April 09, 2005

Greed & Mental Illness


Scrooge McDuck

Why is it that so many people advance serious political, social, and philosophical justifications for avarice? What is it about accumulation of wealth that drives humanity to rationalize and promote it? Don’t we normally call extreme behaviors ‘disorders’? Moreover, why do we so readily excuse excessive Greed from the social damage it causes and not the other vices or behaviors? More often than not, we blame the system for hindering this pursuit of money! Can you imagine us blaming society for hindering other addictions?

Let’s look at some other every-day normal behaviors, that when taken to extremes, have often-devastating effects on their possessors and/or those around them, but we do not ever condone such extremes. In these cases, we consider these conditions to be addictions, based on a psychological or medical disorder, and sometimes both. Why isn’t extreme Greed a considered a disease as well?

We know that everyone needs some basic necessities to survive, and a few luxuries aren’t bad either. Life is about more than just survival, and some added pleasure is always a welcome thing. Money is one of the necessities that we need, at least in the present, to acquire the more basic necessities we need for survival, plus a little for the pleasure part, too. We need food, sex/love, health, and a positive self-image to live well. Is anyone excusing the extremes of these behaviors?

You may know an obese person, or one who cannot stop themselves from eating, perhaps even a bulimic or anorexic that refuses to hold down food or eat altogether. These are horrible diseases. There are no Senators making political speeches in support of it, nor does the Wall Street Journal write scathing editorials against those who oppose eating disorders. There are no Nobel Prize Laureates, feted with honors and the praises of the clamoring masses, delivering philosophical thesis work on the benefits of obesity, gluttony, and self-mortification. Yet, they wax prolific when it comes to extolling the virtues and benefits of Greed.

There are also people addicted to sex. Sex is necessary for most people and, last I checked, it’s still quite enjoyable. What if you’re a person who is addicted to sex and cannot get enough sex? What if your every waking hour is spent thinking about sex, perhaps browsing porn and masturbating, or soliciting prostitutes? What if you are promiscuous and endanger the health of others? What if you caused a family to break up because of your addiction? That is, like it or not, a common problem with serious social ramifications. Where are the grandiose excuses and rationale for this behavior? Where is a sex-driven Ludwig von Mises to explain how this is really a good thing for humankind? Someone call Larry Flynt. I have an idea.

What is it about Greed that doesn’t make society force the greedy into psychotherapy or rehabilitation? Greed is different only in that it ‘masks’ itself under a cloak of benevolence. Both the miser and the robber baron feel that they are not doing it for themselves, but for their families. No one looks at a chronic masturbator and says “He’s doing it for the greater good” or “That’s the American Way. No one looks at the morbidly obese and thanks them for eating as much as they can, invites them to honorary dinners, or parades them around as poster children for a robust nation. Yet, we do it for the greedy, because they can make the case that they are doing what they do for others.

However, is this true? We all want our families to be well provided for. That desire is an evolutionary function. The greedy, however, go beyond any evolutionary claims and hold themselves to be benevolent and altruistic. Yet, if they were genuinely concerned for the welfare of others, would they be extracting that much wealth from these others in the first place? Would they be exceeding their necessities to such an extent as to bar others from having theirs met? I think not. Charity is virtue, but stealing from others, even under the cloak of economic system or philosophy, and then doing your penance later on smacks of hypocrisy and a guilt-ridden conscience. I don’t believe for a second that altruism has anything to do with their behavior, nor more than I would believe the over-eater when he claims that making 30 trips to the buffet table keeps others from getting fat.

Most behaviors, no matter how basic or necessary, when taken to extremes, lead to severe personal and societal consequences. We generally suggest that people living with addictions to such behaviors seek therapy. It is time to force the greedy into therapy. Greed is a mental illness, defended only by those in envy and anticipating a share in the spoils. Those that would condone this greed are akin to those hanging around with fat people hoping to get leftovers, or hoping that the hooker might offer them a ‘freebie’ for driving their buddy to the brothel.

Of course, now they can claim that they are ill. I might have just provided the greedy with a new excuse. Darn.

