Where does greed come from? What makes us greedy? If I may be allowed to propose my own little theory – If you look around the animal kingdom you will see that many predatory animals don’t get 3 square meals a day. They’ll make a kill once a week, once a month sometimes even once every six months and as a consequence they have to gorge themselves on their prey as they don’t know when their next meal will come along. If any rival tries to steal their food they will defend it to the utmost as their possession. I imagine that when we were living the hunter-gatherer existence we lived an opportunistic lifestyle similar to that. A small band of hunters would chance upon a mammoth or some such and the community would feast on it. If a rival tribe came to try to share or steal it they would be repelled as certainly as possible. As society evolved and we became farmers we’ve retained some of those hoarding instincts and they have evolved into greed.
We all exhibit signs of greed to a greater or lesser extent. We all own things we don’t need. It is a natural instinct for all of us to get as far away from poverty as we can, it’s a basic survival instinct to make sure we have ‘enough.’ Most of us won’t get the opportunity to take that to excess, but would we if we had that chance? Would we draw the line and say, “I have enough now; I don’t need to gather more.” According to Wikipedia the world’s richest man is Warren Buffet who has $62 billion. He’s 79 years old. I think he’ll struggle to spend all his money before he dies even if he tries really hard. I think his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren would struggle to make a dent before they die. Bill Gates comes in third with $58 billion. These individuals and others are richer than a good number of the World’s poorest nations and yet they feel justified in their wealth. Consider the billions they have and then consider that 40% of the world’s population have to live on less than $2 a day. Even with this scant evidence it would be possible to suggest that these people have got so rich at the expense – directly or indirectly – of other people.
The 1886 US court case Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the human rights and protections afforded to individuals, and thus began the rise of corporate culture where big companies are offered the same protections as people are, but aren’t subject to criminal law. Where companies have grown to be international (helped in no small part by the above case) they can sit above local law and seemingly do as they want. This leads to massive companies and corporations which can make or break governments and buy out poorer countries as they will. This type of greed leaves me even more baffled. I can at some level understand why an individual may amass wealth, but why people would work so hard to make a concept (a company) so hugely wealthy is beyond me. What good it does for this company (which isn’t a person regardless of what the law says) to horde such resources is baffling to me, but again it’s done at the expense of millions of people worldwide.
Can I just say at this point that there’s nothing wrong with being rich. It’s your attitude to what you have which can get you into trouble. Jesus told a story about a man who harvested a huge crop and built bigger barns to store it all in so he could take it easy for a while when all around him his neighbours and people in his community would have been going hungry and struggling to make ends meet. God took a very dim view of that man’s actions. I said in an earlier blog that the popular saying ‘Money is the root of all evil’ is a misquote.
And while we’re mis-quoting other people, Margaret Thatcher used a John Wesley quote to justify some of her economic policies. Wesley said, “Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can,” and she used that to justify people making as much money as they could in the 1980s. But consider that he also said, “When I have money, I get rid of it quickly, lest it find a way into my heart.”
We’re on a roll with the quotes now, have another one. Friedrich Koenig, the inventor of the high speed printing press said,”We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.”
And to end with here’s a Native American proverb.
A Native American grandfather talking to his young grandson tells the boy he has two wolves inside of him struggling with each other. The first is the wolf of peace, love and kindness. The other wolf is fear, greed and hatred. "Which wolf will win, grandfather?" asks the young boy. "Whichever one you feed," is the reply.”
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