Greed

I grow weary of reading, especially from good writers who are in the thick of it all, like Glenn Greenwald, about Wall Street and Greed. Greed did not cause the financial disaster. Greed is simply (one) part of who we are. Knowing that violence is a potential we all have inside us, we create, sustain and actively reinforce systems from micro to macro to mitigate our violent tendencies. Of course our systems aren't perfect, but we generally agree that violence is something we don't want too much of, and so we can appeal to these co-created systems--laws, customs, religious convictions/commandments, personal principles, interpersonal relationships, to protect ourselves and each other from the very real violence that can well up inside each and every one of us and gush out into the world.

No, it wasn't Greed that caused the crisis. The creation, sustaining, and expanding of systems that enable our Greed was what caused the great cave-in of 2008 ('09,'10,'11...). Or, we could say that the roof fell in on us due to the deliberate and collectively unchallenged dismantling of the societal systems that had been keeping our own Greed from devouring us. I pat myself on the back for the timely mining metaphor. Down there, you ignore the systems that keep you safe at your own peril. We correctly call this reasoned caution 'Conservative'. Of course, like in our mining metaphor, most of us are down there, in the mine, and are rightly conservative with the conditions of our own well-being. Predictably, the few radicals, or Neoliberals (who are to Liberals what neosoul is to soul) interested in ignoring the safeguards are up top, and too big(-headed) to (consider the catastrophic consequences of their actions which will fall onto others if they) fail. Sometimes they even convince a miner or two (or millions) of their quaint/crackpot/dangerous management theories. For the most part though, down in the mine you know that if that roof caves in it doesn't care whether you're a foreman or a grunt, a newbie or a 40-year veteran about to retire (or for that matter any other kind of "difference" you can think of). It turns out that the systems we create to safeguard us from the most destructive parts of ourselves work best if we're all inside the same room, facing the same consequences. Some used to call it "society".

In the leadup to our present morass, and apparently seductive enough to weather a modicum of international scrutiny and a light, brief public flogging, some societal systems directly rewarded Greed in the form of enormous short-term benefits, like young broker pay incentives, to name but one example. Some ideologies lying around, (like a club, ideologies are desirous of being wielded), most notably The Friedmanism, pretended to believe that "greed is good", *, that somehow a "market" (a term which, by the way, refers to the collective known as 'all of us', to varying intensities, depending on our wealth and how/where we invest it) unrestrained by societal forces that mitigate greed would alchemically turn shit into gold bars with which we could beat the shit out of each other, in order to have more shit to make more gold. I know, it sounds like a child made it up. That is, a poor, brutish child who has suffered many hardships and privations (like, say, the Industrial Revolution, or the Twentieth Century). But, in some sense of course, that is who we are.

A teacher of mine in high school once clarified for us, "Here in America we have the notion that everyone can be a billionaire. That's just not true. Many complicated factors notwithstanding, it is true that anyone can become a billionaire--but not everyone." Imagine 300 million billionaires. What would it mean, then, to be a billionaire? $16,000 muffins. Nope, it's a game of contrasts, and most of us delude ourselves to some degree into investing our precious emotional, physical and mental efforts into playing that lotto, hoping for a miracle, imagining our feet up on the desk in that single wide trailer, smoking a cigar, watching the miners go in and out of that dark hole, basking in the cheap cologne smell of our self-evident exceptionalism, barking orders to the foremen down below to ignore the rules that keep them and the men and women they are responsible for, and with whom they will live and die, safe.

Now, some might say we should go up top and kill that son of a bitch. While I can comprehend the presence of that kind of anger, I'm telling you that to go and nurture it, even for a second, to cultivate it into bloodthirst, is indefensible. We all live and die together in this mine; to fortify the very behaviors that would tear us apart doesn't make any sense. No--we all have a part to play: after all, in our modern world we need administrators!

No--I say we just go up top and move him and his double-wide back down into the mine.



* (thank you kindly to anyone who could please direct me to writing on how an extreme "Christian" Evangelism coexists with raggedy Randy Ayn?)