What a divisive sentence! That’s Gordon Gecko’s catchphrase, the archetypal unscrupulous capitalist. Some say it’s the catchphrase of capitalism itself. Greed is good! People use that as an excuse to do some pretty horrible things. But it is also true. From certain perspectives.
From one perspective, I’m sure you’ll agree that greed is good. You want to exist, right? You know that’s pretty greedy. Chickens and carrots have to give their lives to sustain you. If you weren’t so greedy, you’d surrender that expensive physical body you’re keeping and let it be used to sustain the lives of vultures and rats and worms and mushrooms. Because vultures and rats and worms and mushrooms have no compunctions about being greedy.
So that’s obvious, but let’s have a more nuanced conversation.
Have you ever heard of Richard Dawkins’ “Selfish Gene”? It’s a fascinating read. Basically, it’s an analysis of Darwinian evolution theory that says that the basic unit of natural selection is the gene, not the species, not the organism. Meaning when you look at what has evolved, what exists today, Dawkins argues that not every characteristic or genetic behavior is in the best interests of the survival of the individual organism. Not everything is in the best interests of the survival of the species. But everything is precisely in the best interests of the survival of the fittest genes.
People like to criticize greed. “What about other people? What about other species? What about the planet?”
Well, let’s ask Dawkins. You are a machine designed and built by genes that want to replicate themselves. You have all of your own genes, which makes you your own top priority in many circumstances. If you’re starving and you see food, you steal it and you eat it. You don’t investigate who you’re stealing it from. You don’t investigate who might need it as much as you. You steal it and you eat it.
If you’re not starving, then you start caring about things like who you’d be stealing from and who might need it as much as you. From an evolutionary perspective, because the people around you likely share a fair amount of your genes.
The better off you’re doing, the more your genes want you to help those around you. The better those around you are doing, the wider you spread your care. For a lot of us, the world is pretty survivable. We share what, 84% of our DNA with dogs? And that’s not nothing. So it’s in our genetic self-interest to protect dogs if it’s reasonably possible to do so. From an evolutionary perspective. And it is. So we do.
Being genetically greedy or selfish is the precise mechanism that drives individual altruism. We care about each other and animals and the planet because of our selfish genes. See? Not only is just wanting to exist greedy, but so is wanting to help the poor, so is wanting to save dogs from abuse. From a certain perspective.
So individual self-interest and common interest are values that stem from the same genetic drive. Part of the argument is the fact, and it is a fact, that many common interests benefit everybody, every selfish gene, more in the long run than individual interest. If everybody did what is best for everybody, everybody would be better off. But as machines designed to perpetuate genes, we in particular weren’t programmed to think in common interest first.
Ants were. Bees were. Those species actually evolved so that an entire community functions basically like a single organism. How crazy is that? Worker bees can’t procreate, only the queen can. So workers go out and risk their lives, often sacrificing their lives for any small benefit to the hive. The life of a worker is as important as a cell in our bodies: it does its job, dies, and is replaced. Meanwhile, the queen does absolutely nothing but give birth constantly, every day, forever.
From a certain perspective, you could say the queen is exploiting the workers. You could say she sits around while they risk their lives to feed her and build her hive. From another perspective, you could say the workers exploit the queen. They go around living their lives while she does nothing but pump out more and more of them.
From a certain perspective you could say that Jeff Bezos is exploiting us. You could say he sits around getting rich off of our labor and dollars. From another perspective, you could say we exploit him. While we spent the last 30 years living our lives, he spent every day of the last 30 years working his butt off building a network so we can hit one button and, two days later, whatever we want in the whole world shows up on our doorstep. And we paid him for the stuff we got through his network, but we never paid him for building it. If that’s not exploitation, I don’t know what is.
Humans are, and I will be the first one to admit it, a bit more complicated than bees. The exploitation risks being less a matter of perspective if Jeff Bezos is able to use the money we paid him to control all of our lives. So that is an actual thing that we do actually have to be careful of. But it’s not happening right now.
In fact, the government of the United States was painstakingly designed to be convoluted and diverse and decentralized specifically to make it harder for people like Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump to rule the country. And at the moment, it’s still impossible. Not too long ago, Donald Trump controlled the highest office of the most powerful country in the history of the world. Even so, in order to do anything, he had to answer to the senate, the house of representatives, the supreme court, 50 state governors, 50 state legislatures, 50 state supreme courts, and of course 350 million individuals raised to believe in individual liberty.
So from a certain perspective, Jeff Bezos was being greedy when he built a system that makes all of our lives easier. And we are being greedy when we give him billions of our dollars.
Is greed good? Well, a three-word catchphrase leaves little room for nuance.
