[From Bill Powers (2010.11.22.0837 MDT)]
Martin Lewitt Nov 22, 2010 0347 MST --
What you call "greed" explains very little of this complexity. The enjoyment of playing games, of ever refinement of skill of the feeling of control and competence, may be a form of greed that had survival value, but it is hardly the type you are demonizing.
But it is. What is a game to a person with millions to spend without missing them is for those in the strata below a deadly serious, dreary, and scary struggle to get enough to eat, a place to live, help when sick, a future without anxiety. The rich don't pay the penalties for their mistakes and miscalculations, the middle class and poor do. You make the offenses seen innocent, harmless, and even admirable, which of course is a well-proven way of perpetuating evil. You assume that just because someone is rich, he is also smart, or because he is smart about outwitting and outcheating the competition, he is smart in every other way, or even one other way. I've met only a very few in that position whose intellects struck me as out of the ordinary. Pickpockets and con-men are also more than ordinarily skillful and clever at what they do, but that doesn't make them admirable.
It's easy, of course, to pick out of a population of hundreds of thousands a few individuals who stand out because they are so different from their rapacious peers. Warren Buffet has said he doesn't pay enough taxes, but I haven't noticed a line of millionaires and billionaires rushing to sign up for membership in Buffet's movement. Bill and Melissa Gates are giving away huge amounts of money in a very caring and work-intensive way -- but that money was accumumated by a man with an uncanny resemblance to Bill Gates who is generally acknowledged to have been merciless and voracious in his appetite for power and profit. I suspect that the origin of a great deal of philanthropy is a guilty conscience. Not all, never all. But "a great deal" is more than enough.
The desire for inordinate riches and power still looks to me like a disease. When I think of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" I still see the sickness pervading the book, and a pyramid of immature justifications that show an awareness that something is wrong with this picture. Ayn Rand in her innocence lays out in plain view every twisted rationalization imaginable to excuse the inhuman way her heros treat the rest of the human race, and the incredibly inflated egos they boast about and she admires. Practically everything she holds up as a virtue is something most sane people see as a moral failing or a sin (skillfully executed, perhaps, but so what?).
I'm aware that I'm playing out this conflict at the level of its symptoms rather than its causes, so having relieved myself of a few passionate feelings I'm going to let this go. Pitting one conviction against another generates heat but no useful work. When PCT has found its proper place in the sciences of life, I think we will begin to see a lot of the old customs and superstitions about social life begin to come apart as people find better ways to understand their own structures of goals, and to see how much like other people they are in every way at this fundamental level. It's hard to mistreat someone in whose eyes you see yourself reflected. Maybe that will be enough to turn things around.
Best,
Bill P.
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In that generalizable sense, even non-material utopias have their "greeds" whether it is for group sex or spiritual communion.
Martin L
Best,
Bill P.