Do We Have a Problem with Greed?
In an earlier posting [1], I explore the matter of why it is that people sometimes do not know what they want. In this posting, I consider some of the consequences of that condition.
For some affiliated with the Democratic Party, a primary causal factor in explaining a wide range of social problems is greed, most notably corporate greed. For good reason, the private for-profit corporation is considered essentially the institutional form greed takes in contemporary society. The power of the corporation in society is, then, the power of greed.
Greedy desire has no limits and because of this it can never be satisfied by any finite, real thing.
Because of this, the power of corporations can be held accountable for many of the problems that urgently need attention, problems such as poverty, income and employment insecurity, the high cost of health care, and environmental degradation. There is nothing fanciful in this assessment given that corporations have a significant legal obligation to their shareholders to enhance the value and profitability of their investments. In other words, they are essentially designed as instruments to express the greedy desire of their owners. Yet, while we may think we know what we are talking about when we refer to greed, and that we therefore understand what drives corporate conduct, there is an important sense in which we do not know greed and because of that our diagnosis of the problem is at best incomplete.
We do not know greed because we do not know what the greedy want. After all, greed is, by definition, endless. Greedy desire has no limits and because of this it can never be satisfied by any finite, real thing. So, its end cannot be to consume or use anything in particular and gain satisfaction from doing so. When we are driven by greedy desire, nothing we might acquire can satisfy our want or fill the empty space within. The power of greed over us indicates, then, the presence of a problem in our relationship with our wants. In an important sense, the greedy do not know what they want.
If greed means we do not know what we want, then it is not surprising that, in our effort to determine what it is that we want, when driven by greed we turn to others to guide us. We may not know what we want, but we think we know what others want: they want what they have. So, the greedy want whatever someone else has. As a result, greed turns toward envy. We envy in others their presumed ability to identify what they want and the possibility of satisfaction that goes with knowing what they want. What they have that we do not have is the possibility of satisfaction. The greedy appropriation of things is our way of managing our envy of others for knowing what they want. If we can make all the good things, which are the things others want, our own, we can transfer our envy to them; we can make them envy us. In employing this strategy, we turn feelings of deprivation into an attack on others.
To the extent that this is the case, those who see in greed the source of many social problems would seem to be on the right track. Greed does have considerable potential for harm as it clearly fosters conflict over the ownership of the good things. This has another important implication: the urge to find the locus of greed outside ourselves so we will not be responsible for its destructive consequences. Corporations, their owners, and their managers offer an attractive target for this transfer of responsibility for our greed.
The human creature does not start out its life with a well-developed notion that there are such things as other people whose wants also deserve attention.
Greed puts in an appearance early in the expression of human desire. Or, more precisely, the behavior we later associate with greed puts in an appearance then. This is because the infant or young child has no notion of sharing, nor much, if any, concern for the wellbeing of others. The human creature does not start out its life with a well-developed notion that there are such things as other people whose wants also deserve attention. How this notion develops makes a difference. The more parents experience the absence of any concern for their needs on the part of their children as an attack, which is to say the more they project their own greed onto the behavior of their children, the more their children will come to experience their need as an assault and, as a result, later in life to experience want as a destructive force in the world.
When parents relate to their children’s need as an all-consuming destructive force, and let them know it, they make wanting problematic. “Greed” is the word we attach to this problematic quality of want. When the child’s attitude toward his or her want is equated with adult greed, need satisfaction becomes a struggle rather than a natural response to neediness, and, as a result, children will follow their parents in identifying neediness with greed. The phenomena we associate with greed come to be associated with our desire to have something (anything) of our own, which is to say something from which others are excluded. Ambivalence about need means ambivalence about having something of our own.
Parents are, of course, only human, so that, especially as their children mature, they cannot always suspend their own need on demand. Failure to do so is not necessarily a bad thing. Rather, it can be an important part of the way the child’s connection with the parent evolves into a real relationship between separate persons. Without this evolution, the child does not gain the emotional capacity to live his or her own life independently of the relationship with the parent, as a life involving needs of his or her own. A problem arises when the relationship with the parent is, from the outset, grounded in too much ambivalence about wants. When it is, it creates a deeply ambivalent attitude toward want in the child. This attitude, when transmitted across generations, establishes ambivalence about want as a truth that transcends the individual and becomes a significant cultural reality.
If what we want is to have something of our own, and if that is experienced by others as an attack, then we must put our want out of mind so that we can disconnect ourselves from it. When we do this, the result is that we do not know what we want. As I suggest above, not knowing what we want can lead us to look to others and to want what they want. This then leads us to define the good as those things others have. Our problem is not to acquire the things we want for ourselves but to acquire the things others want for themselves.
One response to this situation is to renounce our desire for the good things. When wanting is too closely identified with envy, the best defense is not to want very much. So, we refuse to have any of the good that is not also available to everyone else.
One response to this situation is to renounce our desire for the good things. When wanting is too closely identified with envy, the best defense is not to want very much. So, we refuse to have any of the good that is not also available to everyone else. This is not about generosity and sharing, but about the inability to feel a significant degree of comfort in wanting and having something of our own, which is also the starting point for feeling comfort in sharing what we have with others. Envy does not overwhelm our relation to our need where our need is separated from what others need. So, if we know what we want, our experience of others having and owning things does not provoke envy and is not a defense against envy.
My point in emphasizing the importance of being able to pursue satisfaction of our own wants is not to argue for the moral superiority of self-interest over concern for others, but to suggest that the lack of concern for others follows from ambivalence about having wants of our own. Our capacity to have any concern for the wellbeing of others begins with the lessening of the urge to make our own wellbeing inseparable from that of others, as it is when we must search for clues about what we want in what others want. In other words, if concern for others depends on moderating the power of greed in our personality, it depends on our ability to know our own wants and feel empowered to seek the objects that will satisfy them.
Is it possible that the for-profit corporation can be conceived not primarily as the instantiation of greed, but as a vehicle for assuring the possibility that we can have and satisfy wants of our own, or, perhaps more realistically, that the latter goal, rather than greed, can come to play the dominant role in corporate affairs? The answer, I think, is that this is only possible so far as, in society, the need to use corporations as containers for greedy desire weakens, which can only happen when the power of greed in society lessens.
The problem, then, is not in the corporation, but in the power of greed in society as a whole. The power of greed in society is proportional to the dominance in human relations of ambivalence about want, which is the power of the idea that childhood need should be understood in the adult language of greed so that adults use children to contain through projection their greed and, by so doing, assure the intergenerational transmission of ambivalence about want that makes it a social reality.
[1] https://oncaring.org/blog/h3cm5slvey2a940suo7v00t7fu034g