Greed leads to the devaluation of everything, including human life itself.
Greed: a selfish and excessive desire for more of something than is needed.
Cheap: purchasable below the real value or of inferior quality or worth.
Right here, right now: my life in Dutch education
There are so many things I could say about this topic, I'm not sure where to start, so I'll start right here, right now. I live in the Netherlands, a country traditionally so well-known for its stinginess, it became idiomatic. I work in an International School, subject to Dutch law. Our last government left us with an interesting legacy: we had to give up one week of our summer holidays. The reasoning behind this was: teachers are overworked and therefore need more time to do all that work. It did not address the Dutch system of individual non-teaching tasks (so-called 'taakbeleid' i.e. 'task policy') that teachers have to perform (an unknown phenomenon in the rest of the world), nor did it lower the workload in any way. To compare: in France a full-time teacher teaches 18 hours a week, in the Netherlands 27. Nor was this extra week compensated by a pay rise. A nice, cheap solution. What it really does is devalue the worth of teachers and education in general.
Another reason for the shorter holiday was that students must be exposed to 1040 hours of education per school year. This number is pretty random and there is no evidence that more hours of education will lead to a higher level of knowledge and performance. There is in fact evidence to the contrary, as some countries with fewer teaching hours score much higher, such as South Korea and famous Finland, where a school year consists of a mere 750 hours and children don't enter formal education till the age of seven. So, why the 1040 hours? That's just greed - you get more for the same price. But in reality, students get demotivated by having to sit in class hour after hour, day after day, year after year, for 14 years. No wonder the Dutch have what is known as 'zesjescultuur', which means you put in just enough effort to get a passing grade, but no more. Again, an example of cheap thinking leading to devaluation.
Corporate greed
This term is thankfully becoming a bit of a fad, meaning it has trickled down to the general public. There are many factions out there who (used to) believe that if corporations did well, so would the people around them. Not so. These companies and banks, and their shareholders, are only interested in profit, and more profit. They felt labour was too expensive and started outsourcing to cheaper countries. Subsequently, they turned this cheaper rate into the going rate, which is why many Americans are now faced with having to take on two, or even three jobs, just to make ends meet. The same is starting to happen in Europe. Except, of course, there are no jobs.
These corporations made lots of money by putting ultimately useless (financial) products on the market and by speculating on the stock exchange. Knowing when to shift your money about is certainly a talent, but does not contribute anything of value to the world. Most of this money is safely tucked away in tax-havens like the Cayman islands, not contributing an iota to the people it came from. Those people are called 'losers', by the way, and to devalue them even more, we say that it's their own fault that they are losers.
The Greed of War
As I write this, bombs are falling on Gaza as Israel is 'defending' itself against the Palestinian 'terrorists'. Of course, Israel is the product of the former epitome of greed, The British Empire. The British crown decided that Jews could settle in Palestine. Maybe that was fair. Maybe it really was their God-given land. But then they got greedy. Looking at a historic map of the region, it is clear how the Palestinians have been pushed into progressively smaller areas, while Jewish territory likewise expanded. To justify this, the Israelis cast the Palestinians in the role of aggressor, or terrorist. Jewish lives became worth more than Palestinian lives. And Western media gladly helped. One Israeli killed? Front-page news! Five hundred Palestinians killed? Page 12! The same goes, of course, for Afghan and Iraqi civilians.
To satisfy one's greed, one must devalue the people that stand in one's way. Make no mistake, war is always based on greed: for power, land, resources.
The Psychology of Greed
It's interesting to note that stock markets have a greed/fear index. (see http://money.cnn.com/data/fear-and-greed/). We are cautious when we are afraid and greedy when we feel safe. But being brave when there is nothing to fear, isn't real bravery, is it? In fact, I would say, greed is ultimately driven by fear. To create a buffer in case things go downhill, whether that be status, power, money or land. We're so scared that we are willing to devalue, desecrate, drain, pillage, pollute and plunder the whole world around us, just to make us feel 'better'.
Having been around some 50,000 years, one would have hoped humankind had evolved beyond that.
