From August 4, 2005, “Basta”
A word here about greed and need, which have been treated as a bit too interchangeable in some of the previous threads. (And also because it’s an appropriate subject during hold-out week for NFL training camps.)
Greed and need would both fall under the category of what economists call “incentives.” They can both serve to motivate people to work harder, or to break the rules. If you’re a human resources manager or a prosecuting attorney, either one will serve as motive.
But that’s where the similarities end. Greed and need are very different things, and not just because only the former is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. The moral distinction — the difference between Ken Lay and Jean Valjean — is important, but it’s not the biggest difference.
The biggest difference is this: Needs can be met. Greed is, by definition, insatiable. This means, among other things, that it is at least theoretically possible for a needy person to be or become happy. The same cannot be said for a greedy person. One intriguing implication of this fact is that it does not seem to be in one’s self-interest to be greedy. (Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, etc.)
Inasmuch as there is such a thing as a synonym, “insatiable” is one synonym for “greedy.” An opposite of greedy, therefore, would be “satiable.” This is what the needy person knows that the greedy person does not: That there is such a thing as “enough.”
“Enough” is, admittedly, a bit of a slippery concept. Many of the people who have enough are sure there is no such thing. And many of the people who have never had enough are just as certain that it exists. It is something that greedy people can never have, and perhaps the only thing they do not want. But as impossible as it may be to pin down, it does exist.
I referred earlier to the “Eddie Cicotte theory” that public servants ought to be well-paid. By well-paid, I mean paid enough that financial need does not tempt them into becoming corrupt. It is possible to pay a needy person enough to remove this temptation. It is not possible to remove this temptation for a greedy person because they can never be paid enough.
I’m reminded again of Dickens’ Mr. Micawber and his recipe for happiness: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
To have enough, or more than enough, is a wonderful thing. To have more than enough, and not realize it, is a nightmare.
(I write all this as an American in the 21st century, so my concept of what constitutes “enough” would probably seem ridiculously extravagant to people in other times and other places, but that’s a separate discussion.)
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