11 Comments:

At 8:30 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good point, but it still doesn't mean that liberalism creates more wealth than the free market.

 
At 3:39 AM , Blogger Shlomo Leib Aronovitz said...

What is this obsession with creating wealth?

 
At 3:18 PM , Blogger Hasidic Rebel said...

"What is it about Greed that doesn’t make society force the greedy into psychotherapy or rehabilitation? "

Well, for one thing, with a drug or alcohol addiction, family members can do an intervention. But how would it look in this case? "Okay, Pops, we're here to tell you you've been making too much money." I somehow can't see that happening.

But seriously, you must be kidding me. What do you suggest society should do? How do you measure that one's greed is extreme? And why exactly should society care?

Instead of combatting greed, we should foster an awareness for social consciousness. Make as much money as you can, but use it in a good way. We should fight materialism, and selfishness. Bill Gates, for all his evil ways, has actually committed himself to charity in ways unprecedented in history. Of course, his detractors will find fault with him whatever he does. But the fact remains, good people can and do use money for good reasons, and that should be encouraged.

 
At 3:20 PM , Blogger Leapa said...

Creation of wealth is key to our standard of living, and makes your self proclaimed laziness possible. It's not an obsession, it's the only way out of being obsessed with filling one's stomach.

Let's keep our obsession with obsession focused on true obsessions - not synthesizing new ones.

 
At 7:05 PM , Blogger Shlomo Leib Aronovitz said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

 
At 7:05 PM , Blogger Shlomo Leib Aronovitz said...

Always good comments!
.

I deliberately did NOT mention drug or alcohol addiction. The topic concerns normal, everyday behaviors that, when taken to extremes, cause problems, if not for the bearer, certainly for those around him. For most of these issues it becomes matter of over-control and a quest for power. Eating healthy food is good. Eating five or six times what your body requires is not. In a similar vein, earning money isn’t bad at all. Greed, the ruthless pursuit of wealth, is very bad.

Re: look how much wealth he has created for so many people

I know that Bill Gates is popular example of good capitalism. Every CEO can claim that he is providing jobs. Yet, Bill Gates doesn’t do it on his own, those people earn his money for him and, in return provide a service for everyone. Bill Gates is the better of the bunch, and for every BG there are 20 or 30 of his opposites, downsizing their workforce, cutting benefits or wages, and still earning higher than ever profits while passing the rising costs (and not any savings) onto the consumers. The average CEO of CFO earns 531 times as much as his average employee, yet it is that employee that earns him the money. (Contrast that with the 70s, where the disparity was only 40 t0 1.)

Re: Instead of combatting greed, we should foster an awareness for social consciousness.

Amen to the second part. However, the first part must happen as well. Greed is a societal ill, no different than other personal ills that ripple out into society. The Torah enacted terumah and ma’aser, forbids interest, and puts systems in place to help the needy. Even the Chazal were worried about wages, price fixing, or price gouging. Were Greed to go unchecked, without these safeguards, poverty of the masses would surely prevail. We have seen it in every society since Rome. Where Greed goes unchecked, and the distance between working poor and the rich widens, the people suffer.

We have more people in the US without health coverage than the entire population of Canada, and CEOs with multi-million dollar packages are still finding new ways to cut workers and their benefits. Through the 50s, 60s, and 70s, there was a proportional understanding of wages between rank and file and the management. That is gone now. The fairness and the social consciousness is driven out and away by profit, without regard for anything else.


Re: and makes your self proclaimed laziness possible.

I don’t think you understand what laziness really is. Aside from that, do you know that we work more hours now than anyone in history ever had? The drive for profits encourages us to work much longer hours than would be necessary to sustain ourselves! With all the conveniences of modern living, where we don’t have to hunt, to gather, or to grow our own food, we still barely have enough time to relax.


Re: good people can and do use money for good reasons, and that should be encouraged.

No doubt that’s true. Yet, if an equitable system were established, ¾ of the ‘good’ they do wouldn’t be necessary in the first place. If there were national healthcare for every citizen, would we need all the various foundations to raise money for medical care? We might still need them, that’s true, but not to the extent that society depends on them now.

