of it, your lifestyle is dramatically affected.

So in review, we find that:
1. Some poor people seek to give something of little value to them, political power, for the wealth of the middle class; therefore those people may well be greedy. The value of a living wage is forty hours a week of work, not standing in line for thirty minutes to vote.
2. Many wealthy people give other people's money for power; they are also greedy. They are stingy as well because they are unwilling the part with their own wealth.
3. Many middle class people may be stingy because they do not want to part with their wealth, but the rich use the power of the state bartered to them by the poor to take it anyway. It is hard to feel sorry for the middle class though because they usually vote for the same people who use force to deprive them of their money.

Whether the object of desire is wealth or power, we define greed as using force or deception to give something of lesser value for something of higher value. So again, greediness refers to the manner in which someone gets what he or she has, not how much or how little a person has.

Copyright 2011 Robert Albanese