Greed – Personality & Spirituality | Futurist Transhuman News Blog

GREED is one ofseven basic character flaws or dark personality traits. We all have the potential for greedy tendencies, but in people with a strong fear of lack or deprivation, Greed can become a dominant pattern.

Greed is the tendency to selfish craving, grasping and hoarding. It is defined as:

A selfish or excessive desire for more than is needed or deserved, especially of money, wealth, food, or other possessions [1]

Other names for greed include avarice, covetousness and cupidity.

Selfish and excessive desireis widelyconsidered immoral, a violation of natural or divine law. For example, avariceis one of the seven deadly sinsin Catholicism (avarice:pleasing oneself withmaterial acquisitions and possessions instead of pleasingGod). And according to Buddhism, cravingis a fundamental hindrance to enlightenment (craving:compulsively seeking happiness through acquiring material things).

As with the opposite chief feature of self-destruction, greed stems from a basic fearof life. To be exact, greed is driven by a fundamental sense of deprivation, a need for something that islacking orunavailable.

When this feeling of lack is particularly strong, a personcan become utterly fixated on seeking what they need,always trying to get hold oftheone thing that will finally eliminate the deep-rooted feeling of not having enough.

That one thing could be money, power, sex, food, attention, knowledge just about anything. It could be something concrete or abstract, real or symbolic. But it will be something very specific on which the entire need-greed complex becomes fixated.

Once that happens, life becomes aquest to acquire as much of it as possible.

Like all chief features, greed involves the following components:

In the case of greed, the early negative experiences typically consist of insufficient or inadequate nurturing in early childhood, perhaps enough to threaten the childs survival.

All infants are born with a natural desire for love, nurture, care, attention and interaction. In some cases, however, thesourceof such thingsnotably the caregivermay be absent or unavailable. Perhaps not all of the time, but enough for the infant to experience the lack. Enough for the child to become terrified of never getting enough of what he or she needs.

The situation could be natural and unavoidable, likethe untimely death of a parent, or living through a time of famine. Alternatively, the situation could be deliberately imposed, such as willful neglect.

Another example would be a mother who is too off-her-head on drugs to look after her child.

Whatever the circumstances, the effect on the child is a sense of deprivation, unfulfilled need, of never having enough.

Another common factor in the formationof greed is the availability of substitutes. Imagine, for example, aparentwho fails to provide nurturing but out of guilt provides lots of gifts in the form of money, toys, chocolate, TV. In effect, the parent says You cannot have me, you cannot have what you really need, but hey you can have this instead.

Ultimately, the substitute is always inadequate. No amount of TV can make up for lack of human contact. No amount of chocolate can make up for lack of love. But the child learns to make do with whatever is available.

From such experiences of deprivation and lack, achild comes to perceive life as being unreliable and limited but also containing the missing ingredient for happiness:

My well-being depends on me getting all that I desire.

I cannot truly be myself, a whole person, until I get what has always been missing.

Life is limited. There isnt enough for everyone. I miss out because other people are taking my share, getting what is rightfully mine.

Once I have it all, I will never lack anything ever again.

Over time, the growing child might also become cynical about what life has to offer:

All I ever get are unsatisfactory substitutes.

I cannot trust anyone to give me what I need.

If I am given a gift, there must be something wrong with it.

Everything falls short of my requirements.

Based on the above misconceptions and early negative experiences, the child becomes gripped by a specific kind of fear. In this case, the fear is of lackof having to go without something essential as there may not be enough of it to go around.

What exactly it is depends upon the individuals own idea of what it is they really need, but it will be something specific like love, attention, power, fame, money, and so on.

Because of this constant fear, the individual will obsessively crave the needed thing. They will also tend to envy those who have that thing.

The basic strategy for coping with this fear of lack is to acquire, possess and hoard the needed thing. Typically this involves:

Finally, emerging into adulthood, the chief feature of greed puts on a socially-acceptable mask which says to the world, I am not selfish. I am not greedy. I am not doing this for me. See how generous I am. See how my possessions make other people happy. In fact, the greedy person is never happy so long as the possibility of lack remains.

The mask of greed can also manifest as criticism of others greed or selfishness. The chief feature thinks to itself: If it isnt socially acceptable to crave and grasp and hoard, I shall go around criticising others who crave and grasp and hoard more obviously than me. That way, people wont suspect how bad I really am.

All people are capable of this kind of behaviour. When it dominates the personality, however, one is said to have a chief feature of greed.

Because the compulsion of greed is usually driven by some early, traumatising sense of deprivation that may be lost to memory, it often manifests only later in childhood, adolescence and adulthood as one of our most essential survival instincts comes into play: competition.

Competition for resources is a universal instinct and one of the most important factors in biology. Different species can compete for the same watering hole, for example. Within the same species, males can compete for the same female, or for top dog position.

At an instinctive level we are still like hunter-gatherers who survive against the odds by making sure we have what we need. The cave-dweller within us is still primed to hunt, catch, gather and hoard.

