Meditation on Greed

At Halfpond, we have spent a lot of time lately dwelling on greed.  Why?  Who knows.  Maybe because ’tis the season to run oneself ragged spending money one may not have; or, perhaps because we are still reeling from the campaign discussion about “makers” and “takers”; or, maybe it is the talk about the fiscal cliff and why the world will end if the top wage earners’ tax rate inches up a tad.

Remember what Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity?  He said that though it is difficult to intelligibly define, he knew it when he saw it.

So it is with greed.   Greed, like obscenity, is hard to intelligibly define, but you know it when you smell it.  The best we can do is to offer you a list of thoughts to ponder:

1.  Like adultery, greed is a sin that cannot be committed solo.   Suppose that there is only one dog in the entire universe, and that dog desires to own every last Milk Bone in existence.  Who cares?  Put another way, acquisitiveness and greed are not synonymous.

2.  Greed and its many variations are universally panned in the wisdom literature of the west.   Ten Commandments: no coveting and no stealing (which, arguably, are related).  Seven Deadly Sins (hold on to your hat!): greed, a.k.a., avarice, and its cousins gluttony, envy, and lust–four of the seven–all deadly.   Jesus himself was particularly hard nosed about storing up stuff.  Check out Mark 10:25, where he makes this bold claim:  “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  Wow.   (I know it is impertinent, and also none of my beeswax, but where’s Mitt Romney going to go?)

3.   Greed is easier to diagnose in others than in oneself.

4.  Ivan Boeskey said, “Greed is good.”  Obviously, he overdid it a bit, and wound up wearing stripes for a time.  But, can capitalism actually work without an element of greed?

5.  Pretty much all of us like to be admired for a quality, or even for a possession.  But, we probably don’t want to be envied.  Envy, greed’s twin, can make people do crazy things.  Call to mind the case of the famous figure skaters–one so envious of her rival that she convinced her husband and a goon to give her rival a couple of whacks to the prayer bones.  The competition was all over but the cryin’.  Egads!

6.   The sacred texts of the east are likewise wary about greed, or an inordinate interest in wealth.  Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching:  “He who is attached to things will suffer much.  He who saves will suffer heavy loss.”  (Chapter 44)  Though we seldom behave as if we do, I think we understand this intuitively.  Most people, I am told, when faced with flood or fire will leave the diamond earrings and grab the photo albums.

So, there you have it.  If we are hogging more than our share of the wealth, such that our fellows are going without, we should knock it off.  Likewise, if we are so unaccustomed to the notion of enough that we can’t seem to stop acquiring, we should knock that off, too.  Lao Tzu’s got it down: “The contented man is never disappointed.”

 

 

Ho Ho! Ironically, Holiday Bells Go Ding Dong for the Twinkie Dudes

About a week before Thanksgiving, I happened to pass a Hostess bakery.  The sun was just setting and that bone biting November chill was coming on.  About 20 striking workers, all bundled up, were waving picket signs as I drove by.  The next day, these 20 workers, and about 18,000 others like them were out of a job.

Hostess had filed bankruptcy and begun the process of closing its plants across America.  The company big wigs blamed the demise of the company on the greedy workers for failing to take concessions in pay and pension benefits.  That’s it!  The workers are GREEDY!

Hold the phone.  The workers are greedy?  Most of you probably know that Hostess executives asked the bankruptcy court just yesterday to allow them to shell out $2 million in bonuses to a handful of top managers.  Methinks I smell irony here. . . irony is a somewhat elusive concept, but here’s what Wikipedia says it is:  an event or description “highlighting certain discordant features of reality.”  If it is good enough for Wikipedia, it is good enough for Halfpond.

There is discord between the sight I saw–bundled workers fighting to keep crappy jobs, because they had rent or mortgages to pay and kids to feed–and executives awarding themselves BONUSES for spectacularly failing at running a company.

I Tried the Hamburger; I Tried the Stuffed Bear; I’m Jonesin’ for a Devil Dog

Here’s what I think might be another irony–you be the judge.  Remember Mittens and the conservatives espousing the virtue of personal responsibility during the recent campaign?  Of course, as a big loser, Mittens can no longer legitimately be considered the spokes model for his party, but he did win the nomination after saying that workers should buy their own unemployment insurance, and not depend on the public unemployment insurance system.  So, the justification to the bankruptcy court put forth by the Hostess execs for summarily canning thousands of workers?  The workers could begin to collect public unemployment insurance immediately.  (Where is Linda Blair?  Someone needs to teach me how to spin my head and spew green stuff–that would surely reduce the pressure building in my brain. . . . )

What happened to taking responsibility for running a company into the ground, racking up debts that cannot be honored, and hurtling 18,000 fellow citizens–who showed enough personal responsibility to show up for work on the line every day–into crisis?

If that was your legacy, would you have the chutzpah to suggest that you deserved a bonus?

~Coming soon from Halfpond:  “Meditation on Greed.”
From the Tao Te Ching:  “[S]he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.”