Humankind’s history is full of stories about the disastrous consequences of greed. But in spite of these cautionary tales, when it comes to greedy behavior, it appears we never learn. We aren’t always good at controlling the greediness that lurks inside us. Why do we behave like this? Can we break the vicious cycle of greediness? Most importantly, what impact do greedy people have on themselves, others, and society at large?
The Basic Fault
Is it possible to look at greed as nothing more than a coping mechanism? Is it a way, dysfunctional though it may be, to resolve mental health problems? What’s the matter with greedy people? Why do they behave so outrageously? Is there anything they can talk about besides money? When I nudge clients who fit this profile to explain themselves, I don’t get much of a response. Perhaps their greed has something to do with their unresolved feelings of inner emptiness—the feeling that there’s something missing. But if that’s the case, where does this feeling come from?
Ineffective role modelling when a person is growing up seems to be a significant factor in the development of greediness, as it is in so many instances of psychological dysfunctionality. A lot of the stories I’m told by greedy people feature early negative parental experiences that set the stage for feelings of low self-esteem, creating a kind of “basic fault”—a life-long search for “something that’s missing” that would give them some form of satisfaction.1
The psychoanalyst Michael Balint introduced the idea of the basic fault and viewed its emergence as the result of a skewed relationship between the child and its caretakers, a trauma that leads to unsatisfactory relationships with others, contributes to intense and overwhelming anxiety, and creates regressive behavior when under stress. Consequently, during children’s early stages of development, they will adopt behavior patterns—that later turn into compulsions—to cope with a considerable discrepancy between their psychobiological needs and the care provided by a faulty environment. In short, Balint’s notion of a basic fault referred to very early and fundamental psychological damage due to inadequate caretaker responses to the infant’s needs. This failure contributes to a split, creating a differentiation between a true self and a false self.
The idea of true self versus false self was introduced by the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.2 According to Winnicott, all of us wear masks that enable us to survive and interact appropriately in a wide variety of interpersonal contexts, where, by necessity, we show different sides of ourselves. These different social masks help us to manage our lives in a balanced and integrated way, making it possible to develop a cohesive integrated identity. But when our emotional needs are either unmet, or met unreliably, we learn not to trust the environment, or who we are. Our natural infant spontaneity will be in danger of being encroached on by the need for compliance with our parents’ wishes and expectations. Adaptive as this way of interacting may be, it could lead to the development of a false self in the form of a defensive façade that is tiresome to maintain. Keeping up a façade toward others can result in our feeling depleted, drained, or emotionally numb. In contrast, being able to spontaneously project our true self will make us feel more truly alive. But if there is a split within the self, if we are unable to integrate its various parts, we will have the subjective experience that something essential is missing inside. This is the kind of feeling that contributes to the sense of a basic fault.
A Leaking Bucket
From what I have seen, many greedy people obsessively pursue wealth as a substitute for what they feel is lacking inside. One person described this feeling to me vividly, explaining that “deep inside, I feel like a leaking bucket that can never be filled.” This man seemed to be compelled to keep at his greedy pursuits to create the illusion of completeness. Through the acquisition of wealth, he hoped to feel at least temporarily better within himself, and better than his peers. But he forgot the high price that greed exacts. He forgot that it can contribute to a stunted life, to feeling inauthentic, and worsen his own dysfunctionality.
Narcissistic disorders and greed are close cousins: profound self-doubt forms the base of both. In both instances, people doubt their importance, significance, or value. But in differentiating these two dysfunctional ways of dealing with life, I suggest that narcissistic disorders have more to do with emotional self-aggrandizement, while greed is a form of materialistic self-aggrandizement. In whatever way we differentiate them, both are poor choices when it comes to leading a fulfilling life.3
Greedy people use their materialistic pursuits to find some form of relief for their emotional discomfort. Their behavior can be compared to people who suffer from substance abuse. However, like with these addicts, any relief they find will only be temporary. Their attempts to fill their inner void with material things will only aggravate the problem: there won’t ever be enough. Like drug addicts, they will soon need another fix. Without even being aware of it, the greedier they are, the more self-destructive they will become, and the worse they will feel. Their endless acquisitiveness will not ameliorate the underlying feeling that deep down they aren’t good enough. It is mission impossible.
Greedy people, consciously and unconsciously, link their self-worth to their financial worth. It has become their main way of keeping score. Yet greed is not really a financial issue; it is all about having a troubled mind. Not only do greedy people damage themselves, they will cause considerable damage to others. Overly competitive and aggressive, they will take ruthless advantage of every opportunity to turn a profit—at any price.
Evolutionary and Societal Considerations
But to play devil’s advocate for a while, is greed really so bad? Why should we be so negative about the accumulation of wealth? If evolutionary theory is to be believed, competition for scarce resources is a basic human characteristic. From an evolutionary perspective, greed may be essential for our survival. As greed encourages us to accumulate things, and wealth is an important signifier of status, having many possessions shouldn’t be such a bad thing. It is a very effective strategy if you want to attract a mate. After all, having a mate helps us to perpetuate our genetic code. Doesn’t that make greed nothing more than a purely biological imperative? Perhaps Gordon Gekko is right to suggest that greed is programmed into our genes.
