A question about greed

[GliderGuider]

I asked this question in another thread, but I'd like to hear as many thoughts on it as possible so I'm bringing is up as an OP.

The world faces an enormous array of converging problems. We all know the litany:

• Climate change
  
• Deforestation
  
• Topsoil depletion
  
• Fresh water loss
  
• Pollution of all kinds (air, soil, water)
  
• Habitat loss
  
• Global economic instability
  
• Rising energy and food prices
  
• Extinctions, including the depletion of global fisheries
  
• etc.

When we ask why any of these are happening, the usual answer that comes back is "Greed!".

This makes me wonder why it is that we see everything our species does as being greedy (which is quite an emotionally a loaded and judgmental word, btw). I have no doubt that if you asked the workers of the world - the farmers, fishermen, truck drivers, miners, factory workers, the managers of all kinds, and maybe even even the bankers - about their motives for doing what they do, you'd get a fairly standard answer: "I'm trying to give my children a better life than I have."

What makes the difference between how we see them - as greedy - and how we see ourselves - as virtuous?

Is it as simple matter of "me vs. you" as in, "My desires are legitimate, but yours are greedy"? (As an aside, can any of us consider ourselves personally to be greedy on the global stage?) Are we perhaps a broken species, either morally or genetically flawed? Is the problem a lack of education? Or is it something else entirely?

What are your thoughts?

[pscot]

1. Bad genetics

WE are what we are. We just can't help it. Civilization is less than 500 generation old. For 5000 generation before that, our response to problems was to either run away or hit it with a stick. If we could eat it or fuck it, we dragged it home. We've come up on the world and developed inflated notions of just who and what we are. The lowest form of Republican is probably closer to our roots than anyone who posts here.

[GliderGuider]

4. The issue is one of the evolutionary process itself?

Nobody's to blame, we're just operating as designed - the way mother nature organizes life?

I'm interested by your use of the phrase "Bad genetics" - what do you mean by the word "bad?"

[pscot]

8. Bad in a survival sense

Human intelligence looks like becoming an evolutionary cul de sac. I haven't thought this through. It occured to me as a response to your OP. But we're the product of selection, and we have altered our environment to the point where we're on the verge of being selected out. What other conclusion can one draw, except that in terms of natural selection, we're a short-lived accident, and not because of normal, environmental pressures, but because of our own actions. Collectively, we're going to get a Darwin Award

[GliderGuider]

9. OK, I wondered if that was how you meant it

I tend to agree - intelligence of our sort is such a powerful driving force that it would need equally powerful brakes to keep it from doing the damage it has done. We don't have brakes that are up to the task.

Human beings are sort of like Bugatti race cars. According to legend when one of Ettore Bugatti's customers complained about the brakes he was said to have replied, "I make my cars to go, not to stop."

[phantom power]

2. thinking much farther ahead than the next meal has nearly zero evolutionary value

It's common to bemoan humanity's failure to Think Ahead, but in reality, the fact that we can do it at all is quite something. In The Wild, if you disadvantage yourself in the short term, you'll be outcompeted. Any evolutionary programming we have in this respect is going to be all in favor of motivations to grab the immediate advantage.

hyperbolic discount functions, yada yada yada

[GliderGuider]

3. So all this is perfectly normal, then?

Or if "normal" isn't your choice of word, maybe "predictable" or "expectable"?

[phantom power]

6. I guess my answer is "yes"

That doesn't mean we shouldn't fight it. But it does imply that it will be an uphill battle, which I think is pretty well supported by human history so far.

I think it also implies that our best avenue for success is by passing laws. Asking individual people or businesses to do the right thing voluntarily, when the right thing is "consume fewer resources," is essentially asking them to watch as competitors take the advantage by blowing off the right thing.

[reteachinwi]

5. Too much Social Darwinism

Cooperation with and contributions to one's social group has evolutionary advantages as well. Competition between groups has plagued us. We think banksters are greedy and evil as they are destroying us. Teachers (my group) are wise and compassionate but the banksters are destroying us. And so on.

[GliderGuider]

7. Thanks!

It's a real conundrum why our group actions seem dominated by competition while our individual actions show large amounts of altruism. Individual virtue doesn't replicate up the organizational scale, or something.

[pscot]

10. That competitiveness seems to be cultural

and largely a Western European phenomenon. Individualism and the need to excell are cultural factors not univerally shared, at least not to the same degree.. There was something in the European experience of the last few thousand years that enshrined those traits as iconic Western values. They can certainly be traced as far back as Mycenaen culture, but don't appear to the same degree in India and China where collectivism prevailed. It's a long chain of experience that probably goes all the way back to how and where we came out of Africa.

