Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.
——Mahatma Gandhi
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There was another thing that Styx said to me at the Cracker Barrel restaurant the other day that surprised me. He asked if I had seen an interview with Stephen Hawking where Hawking had said that man’s existence on Earth was doomed because of his greed.
“Ain’t that the truth!’ he had exclaimed in that Virginian country twang. Maybe I was surprised to hear the Hawking reference or just the thought about greed which pretty much jibed with my own. Whatever, it made me think this morning.
Throughout history, from the Greeks onward, we have been warned of the dangers of our own greed. It has been the cause of most if not all wars and many of the great injustices of history. Our history of slavery here in the US was the result of greed.
Yet, greed never ceases, never slows a bit in our species. We fail to see it in ourselves, blinded by our own rationalizations about our perceived need for more and more. I remember at the height of the financial disaster of 2008, hearing an interview with an anonymous hedge fund trader. Just a trader and not a manager, he was pulling in about $10 million a year. Had been making it for quite a few years. He said he had more money now than he could spend, perhaps for all the rest of his life. But when asked if it was enough, he very coldly answered that no, it was not. He needed more money.
That interview scared me more than all the other revelations about the abuses in the financial world that were coming out every day at the time. It wasn’t an action that could be simply corrected but an entrenched mindset, one filled with a greed that can’t be swayed and one that trumps all virtue. It was a mindset that took the human need to better one’s self to the furthest most extreme excess. And we had started to accept this mindset as the norm.
The “greed is good” mantra of Gordon Gecko had become gospel. I’ll get mine and damn the consequences.
Think about it. What awful thing hasn’t been the result of greed of some sort? And what are we doing to avert this tidal wave of greed that is swallowing us whole?
Nothing. If you aren’t grabbing all you can, you’re considered a sucker and if you try to do something about other’s lust for more, you’re considered anti-capitalist. Socialist. Commie.
There has to be middle ground somewhere, where common sense and moderation prevails. Where it is and how to get there, I haven’t a clue except to try to keep my wants to a minimum and savor what I do have. My grass is green enough here on my side of the fence, thank you.
Thanks for the thought provocation, Styx.
Redtree Times 