Let us concede for the moment that at times something that might look like greed can help us do good things, after we have given up any semblance of being greedy. Greed in and of itself is not good. That is a lie that has been repeated so often that a lot of people now believe it.
Mantras work that way. They wear grooves in our brains that then feed us an answer every time we ask ourselves a question. While chanting the mantra; “Greed is good,” minions of many big companies have looted and defaced our society and economy. If you think greed is good then you should applaud the former leaders of such giant failures as Enron and even Citibank today.
The reason the leaders of those companies failed their employees, shareholders and customers and even the public at large is simple. It lies in the fact that they freed up their greed at the expense of their good sense. Any idiot could have seen that what they were doing was not sustainable. Greed blinds us to the consequences of our actions.
The drive to achieve something substantial is not the same as greed. It can easily be misconstrued as greed by people with a faulty moral compass. But the drive to achieve is never greed; it is simply embracing the hope of doing something meaningful with our life.
Hope is a funny thing. It uplifts us and makes us strive to be better in some way. In the end what we make of ourselves is our own greatest creation. A case in point is a person I once knew. We will call him Larry for the moment.
Larry had a father and mother. Most of us do when we start out. His mom died of something we used to call sleeping sickness. That was a disease spread by mosquitoes and rare where Larry lived. He was seven years old when she died. His dad drank a lot of alcohol before that happened and abused Larry a bit.
By current standards most people did some tough things to their kids in those years. They were not the best of times, a depression was raging and many families were stretched as badly as they are today. After his mother died Larry got a lot more abuse and a lot less love.
Larry grew up fighting for his space in the world. When he was a young man he learned that love was hard to hang onto but precious. He married early and went into the business of drilling water wells. That was the family business and he made it more successful in his first ten years at the helm than it had ever been.
He married a kind and gentle woman who was tough as a good file. She worked on his rough edges and he became even more successful. Then the oil boom hit and he bought an oil drilling rig and made some real money. Those were pretty good years.
He still bore the scars of his father’s abuse but he learned a lot of things over the years. Forgiveness was one of them. Larry reached middle age and he had outstripped his peers in financial success and happiness. He was still unsatisfied. Money was nice but he wanted to do something that made a difference.
He hunted as a hobby. He even made a trip to Africa and Hunted Big Game there. While he was there he met some people who were trying to build wells that could provide clean water to rural villages. He helped them a little before he went back.
His wife came along with him to see Africa and she fell in love with the people. They went back to the town where they had always lived and looked around. Their kids were grown. The town was doing OK everyone in their families was doing just fine. They had a lot of money and were restless with all of that free time.
So they contacted the people that they had met in Africa who were trying to drill wells and provide clean water to people. They signed up to help and brought their own equipment and support system along with them.
They are still there and still working to improve the lives of people that are suffering from poverty that most of us cannot imagine. Larry would be about eighty or so today but he is still working hard physically and loves it.
Every once and a while they come back for a few days to see old friends and family members. The last time I saw him Larry told me something I had never heard him say before.
“The people who need me the most are the ones that keep me going. Those are the children who give their love without any restraint or selfish reason. I used to think my childhood was bad. They suffer losses that I could not have imagined and keep on smiling. If you want to find unselfish people then just go where I have been and look at those kids.”
That came from the heart of a man who had what most of us would consider a horrible childhood. The world can use any amount of good we want to do in our lives. Greed is no part of doing good; not now, not ever.
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