[GliderGuider]

11. That's an interesting point.

But non-competitive cultures tend to get, um, out-competed - and lose access to resources over time. Andrew Schmookler's "Parable of the Tribes" may have been a thinly disguised commentary on modern European imperialism, but there's still a kernel of truth in it:

All of a group of tribes living within reach of each other choose peace. However, if all but one choose peace (i.e. one becomes competitive towards its neighbours), there are four possibilities for the threatened neighbors:

- Destruction.
- Absorption and enslavement.
- Withdrawal to a less desirable place.
- Imitation of the aggressive behavior.

[Shankapotomus]

22. You hit the nail on the head

Groupthink. The group mission is corrupted. As a group we are headed headlong straight off a cliff. And the more of us that are added to the group, the greater our momentum towards the cliff becomes, because inclusion in the group is predicated on an automatic acceptance and compliance with its overall corrupted mission. The only way to slow down progress toward the cliff is for more of us to start favoring our individual actions. To break from the group and do our own thing.

[NoOneMan]

12. Everything wants resources and energy from something else

To everything, the death or destruction of other things to support its life is justified. This much is natural and observable.

What doesn't seem natural is killing & destroying beyond one's needs. Perhaps that is the "greed" part. Do we see lions killing and killing, leaving carcasses to rot? Do animals deprive other creatures of life, for reasons beyond security or energy? Yes, there are exceptions, but it seems the natural world has an "enough" point even if an immediate natural check is not present; of course, long term, culling species unnecessarily will lead to one's own species to be culled if they are a part of the food chain. Did animals evolve to develop this "enough" point after facing famines from reckless behavior? Did we?

I think the problem with humans is that we do not know what we "need" any more, if we ever did. We are so separated--by culture--from a finely tuned system that took billions of years to evolve, that we have no idea how much to take--it often seems like we are taking just the "right" amount personally if we are just getting by. We also don't understand that taking too much impacts the system that supports us as well due to our divorce from nature. We can rationalize our own greed, because our individual taking has little discernible impact; it is the aggregate, non-direct impact that does (which we can harbor hatred against).

[GliderGuider]

15. Do humans need more than 2800 calories a day of food,

plus whatever energy it takes to stay warm and dry?

What is a need? What is "enough"? Are desires ever justified? At what point does desire turn into greed? Is it the same point for everyone?

I agree that we are terribly separated from pretty much everything. From nature, the planet, the cosmos, each other. Is that separation surmountable for any but a small number of us?

[NoOneMan]

17. In general, no

I spent some time trying to get back in the rhythm of things this summer and thought about this. I ended up losing 25 pounds from eating less and spending more time hiking and walking with family. I felt so much better, though I wasn't in bad shape to begin with.

"Need" is what we require to live and reproduce. That is the bottom line. And while I think some "desires" can be justified (like a camp fire), the problem becomes when we stop keeping track of the impact of those desires and get used to them, thereby wanting more to fill that happiness gap with more. If our desires produce harm to an environment quicker than the system can evolve to adapt to our extraction of energy and waste, that's too much desire. With the exponential growth of both people and things to desire, there is no way that a system that took billions of years to tune itself can immediately evolve to maintain homeostasis.

BTW, an interesting though is that all this desire wouldn't be bad if we worked up to it over a billion years, giving the system a chance to evolve. Its all too much change all at once, so the system cannot handle it. That is why this isn't going to end well.

Is that separation surmountable for any but a small number of us?

That's a million dollar question. If we were to revert back to 2000 "safe-ish" emission levels and everyone met in the middle, we would all be sharing a standard of living with Zimbabwe, and surely we would desire "more". If we cannot figure out how to curb our "desires", this planet may not be able to support more than a billion people (namely, those in the first world). But fortunately, I've been told we can want everything and have everything once technology figures out how to let us. Of course, before technology can, we have to break a few eggs.

What could possibly happen is that only a few get their infinite desires fulfilled while the environment kills off the rest or sends them into a primitive life. As long as you believe you get to be one of those few who gets to maintain their separation from nature, then climate change is no big deal.

[GliderGuider]

21. Crashing back to a Zimbabwean standard of living would be catastrophic

And not just the crash itself, which would be bad enough. The aftermath could be even worse as the whole species scrambled to regain its former glory - that's the real Mad Max recipe.

The future won't happen like that, of course - just as it won't happen exactly as any of us might imagine, whether we are cornucopians or doomitarians. One thing we can count on is surprise... surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Two things we can count on are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Three things we can count on are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to Progress....

[Fumesucker]

13. Greed...

That degree of acquisitiveness which will cause a person to knowingly and deliberately cause harm to other unconsenting person or persons solely in order to enrichen or empower themselves.

