GIVING GREED A BAD NAME

People have waged a hate campaign against individual liberty since biopoiesis began. A plant rootlet, a bacteria, the most primitive animal has at the heart of their survival extraction of nutrients from the environment. If there is competition, there is greed—the one who gets what they need survives and the one who doesn’t dies. Darwinian simplicity; unfortunately we have burdened the word ‘greed’ with the connotation of being bad or evil. To survive is good, not evil.  We do not teach our children to be greedy yet some of them grow up to be greedy, which means to me that greed in a fundamental trait locked into our genes. However, when we examine what we mean by greed in the land of plenty, we divide the desire to control resources into two conditions; enough resources to survive verses accumulation of excesses above what we need to survive. The definition of resources is broad: power, territory, food, oil, and water, but all of this centers on one thing, which is survival.

If resources are scarce, we are willing to let someone else die to ensure that we have enough; in fact, we do not even allow those kinds of thought into our heads; our self-interest is so focused, the fact that other people might die is not even considered. As human beings, we are adept at expanding the “I” of a primitive organism into the “editorial we” of man going from an individual, to a mother-child unit, to a family, to kin, to tribe, political party, state, and nation. Orson Wells’ “War of the World” made us realize that we will even unite as humankind: to fight aliens to the death for resources.

We have not coined words to divide these entirely different settings even though the difference is enough to lead to fighting and even wholesale killing. We do not see ourselves as greedy if we are fighting for resources if we need to survive, using “we” in all the senses of the word mentioned. We see the effort as honorable and patriotic. There is no single word to differentiate those who accumulate or desire to accumulate resources in excess. Such people are still just greedy; hence, or somehow inferior or even despicable.

In that vain, there is the complication of those who have the resources as looking at accumulation of resources in excess as a reward for hard work; the bigger the bank account the more successful; something young people envied and copied. The best hunter had more meat, which made him or her, the envy of the tribe thus something a source of pride.  However, primitive man could not accumulate meat. In addition, in a world of scarce resources, there was no natural selection to cause a hunter-gatherer to select against that kind of behavior. Stimulated by pride but uninhibited by inbred genetic survival behavior, modern man convinced himself that paper and coin are the meat equivalent; therefore, a commodity that would not rot; thus, avoided the problem. People could accumulate money in great excess.

This accumulation of resources beyond what is needed to survive is what gives “greed” a bad name. It is what makes greed a pejorative term. It causes those who do not have enough to survive in an economically deprived world to become angry: no jobs, no health care, no pension, no affordable education, etc. More and more it is what is defining the United States politically. It is the George W. Bush’s “haves verses the have nots”, and the 1% verses the 99%. It is Mitt Romney’s 47%. It is the Ayn Rand political divide between the “producers” and the “takers”. My point is that “it” is part of our everyday life but we do not have a single term for “it” unless we want to tag it with the name of the political party that endorse the concept: Republicanism. 

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