Meeting on greed versus ambition

We had our meeting last Wednesday on greed and ambition.

Bob made his observation that some of it stems from our tendency to judge others different than how we judge ourselves.  The "I erred but you sinned" syndrome may contribute to how greed is generally attributed to others but not to ourselves.

We then explored the concept that maybe there is a comfort level that we think everyone should have as a minimum to carry on a decent life.  That robbing others of that comfort level in order to enrich oneself to have more than that minimum is greed.

If there is more than enough to go around, then we are free to pursue having more so long as we do not make others suffer by taking from them or causing them to have less than the minimum.

The difficulty is establishing a minimum acceptable to all, in limiting the size of the community considered, and facing the fact that there is no such thing as unlimited resources.

While I originally intended for greed to be separated from ambition, or the drive to succeed and achieve, Mano pointed out that ambition had a negative connotation from the days of the privileged class looking down on members of the lower class trying hard to break out of their lot and try to social climb to a higher class.

Striving to succeed and achieve is something we generally consider to be positive qualities, especially for the young starting their careers, the fine point is to differentiate it from how others may be hurt in this process.

It is easy to see personal gain as greed.  The free market economist idea of the invisible hand that maximizes benefit to all while individuals pursue their own interest have been adopted by many socialist regimes in the past few decades to improve the lot of their citizens.  Yet we feel uneasy about it.

Participants in this free market system are often accused of being uncaring of others while pursuing their own interests.

On the surface, these critics have the moral high ground over the free marketeers.

There actually are two dimensions to this discussion; the moral aspect of helping our fellow humans and the determination of how best to cooperate with each other in our endeavors.

Our moral sense points us to pay attention to those in need.

Our drive for efficiency points us to prefer those who give the best results regardless of effort and other considerations.

In distributing wealth and resources in our society, we have to consider needs as well as efficiency and these two considerations are often opposite to each other.

The discussion is often too polarized with the two sides accusing each other on principle instead of looking at the tricky task of optimizing through compromise of the two.

Mano also pointed out that we live in a society defined by our history and social circumstances, that qualities like greed is defined by historical events leading up to the present day. It is not up to us to define greed on its own in a vacuum.

That is a good dose of reality.  However, it should not stop us from examining ourselves and our history to see where we should be heading and to work at depolarizing the extremes so that meaningful dialog can happen.  Finger pointing, stereotyping, and cynicism are the worst enemies towards this dialog.