This evolutionary, selfish gene argument about the benefits of greed is accompanied by societal and existential considerations. Some believe that without a dose of greed, an individual, community, or society might lack the motivation to move forward. Without greed, would we accomplish anything? Would we be able to defend ourselves against the greediness of others? Without having a modicum of greed, wouldn’t we become too vulnerable?
Some people have suggested that greed is also Homo sapiens’ way of dealing with existential anxiety, a way of transcending death. The acquisition of stuff creates the illusion of eternal life. We may die, but our acquisitions will live on. Greed is simply a fact of life and we should embrace it, not fight it. Since the dawn of time, greed has been the driving spirit of civilization.
True enough, greed is a major driver of many successful societies, the fuel that drives the economy. Some argue that political systems designed to check or eliminate greedy behavior have invariably ended in abject failure. Without greed built into their fabric, societies would quickly descend into poverty and chaos. I think, however, as is the case with most things in life, that it’s all a question of balance. We can all see how the unrestrained pursuit of our own interests creates problems for ourselves and others. Also, some of us have learned the hard way that other people resent it when we take more than our fair share. Greed, like all potentially destructive human drives, needs to be tempered by social norms. When greed becomes perverted, it leads to social unrest.
Thus, although greed plays a role in economic progress, uncontrolled greed contributes to economic decline. Like a great cancer, the lust for possession and greed will destroy the soul of humanity, metastasizing throughout society. And we don’t need to look very far to see how our consumer culture—our tendency toward conspicuous consumption—can inflict severe damage. We have also seen the damage financial engineers can do to society, the banking crisis of 2008 being a prime example. Excessive greed also contributes to corruption. Even the lack of foresight with respect to the coronavirus pandemic—as there has been a lack of needed investments—may be attributed to greed. I would go as far as to say that the victory of greed over compassion could be the downfall of our civilization.
A Faustian Pact
Greed addicts can do great harm. In their obsessive pursuit of wealth, they are often grossly insensitive to the needs and feelings of others. And as excessive narcissism is part of the greed equation, empathy will be in extremely short supply. These people care about money, but that’s all they care about. As they are never happy with what they have, their desire only increases with their possessions. Greedy people leave reason, compassion, and love by the wayside. To them, the richness and complexity of life is reduced to little more than a quest to accumulate and hoard as much as possible of whatever they desire.
What these greed obsessed individuals don’t realize, however, is that they may have made a pact with the devil, which takes us back to the concept of the basic fault, being troubled by feelings of emptiness and meaninglessness that aren’t going away. No wonder that greed becomes tied in with negative emotional states like stress, exhaustion, anxiety, depression, and despair and maladaptive and unethical behavior patterns, such as gambling, scavenging, hoarding, fraud, and theft. In the pursuit of greed, family and community ties will fall by the wayside. Greed can undermine the values on which society and civilization are founded, when people are unable to distinguish need from greed.
Is There Hope?
From a professional point of view, I must admit that I don’t find it easy dealing with greedy people. And I am not alone in this. Many of my colleagues in the helping professions are also wary of dealing with them, and for good reason. Given (or perhaps because) greedy people have everything they think they want and more, many are unable to adapt and reformulate what they really want. They find it difficult to explain why they feel incomplete and why they are so obsessed with money.
Another complication when working with these clients is that in their pursuit of wealth there never seems to be an endpoint in sight. They have no concept of “enough.” Making money seems to be the only thing that gives them any satisfaction, the only salve they know that brings temporary relief. The process whereby they accumulate their riches has become an end in itself. But surely life should be about more than getting a chemical “high” (or dopamine release) every time they make a deal, turn a profit, or make a “killing?” But like any other form of addiction, as their system develops a greater tolerance for the dosage, they need to increase it continually, as previous highs no longer give them same degree of satisfaction? Greedy people need to make bigger and bigger killings to feel good about themselves—at least temporarily. But unfortunately, the subterranean doubts they have about themselves will not go away.
What makes the treatment of greedy people so difficult is that a substantial number of people view greed and its related traits as desirable rather than as potential mental health problems. Understandably, they find some of the derivatives of greed, like ambition and success, attractive. Given society’s ambivalence toward the issue, many greedy people don’t even recognize the difficulties they are in. They are not ready to acknowledge that their behavior is harmful to themselves and to others.
The challenge is how to make clear to them the greater value of generosity above material wealth, how to explain that helping others will make them feel more fulfilled, and to convince them that generous people have greater satisfaction with life. They need to understand that greed is a compulsion and to decide whether they are willing to work on it. Are they willing to choose who will be in charge of their life: will it be the demons inside them, or themselves?
