Greedy, greedier, greediest

In her first address shortly after taking the oath of office, President Myriam Spiteri Debono said that greed and the wish to accumulate more money often lead to various forms of corruption. She rightly added that this has become the current Maltese social scourge, even worse than the all-pervasive drug problem.

Today, ordinary, honest, law-abiding and tax-paying Maltese are outraged at the greed of the few at the cost of so many. To an infinite extent, their outrage is abundantly justified. And this makes it a particularly good time to take a hard look at greed, both in its general form and in its peculiar Maltese incarnation.

If infectious greed is contaminating Maltese business, politics and society, then we need to try to understand its causes and who and how it may have contributed to it. Why are so many falling prey to greed? With a deep, almost reflexive trust in the free market, are Maltese somehow greedier than other people? And as we look at the wreckage around us, can we be sure that there will somehow be a stop to it?

Freud argued that greed was natural and that man was born greedy. He acknowledged that money can be a measure of our status, even our freedom, but he recognised that we are deeply ambivalent about it.

Greed may be seen as part of human nature, traced back to the death drive. Human beings are unavoidably self-destructive, and they project that destructiveness onto the outside world in the form of insatiable acquisitiveness, envy and hate. At the unconscious level, greed aims primarily at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring helpless fellow human beings.

There might be an existential connection between humanity’s mortality and its desperation to acquire good things. Essentially, it’s death that makes people greedy for life; they seek to get as much as they can for themselves before the game is over.

Still, man is born good, and it is the environment that corrupts him. Greed, in other words, comes out of nurture, not nature. It compensates for the emptiness that results from feeling that one didn’t get enough love or affirmation in one’s life. When children repeatedly don’t get enough affection and empathy, they grow up to be the type of people who try to force others into meeting their needs. In the process, these individuals become aggressive, manipulative and often enraged. And when their grandiosity becomes pathological, you get greed.

Whether greed emerges from our psyches, our environment or our genes remains an open question. No one can say with certainty why the few, in contrast to the many among us, are so desperate for more money. They may not know the reason for it themselves. What’s important, though, is to acknowledge that greed is a deep, perhaps even primal, instinct in man.

Which brings us to a crucial question: Why do those few spend all their time in self-interested acts of money-grubbing? Why are all their human transactions guided by avarice? The answer is that greed, like all potentially destructive human drives, is tempered by social norms.

Greed can be harnessed to serve social ends. It can spur entrepreneurial innovation, leading to broad prosperity. It is society that channels greed for such constructive purposes. And it is society that decrees how much greed is enough and how we define where, say, healthy ambition ends and unsavoury self-interest begins. The social rules can, moreover, change very quickly. Yesterday, it was fine for CEOs to earn a bit more than the average worker. Today, it seems distasteful, even immoral.

Jesus Christ warned us that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. The Apostle Paul was less equivocal. The love of money is the root of all evil, he wrote. Thomas Aquinas took the argument against money a step further, arguing that acquisitiveness involves withholding good things from others and thus impoverishing them.

In today’s Maltese society, the term “cost of living” is an insufficient and somewhat ironic descriptor. For many, it is, in fact, the cost of merely surviving. The phrase has morphed into something far more haunting, a ticking clock that reminds many of the distance between living and staying alive. Many are confronted with the profound irony of this land, one that proclaims endless opportunities yet suffocates so many with the weight of mere existence.

It does not feel as though we are a rich country. Instead, this often feels like a very poor country that is home to a great deal of very rich people.

At the epicentre of this despair lie the towering monuments of corporations, entities that have grown mightier and more voracious with each passing decade.

Corporations, with their unyielding thirst for record profits, have too often been the architects of these mazes of hardship. Their pursuit of ungodly levels of affluence has not been without cost, a debt that has been exacted upon the very society from which they draw their sustenance. In their wake, countless people grapple with economic devastation, their dreams held hostage by a system that appears increasingly indifferent to their plight.

Greedflation is not just manifesting at a corporate level but at an individual level as well.

What can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the closer we approach our journey’s end?