There seems to be this attitude that we cannot tell people how much money to make. We set limits on all kinds of behaviors, including behaviors that involve commerce and wages. It is not unreasonable to tell a person that enough is enough.

 
At 10:10 AM , Blogger Shlomo Leib Aronovitz said...

Besides, what does one think Socialism is? Marx, Engels, and others before them looked around, saw how shitty things were for the working class, and came up with a PLAN to implement this social consciousness.

Is it perfect? No. Does it solve all problems? No. But it does seem to alleviate the worst of them.

 
At 12:57 PM , Blogger Hasidic Rebel said...

"Is it perfect? No. Does it solve all problems? No. But it does seem to alleviate the worst of them."

SL, that Socialism is what you're advocating seemed obvious from the beginning. That's where the beef is. I'm no expert on economics, but from what I know, we have yet to find a society that was successful in implementing a fully Socialist economy without resorting to mass murder. Marx and Engels were great thinkers, but they had no labaratory in which to test their ideas. The labaratory was Stalinist Russia, Red China, and Castro's Cuba.

Western democracies have implemented policies to help alleviate people's misery. For all their faults, their populations are generally better off than those in countries like China and Cuba. The only difference: In Cuba there are no CEO's with enviable salaries. So is that what we're concerned about? Mere Envy?

 
At 5:57 AM , Blogger Shlomo Leib Aronovitz said...

HR,

Good comment. Thanks.

Socialism in Russia failed the day the Stalin (yimach shemo) took power. I know that everyone likes to give Reagan credit for bringing down Communism, but Communism was already gone in 1922. That experiment failed from the outset. The policies of Stalin, and brutal paranoid, were NOT those of Lenin or Trotsky, who advocated a smoother and less rigid transition from the feudalism of the Czars to a collective society. Mao, like Stalin, wished to create a cult following around himself, and to do so, it required ‘purges’ and ‘cultural revolutions’ which served more to quell personal political rivalries than to further the ends of Socialism. Any government that ridicules or persecutes the educated and the intellectuals is not long for this world.

Socialism has two means. From “isarusa deleayla” or “isarusa deletata” (influence from above, or influence from below.) The preferred socialism is the latter, but the former is also necessary, just like in any government. When too much power falls to the bureaucracy, the balance is destroyed.

(Let’s leave Castro for another time. I happen to like him, and that has a great deal to do with Cuban history and American intervention in Central America. It deserves a discussion of its own.)

There is no doubt that socialistic reforms of the 20th century improved the lives of many around the world. Child labor laws, women’s rights, workplace safety, national health care, unemployment compensation, legal redress of grievances, etc., all came about as a result of socialist ideals filtering into the mainstream, and awakening that social consciousness that is so important to maintaining a sane, safe, and secure future.

There are little successes for socialism all over. I’m a ‘soft’ socialist anyhow, and agree that in practical terms, it might be counterproductive for a society to adopt full-blown socialism at this point. That being said, the other extreme, all-out capitalism is just plain dangerous, not because it gives you the freedom to do what you want to do for yourself, but that is gives others the right to manipulate aspects your life without restraint or redress. At some point we have to set some limits. I’m in favor of more limits than others would be comfortable having.

Therefore, when I come across anyone acting without social consciousnes s or concern for others, no matter what sort of obsession causes that behavior, I speak up.

 
At 5:12 PM , Blogger Shlomo Leib Aronovitz said...

Here is a good link for a quick review of Socialism ala Trotsky.

http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/contemp/pamsetc/socfrombel/sfb_main.htm

 
At 6:58 AM , Blogger mnuez said...

Nice piece - especially your responses in the comments here. Speaking of the greed of the rich, did anyone else notice that there's no minimum wage in America anymore? Making $10,000 a year a full year's worth of all day labor isn't called a "wage" of any sort.

That said, go Bull-Moose and you've got my vote but keep talking Castro and all I hear are the clanking of prison cells.

mnuez

 

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