Why is everyone greedy

They can be charming, but their principal agenda is to have people around them that feed their ego. Greedy people are into the short run ; they are focused on satiating their immediate needs and leave it to others to cope with the consequences. To illustrate, as leaders of corporations, they are more interested in getting their bonuses, instead of making investments for future innovation, or to share whatever benefits accrued with their employees.

In the pursuit of their material needs, they know no limits. Greedy people are not good at maintaining boundaries. They will compromise moral values and ethics to achieve their goals. They look for loopholes or clever ways to outsmart the rules and regulations that have been put into place to moderate this kind of behaviour. Dealing with excessive greed What I have learned from experience dealing with executives that suffer from the greed syndrome is that it is usually the foolish decisions born out of greed that eventually prompts them to make changes.

Evolving Leadership in the Digital Age. The Happiness Equation. Pity the Super-rich. David K , Wonderful article. Anand Mathur , Solving This. Ulrich Neuhauss , Thank you Manfred. It is a. Zizou42 , Joyce , Vincent , Greed is a disease. Vito , Krishna , Greed has many forms which are not visible to any one.

How I ran across this story from my personal journal. Human nature. Who is responsible. Buddy , A friend. Kani , Add a comment Already a member?

Sign In. We welcome your comments and encourage lively debate. However, to ensure the quality of discussion, our moderators reserve the right not to publish personal attacks, abusive comments or overly promotional content.

This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions. What code is in the image? Manfred F. Kets de Vries. Edouard Polytopoly. Mikel Gutierrez , How to Cultivate Cross-Silo Leadership. Soon the water drop, and surrounding water drops, and large chunks of ocean, were filled with Hermans and Hermettes, all gulping down metaphorically speaking, since they didn't have throats every piece of food they could find.

In other words, they were greedy, ensuring their own survival and ability to reproduce by devouring everything they could find that would result in more Hermettes. Herman, and its descendants, and their descendants, kept this up for a couple of billion years, greedily grasping for those resources that ensured personal and genetic survival.

Eventually, some of Herman's descendants discovered that they could cope with conditions better is they found a way to evolve faster and weed out mutations that got in the way of survival. They developed sex. Finally, Herman's descendants were greedily gulping fruits, nuts, berries, and anything else that came to a paw that was becoming a hand. Several of them had banded together to form a mutual nonaggression pact. Among them were Oog and Ugh, who were hoping to have a little Ugly of their own.

Reaching for another apple, Oog suddenly had her protohand slapped. Popping the offended member in her mouth, she looked askance at her attacker.

Aagh pointed to her own little Yugh, who was looking thin and hungry. Oog looked, then back-protohanded Aagh off the branch, took the apple, and scarfed it down.

The rest of the band, observing this subtle interplay of diplomatic reasoning, decided that such selfishness required discussion. However, since they hadn't yet evolved language, they simply beat up Oog, and for good measure Ugh, with a few swipes at Aagh for having started the whole mess. Then they sent Oog and Ugh forth to go and sin with some other group but leave us alone.

Such discouragement discouraged Oog and Ugh, but they knew deep down that the more resources they collected and kept for themselves, they better off they, and when Ugly came along, all three of them would be.

They competed for resources better than others, passed on more of their own genes, and in general became human beings. However, human beings are gregarious creatures, wishing to band into mutual admiration societies and avoid inbreeding. We get together for protection, for support, to share the work necessary for survival, and to have someone to talk to.

In addition, the resources important to humans changed. No longer was it simply food in order to get and keep the strength to procreate. Now there were other things, like land to grow food, and money to buy food, and pottery to store food, and methods such as ships and caravans and trading and military conquest to get food. Eventually, the food was not the end result desired -- the means to the end became the end itself.

The real problem arose when the population increased and the possible wealth became limited. There was only so much land and money and other resources to go around. Thus, for one person to amass a lot of wealth, rhe had to reduce what somebody else could get. This created conflict in the society between the haves and have-nots, the go-getters and the no-getters.

The purpose of a society is to reduce conflict between the members of that society. The society creates laws, religions, government, whatever will allow people to get along without fighting each other in response to their biological urges. Thus, there are laws and religious proscriptions against murder to keep people from killing each other and thus weakening the society's ability to support itself and the people in it.

There are laws and religious proscriptions against infidelity to keep men from killing each other and enslaving women so men can be sure of their paternity a biological imperative -- a male doesn't want to waste his resources and care on genes that aren't his Daly, , and men are male. To reduce the conflict greed could create, societies, through their laws and religions, said that an extreme desire for wealth was harmful to the society since it concentrated too many resources in too few hands.

Thus greed was decreed and decried as excessive and harmful, and proscribed. The ancient proscriptions were to avoid societal conflicts. The proscriptions were also often easy to follow when people were nomadic. The fear of loss, among other things, could well drive such actions.

Scholar Damien Keown explains in his book on Buddhist ethics that in Buddhist thought, the whole universe is interconnected and ever-changing. People perceive material things as stable and permanent, and we desire and try to hold onto them.

But since loss is inevitable, our desire for things causes us to suffer. Our response to that suffering is often to grasp at things more and more tightly.

But we end up harming others in our quest to make ourselves feel better. Taken together, these thinkers provide insight into acts of greed committed by those who already have so much.

At the same time, the teachings of the Buddha suggest that our most strenuous efforts to keep things for ourselves cannot overcome their impermanence. In the end, we will always lose what we are trying to grasp. Festival of Social Science — Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products.

List of Partners vendors. Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Business Leaders Warren Buffett. Compare Accounts. The offers that appear in this table are from partnerships from which Investopedia receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where listings appear.