We are also a tribal species who will instinctively take from other tribes as a desperate measure to feed our own. This is pretty much what all post-apocalyptic movies are showing us: take away civilisation, and we soon return to acting like animals. (Except that animals, of course, animals dont usually take more than they need. Its not a very efficient use of energy.)

Lets now unpack the elements of greed in action to illustrate how it works and what it feels like.

Compelling need

By definition, greed is a compelling need to constantly acquire, consume or possess more of something than is actually necessary or justifiable. You would experience this subjectively as an all-consuming lust, hunger or craving for something (money, sex, food, power, fame, etc). This might be triggered by suddenly seeing the object of your desire, or an opportunity to go after it. Underlying the desire, however, is a terrible insecurity, a primal fear of lack or deprivation, though this is likely to be more unconscious than conscious. On the surface there is just the compulsion to satisfy the need.

Risky commitment

When the need is being strongly felt, you become compelled to commit a great deal of time and energy to seeking and acquiring your thing, setting all else aside. The only clear course of action, it seems, is to try and satisfy this longing because, after all, it promises to give you that long-lost sense of security.

Others might question your peculiar commitment and determination, given that it seems you are willing to risk everything over this personal obsession. But you can always find a way to argue the case: This is important to me. It will make me happy. It will make you happy too. And if I do happen to end up with more than I need, Ill just give some away Everybody will thank me for it!

Brief gratification

Sometimes you might achieve success in getting what you seek. And in those moments when the elusive object of your desire is actually in your hands you experience truly intoxicating feelings of triumph and relief.

However, these gratifying moments are all too brief You feel that the win was just not enough. In fact, there is no such thing as enough.

Despite all your best efforts, and despite every success, an abiding sense of security or fulfilment is never reached. The overwhelming desire is literally insatiable so long as the underlying fear is never addressed.

Harsh realities

You may then experience frustration at the transience of such pleasure, especially given the investment of time and energy. (Was it really worth it?)

You may experience shame and guilt over the damaging effects of your actions upon your relationships, reputation, financial security, etc. (What was I thinking? Im hurting the very people I love. Im ruining my life when its all been going so well.)

You may feel overwhelming anxiety over the uncertain future (Im on a slippery slope to hell).

All of this has the effect of evoking fear and insecurity, and a compelling need to fill that hole, and so the cycle begins again.

You might experience all these at some level at once, or have different ones in your foreground at different times. Still, it is very comparable to a cycle of addiction, in that the desire becomes harder and harder to satisfy, so the target level of a win or a fix keeps going up, which in turn requires more and more investment of time, energy and money.

There is also a greater cost to self-esteem, as you become more and more enslaved to the need. And of course, a greater cost to ones other commitments, such as career and relationships, which compete for the same time and energy.

By way of illustration, I came across this NY Times article by a guy called Sam Polk [2], a former hedge-fund trader, who describes the greed pattern in his own experience:

In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million and I was angry because it wasnt big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.

An obsessive pursuit of wealth not only taps into our competitive survival instinct very neatly seeking, hunting, catching, hoarding, winning, stealing if necessary It also MAGNIFIES the sensations involved (desperation, excitement, thrill, triumph, reward) and it ACCELERATES the whole cycle, from what may have been days, weeks and even months (to acquire enough food to get through winter, say) to hours, minutes or even seconds (to win a jackpot).

When I walked onto that trading floor for the first time and saw the glowing flat-screen TVs, high-tech computer monitors and phone turrets with enough dials, knobs and buttons to make it seem like the cockpit of a fighter plane, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It looked as if the traders were playing a video game inside a spaceship; if you won this video game, you became what I most wanted to be rich.

The satisfaction, he says, wasnt just about the money. Soon, it was more about the power.

Because of how smart and successful I was, it was someone elses job to make me happy.

Note the sense of entitlement to being looked after, a common factor in many forms of greed.

In the case of greed, the positive pole is a state which may be referred to as DESIRE, EGOISM or APPETITE, while the negative pole is one of VORACITY or GLUTTONY.

Egoism (not to be confused with egotism) is state of self-centred acquisitiveness: I will have what I want and need. It is the opposite of altruism.

Why is this a positive pole? Because in moderation, satisfying ones own needs and desires is part of what life is about. We are not all here to be self-sacrificing saints. We are here to make choices, and most of our choices will be driven by our own needs and desires. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having a healthy appetite. In fact, it is healthier to be driven by ones desires rather than ones fears.

Voracity or gluttony is a state of excessive egoism, unjustified acquisitiveness. Not only does it cause one to acquire more than is ever going to be necessary, it can also lead to others being deprived of the same thing.

Moreover, once the negative pole of greed takes control of the personality, it does not care who it hurts in the process of getting what it needs. All things are secondary to the fear of lack. This is why, of all the chief features, greed is the hardest on others in ones life.

Greed isnt simply naked selfishness. It is multi-faceted and multi-layered, with elements that may be buried far below the level of everyday awareness. So if one is to get on top of a pattern of greed then one ought to consider this complexity.

Here are some suggestions, in no particular order:

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/greed