GREED IS GROOVY

Apr 28, 2010 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The Americans parade their rich and successful. We tear ours apart. The Americans worship material achievement. We idolize service without reward.
To grasp this reality just study this newspaper’s column on Special Persons in our society. This column appears every Sunday. The persons chosen are invariably those who have been said to have given back to society more than what they have taken out of it.
The Americans however make no such pretence: wealth accumulation is the benchmark of personal success.  In the heart of capitalism, the more you have the better.
But while the rich are making their zillions, the poor have to be made contented with their crumbs. Thus they are sold the view that being poor is virtuous. This deceives the poor into not upsetting the status quo, thereby allowing the rich greater freedom to continue to make untold riches which the poor satisfy themselves with the virtue of serving others for the pure joy of doing this.
Capitalism is however built upon the virtue of greed. Green is good; greed is what drives wealth creation and provides competition. This competition allows for all, both rich and poor, to benefit. Competition drives down prices, allows for expansion, which in turn creates more jobs and provides incentives for further innovation to reduce prices and thus provides more benefits. Greed is good for all then. This is the creed of capitalism.
But it is the creed that applies only to the rich, for the poor are encouraged to accept their lot. All kinds of spectacles and entertainment are provided so as to conceal and suppress the fact that they are being exploited and used as cogs to make the rich get richer.
They are also encouraged to see what they do as something good. They are encouraged to give. “Ask not what America can do for you, but what you can do for America.” And the poor swallow this line, hook and sinker. They even begin to believe in the service to others. The poor are encouraged to give and give and give and the more they give, the less they receive while the less the rich give the more they receive.
As a result of these diametrically opposed processes, a form of class division results. The rich get richer and the poor become poorer. But this too is suppressed by selling to the poor the notion that everyone can one day become rich. The poor swallow this pill too and the very poor man follows his own pipe dream. And while they are chasing rainbows, the rich are smiling all the way to the bank.
The poor are encouraged to believe that if they work hard, if they make the necessary sacrifice that they too can one day become as prosperous as the rich man. In the rich countries it is easier for a man to believe this.
But in poor countries, there are limited resources and thus there is competition for these limited resources. This competition does not leave everyone better off. Instead it creates a gaping gap between the rich and the poor which becomes starker. This in turn leads to two symptoms.
The first is mimicry. Everyone wants to be like the rich man. They see what the rich man has and they think that if they only do as the rich man does that they too can become rich.
So the rich man is the shop man or so people feel. They have not seen his bottom line, just his shelves. They think he has a fat bankbook, but they do not know about his overdraft. So wanting to become a shopkeeper, they forget about working for others and see the measure of their independence as working for themselves even if it is in a four by eight contraption that is a shack. They see it as a “shop” or the even the “store”.
They stock this shop by purchasing on credit, and they sit all day waiting on the sales to come.
Mimicry does not work in small societies. It creates self delusion – individuals believe that they have become a man or a woman when they no longer have to hold down a steady job, when they can sit all day in their shop, never mind all that is selling is a few cigarettes and mints, trying to make enough to repay the wholesalers from whom they purchase. And in this shaky business of mimicry, they still can muster the sense that sitting all day waiting for a sale that they have arrived; they have achieved status; they are self-employed and even if their store is a knocked-up shack made of a few odd pieces of plywood, it is still their own, their business.
The second reaction that competition for limited resources creates is a culture of pulling down the rich. And this is very much evident in Guyana. Those envious of the rich try to justify their own lack of accomplishment by pulling down the rich. They do so by suggesting that the rich have become prosperous through ill-gotten means.
How often do we not see this in Guyana? A man builds a fancy house and the rumours are rife that he is into something underhand. A person works his way from rags to riches and instead of us worshipping that person’s success, the person is pulled down; his fame is ridiculed and his good name tarnished.
The man is pulled down in the eyes of the public. He is seen as a target for attack. Rather than celebrating that person’s luck, tact, skill or the political and social connections that have allowed that person to make an easy profit, we try to pull that person down.
If we say that capitalism is about making money and if we say that capitalism is good does it not follow that so long as what a man acquires is through honest means, even if it is an easy profit, that we should be happy for that man? Should greed not be groovy to every aspiring capitalist even if he has bought something for $1M and sold it for $40M? Or do we prefer for that man to sit all day in a shop and sell a few mints and chewing gum and make a $2 profit?
Which is the better role model? The one who is greedy and makes a huge profit? Or the one who is also greedy and makes a small profit?
(To be Continued)

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