About Greed
There are many emotional distresses that afflict humans—jealousy, despair, panic, frustration, boredom, greed. All of them have played destructive roles in many individual and social situations.
Greed, however, occupies a special place in that it has been made the basis and the fundamental operating principle or requirement in all oppressive societies. It has been esteemed to the point where, in practice, it takes precedence over most human aspirations. The successful fulfillment of goals based on greed is accepted in all class societies, and in particular the current societies, as taking precedence over happiness, health, care of the environment, good relationships with others, and the operation of human intelligence.
We have recently begun to understand that probably an even earlier appearance of irrationality into humans’ relations with each other, earlier even than greed, is the idea of preferment or choice of one individual over another. There apparently is nothing necessarily irrational about an individual preferring a warm room to a cold breeze, liking blue color better than red, or choosing vanilla over chocolate, but any choosing or preferring of one human over another in any sense seems to be deeply oppressive and lays in the patterns for a spreading oppression, out of which greed can flourish, wars can rage, and class societies persist.
From page 164 of The List
(Present Time 198, January 2020)