Do You Know the Psychology of Greed?

"He who considers wealth a good thing can never bear to give up his income; he who considers eminence a good thing can never bear to give up his fame. He who has a taste for power can never bear to hand over authority to others. Holding tight to these things, such men shiver with fear; should they let them go, they would pine in sorrow."- Chuang Tzu, Chinese philosopher

For time immemorial, greed has been identified as a source of evil. In the Bible, as one of the seven deadly sins, greed is called avarice. The Buddha referred to greed as desire and called it the source of all human disappointment and suffering.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines greed as “An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.” It is an emotional response to wanting more of what brings pleasure.

Freud argued that greed was a natural instinct of the unconscious-that had to be socialised. Evolutionary psychologists believe the source of greed lies even deeper than the psyche-it's in the very DNA that defines us. Another school of thought explains, societal and environmental experience triggers greed.

Economist Paul Krugman noted in the New York Times, the theory that “greed is good” for society may contain a fatal flaw: “A system that lavishly rewards executives for success tempts those executives, who control much of the information available to outsiders, to fabricate the appearance of success. Aggressive accounting, fictitious transactions that inflate sales, whatever it takes.”

Do you know how people catch monkeys on the islands of the Indian Ocean? After drilling a small hole into a coconut, they empty it out and stuff some of the monkeys' favorite food inside. Later, attracted by the smell of food, a monkey squeezes its hand through the hole, grabs the food, and then discovers it cannot pull its enlarged fist out of the hole. Why doesn't it just drop the food and try again? The greedy monkey doesn't want to let go of the food! While the bewildered monkey is trying to figure out how to remove the coconut from its hand, it is quickly captured with a net. Like the monkey, we can become prisoners of our own greed, slaves of our own addictions.

We've got to learn to let go and get rid of the trap that our mind probably cannot visualise! Freud agreed that it should be the mission of human mind to make the unconscious conscious so that it can sublimate its instincts to the greater good. "Where id was," he wrote, "there ego shall be." That wouldn't be easy, Freud conceded, but civilization is worth the effort.
 

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