[GliderGuider]

14. If we harm others without knowing we're doing it, is it still greed?

Also, what if they are not "persons" - say they are animal species like cattle or chickens?

[Fumesucker]

16. I pointed out when it's *definitely* greed..

We all cause harm to others at some point I think, no one is perfect but when you do it knowingly and deliberately and for the sole purpose of your own benefit then that's my personal definition of greed.

Other cases can be argued on the particular merits, do you have some additional quibbles with what I posted?

[GliderGuider]

19. Actually, I don't have any quibbles at all with what you posted.

I'm just poking around asking the questions that come up for me when I read the thoughts on the thread. There are so many good thoughts posted here, and I like following the threads they create. E&E is home to some really good, deep thinkers, and I was hoping to elicit some of that. I didn't mean to sound critical, it's just exploratory.

[The2ndWheel]

18. Death by a thousand improvements?

Starts as simple survival, then turns into a quest to cure death. For that to happen, something has to die. That's the balance. The more we do, the greater the array of converging problems.

Not a broken species, morally, or genetically. Just the culminating effect of ever increasing increments of success. If the 1% hoards all the wealth, the economy doesn't work right. If humans hoard the planet, it's not going to work right.

[GliderGuider]

20. Yes, that's my take on how we got here.

Do you have any ideas as to why we work that way? Why do we want to make a thousand improvements, why do we want to cure death? Is the process inevitable? If not, could we have kept it from going off the rails?

[CRH]

23. Until humans think and act communally, ...

not just to other humans but the biosphere and environment as well, individuals are destined to experience not just greed, but denial of their greed. Greed should not be thought of as just a material condition, but inclusive of actions as well. An example, over populating is an action that affects future conditions that all must survive.

A few of the points I would make on individual or group greed would be, ...

~~ Much of our greed is derived from hoarding today to increase security for tomorrow. The maintenance of wealth in whatever form, places us in the conundrum, of what is greed. If I provide for my future am I more greedy than providing for my family's future? If I provide for my future at a softer level of living than the poorest in my community, is this greed?

~~ Is it even possible to seek or maintain wealth, without experiencing greed? If wealth is described as anything more than what is needed for today's survival, is greed an inevitable experience ingrained in the human condition when we left the migratory hunter gatherer method of living?

~~ At the dawn of civilization, with new frontiers in all directions in a world of plenty, was the simple act of acquiring and maintaining wealth, greed? At what point in collecting wealth does greed start? When private or group ownership prevents others from sustenance or at least, requires them to migrate to secure sustenance?

~~ Greed is obviously magnified in a world with less space and resource. Is positioning oneself, family, or group to increase the odds of survival, greed? Are the fruits of industriousness to be compared with laziness and frivolous expenditure of time, energy and resource? At what point does the earned bounty of some become a communal obligation to others?

~~ How much or when, does the instinct of individual survival temper the rights of the community? Are the actions improving the odds of survival, at the cost of an greater than per capita distribution of resource, greed or an innate instinct for survival?

~~ What determines greed, consciousness of the action? If a person has money and invests it in the broad market to secure the means to a modest future, and is 'knowingly' funding commerce, industry and consumption that is over heating the planet and limiting the future for generations to come, is this greed?

~~ If a person or group views private property as a stewardship of the land, preserving the resource and environment, then sells to provide secure future funds while knowing McMansions will likely be the outcome, has this action fulfilled the instinct for survival or consummated the components of greed?

I could go on an on with these thoughts and queries, and still, anyone reading this post would have a list of their own to add. Most anyone could make a case that many of the above points were individually justifiable. Therein is our egotistical preservation, exercising denial.

Whenever a human rises beyond a state of ego, it could be argued, they are no longer sociologically, human. It could be argued, greed is a natural function of ego, increasing the odds of survival.

[GliderGuider]

24. Thank you!

What an insightful and provocative set of questions!

Your last comment resonates with me personally: "Whenever a human rises beyond a state of ego, it could be argued, they are no longer sociologically human."

We have defined the state of being human in very anthropocentric and culture-centric terms. It seems to me that definition includes operating from the ego. Those who transcend ego, whether we call them saints, sages or fools, seem to us mortals to have transcended their humanity. Those who withdraw from the victory dance of desire and denial, selfishness and altruism, politics and power, but do not become victims in the process are seen instead as vehicles for something larger than the merely human.

But of course those saints, sages and fools know they still use energy and impact the environment: "Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water..."

[CRH]

25. Thank You! I absolutely love ...

the quote in the final paragraph. Such economy of words to capture the profound essence.

Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water...