I remember one very successful investment banker, I’ll call him Arnault, who came to me for help, prompted by his impending divorce. His wife had told him that she had had enough of living with him; she wanted to “have a life.” She was fed-up with catering to his self-centered pursuits and serving merely as a cheerleader. She had had enough of him being so cheap and controlling how much money she was allowed to spend. Arnault also said his grown-up children weren’t happy with him. He confessed that he had never paid much attention to them, as he had always been too busy making money. Now, as adults, they only visited him at Christmas. Their relationship was quite distant. When I asked Arnault what he did apart from making deals, I didn’t get an immediate response. Eventually, he admitted that deal-making had always been all that mattered to him. It was the only activity that made him feel alive. It wasn’t difficult to figure out what his major Life Anchor was. When I asked him if he had any other interests, I was faced with a stony and lengthy silence. Finally, Arnault responded that he had always felt compelled to work. He needed to earn money—and now he had to make even more, given the substantial alimony he would have to pay his wife. When I prompted Arnault to give me some reasons why he was so concerned about making money, he told me that when he was growing up, his entrepreneurial father had gone bankrupt a number of times. He remembered how embarrassed he had been when the family turned off the house lights and hid to avoid creditors. He also recalled how the neighbor’s children used to make fun of him, knowing the family’s dire financial situation. He added that his parents didn’t provide much emotional support when he needed them, recalling a number of incidents when they had led him down. It made him decide to rely only on himself (it wasn’t difficult to figure out his attachment pattern, either).
I remarked that Arnault should be pleased with what he had accomplished. As he had no longer any financial worries—being independently wealthy—he could now do whatever he wanted to do. Now he had a wide range of choices. Because of his wealth, he had many more options than just making deals. But Arnault’s instant response was that he still wasn’t financially secure enough. This led to a litany of reasons why he could still get into financial difficulties. As I tried to go beyond his defensive rationalizations, I asked Arnault again, “Do you really have no other choices?” I tried to point out to him that he was allowing the intensity of his needs and his underlying fears to hijack his mind, overriding his ability to step back, and to do other things. I was trying to help him make sense of how the cycle of greed was operating within his mind. However, his confused reactions made me wonder how aware he was of his options. Did he understand the underlying craving that kept him looking for yet another deal?
I remember how hard it was to convince Arnault that his compulsive striving to keep on making money was not rational, despite his numerous rationalizations. I tried to point out that he was spending so long trying to get what everyone else had that he didn’t even realize that he already had it all. I told him that he seemed to have unlimited quantities of various things—and tried to accumulate more—but like everyone else, he had only a limited quantity of other things, such as health, and time with the family. Why risk the things he had limited amounts of to increase the quantities of things he had unlimited amounts of? What would he rather look after, his money, his health, or his family? I added that if money was his only measure of success, he shouldn’t be surprised when it turned out to be all he would ever have. His relentless pursuit of money, combined with his avoidant attachment behavior, would make him end up a very lonely man, like Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge. I also pointed out that money is a very cold currency compared to intimate relationships. His greediness meant he would always be dissatisfied because he would never be able to get everything he desired. I pointed out that greed never allows you to think that you have enough. Greed will eventually destroy you by making you strive ever harder for more.
At one point I asked Arnault how much money would be enough. Could he give me a figure? Could he tell me the level of income he needed? It was this question that started Arnault’s process of realization that there would never be such thing as enough. Not immediately, but slowly, it began to dawn on him how illogical and destructive his behavior had always been; that he should pay more attention to things he did have. I suggested that perhaps he should learn how to enjoy those things. I explained that life isn’t just about ticking the boxes for his acquisitions, then moving on to the next item on the list. There is more to life than making lists.
I spend quite some time with Arnault, dealing with what was under the surface of his greed. I helped him identify the “lack,” or whatever it was that he was so afraid of—the complex interpersonal dynamics that had created this “basic fault.” Together, we explored his associations between these anxieties and his greed-based actions. Discussing his background, I made him more conscious of why he was doing what he was doing. I think these explorations of his family history helped liberate him from the chains of his psychological enslavement. Gradually, Arnault came to understand—to his great surprise—that his real obsession was not with wealth at all. What he really needed was greater emotional intimacy. Behind this obsessive pursuit of wealth lay his need for rich, satisfying relationships. I helped him understand that he didn’t need to be a prisoner of his compulsions—that he did have choices.
One of the most difficult tasks for greedy people is learning to be selfish in a different way. They need to become more attentive to their inner self. As the case of Arnault exemplifies, this isn’t easy to do. It requires persistence, patience, humility, courage, and commitment. But this long-term investment in the self—as a counterweight to feelings of deprivation—can be a powerful antidote to greed, gluttony, avarice, and other forms of addiction. Arnault had never realized that the less you want, the happier you are. Perhaps it is a truism to say that you truly succeed in life when all you really want is only what you really need. In contrast, the more you desire, the greedier you will be. In the words of the Buddha, “Let your diet be spare, your wants moderate, your needs few. So, living modestly, with no distracting desires, you will find content.”