The Opposite of Greed is Empathy

Fostering Creativity as an Act of Humanity

Photo by Brett Sayles

The world is on fire. Literally and metaphorically. The number of global disasters cannot be counted (and if it could, the number is far greater than it should be). Every day on social media, I see humanity at its worst. People hoarding billions of dollars, innocent lives getting caught in the crossfire, needless destruction for the sake of power. And greed. I’ve been caught up on this notion of greed lately. What is it? Where does it come from? What can we do about it?

I try to answer these questions to the best of my ability by combining and connecting multiple sources of research and my own ideas. My goal is to break down greed and related elements like aggression and capitalism to their core pieces, to the humanity at the center of it all.

Western Greed and Indigenous Giving

In a paper titled, Greed as the Motor and the Momentum of Human Civilization, Loulou Malaeb Ph.D. argues that a desire for “commodius living” is a biological trait of evolution. Malaeb suggests that greed is an inherent quality of humans, that we seek more to improve our well-being.

But what is greed?

Greed, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/greed), is “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed.” For this reason, I fail to see how greed and a desire for more could be at all connected to human evolution, let alone seen in a positive light. I agree that, as humans, we want to live a comfortable life, but a “survival of the fittest” and greed-centered mindset hardly explains how we have created the world we live in now.

Whenever I think about human evolution, how we moved from hunter-gatherers to empires to modern civilization, I think about the Indigenous and their way of life. My understanding of Indigenous societies in the past is that resources are shared willingly and “traded” appropriately, meaning if one person has too many carrots from their crop but they need fur for clothing, they’ll trade the excess amount with someone who has excess fur. This trading system allowed all parties to meet their basic needs and to flourish. It didn’t matter if one person had more of something because everyone had access to that something.

In addition, I saw a short clip of an interview a while ago, and I’d link it if I could find it again, but it discussed how the Indigenous people valued giving and abundance, while the Spaniards that invaded valued taking and greed. While I’m not against the idea of greed being a part of nature rather than nurture, I think it developed later than some suggest.

The Greed and Aggression of Men

In Women After All (2015), author Melvin Konner shares that “DNA analysis of the Y chromosone by Tatiana Zerjal and her colleagues showed in 2003 that about sixteen million men alive were genetic descendants of one man who lived at the time of Genghis Khan.” This statement proceded a section on the rape, abuse, and prositution of women during the Crusades. Men succeeded reproductively but at the expense of women. One of my theories is that greed and violence may have passed down genetically. If we’re to agree that humanity evolved due to the survival of the fittest, does that also mean it evolved due to the survival of the most aggressive, assertive, and possibly violent as well?

Konner, however, also touches on Carol Ember’s study of Luo children in rural Kenya where if a family had too many boys over girls, the boys were given the “girls' work” (for example cooking or looking after younger siblings over going hunting). These boys assigned to girls' work showed “less aggression and domincance, more altruism, and less dependence.” As I suspected, the answer is neither nature nor nurture, but likely a combination of both. If aggression is learned, so is greed. If violence against others is learned, treating each other with respect is also learned.

Capitalism Versus Creativity

I also disagree with the concept of greed as human nature because even Maleab fails to see the true element behind commodious living. They ask, “Why do we want more?” When really, I believe, the “more” comes from the need to create. Why improve a tool when the one we have already works? Our human brains allow us to imagine, think up possibilities, and then act on them. It’s not that we want more commodities; it’s that we want to create more or something better than what already exists.

Photo by Una Laurencic

Capitalism has turned this human need to create into an excessive want to have. Economic growth is really economic greed, and again, commodious living fails to include the billions of dollars in offshore accounts (as is so aptly demonstrated in the documentary The Panama Papers). If that wealth is supposed to improve the lives of its owners, why is it just sitting there? If greed is human nature, how do you explain the other societies and people across the world who have less money but are statistically happier? It’s because they have wealth in other areas besides money, and that wealth doesn’t exist in excess.

The Answer to Destruction is Creation

What is the answer, then? How can we combat greed and capitalism and the systematic deconstruction of democracy? Creation. Creation is the answer. The act of creating something from nothing is not only an act of rebellion, but it is one of humanity.

Think about it. What are the items that withstood the test of time of ancient civilizations so that we may uncover them, view them, and study them? Their buildings, their temples, stone tablets, tools, intricate jars, bowls, masks, and more. Their art survived. Their inventions and creations have survived so that we may know them today. Even now, presently, we have monuments and cathedrals carefully reserved and restored, paintings and portraits that fill museum walls, and we have the journals of da Vinci and Darwin.

This is partly why I love books and reading so much. I can pick up a new release just as quickly as I can find a book a decade old, five decades old, or a century old. Not only do we get to experience a new story, but we get a peek into the past, a peek into the every day life of human beings now long gone. When I read The Revenge of Analog, David Sax spoke of this need to hold something physical in our hands. He said it was very human, that it helped connect us emotionally. Showing off a physical book collection hardly compares to scrolling through an e-reader list. Not that one is better than the other, but the tangiblility of a physical books allows all our senses to activate and deepens the experience.

Creation as Empathy

This brings us to my last point. Possibly, the point. Creation and creativity are not only tools for connecting with our humanity, but they also teach us empathy. Books, paintings, films, architecture, woodworking, and more allow us to look through someone else’s eyes and see the world as they see it. We get to learn that girls and women, BIPOC, and the disabled can be heroes, too, and that people of all skin tones and all sizes deserve to have their forms immortalized in paint and marble. We learn that women belong in STEM fields and have actually made important, award-winning discoveries just as long, if not longer than, men.

The more we uncover history through records, sketches, and journals—the more we uncover history through art—the more we widen the lens of what it means to be human. Suddenly the scope of what we thought we knew widens to reveal the truth. Education is a threat to the powerful because education is knowledge, and knowledge is what gives us creativity, empathy, and truth. The truth is that we do not know everything and we never will, but the pursuit of knowledge is worthy anyway. The pursuit of to create and invent and make is worthy anyway. The pursuit of understanding and learning to respect others who are different from us is worthy anyway.

In the wake of billionaires and the hoarding of wealth, create. In the wake of prejudice and hate, practice empathy. In the wake of disinformation, dig deeper until you find the truth. Because if greed is learned, it can be unlearned.