No New Tale to Tell

Greed is a hard topic to talk about. Of course we can simply define greed as "desiring something you don't have", but is that completely accurate. When we apply greed to human nature and modern society it manifests itself in very different forms. Greed doesn't necessarily need to be for yourself, greed also doesn't need to be for a bad cause. Greed is a wide and far-reaching subject that is not so easily classified by the definition we are pursuing. For instance a mother sending her child to a selective enrollment school is greedy because she desires her child to be more successful than others and have advantages that others do not. By that child taking a seat in the school, it means some other child is denied that future. Greed is present in almost all human actions. Desire for pleasure, the ultimate goal in life is only attained by greed. Everyone wants to feel pleasure in their own respective way or form, and this desire is greed in essence. Greed is as natural to humans as breathing and is ultimately inevitable. Because of this greed really isn't such a bad thing after all. Greed saves people from dangerous situations, it allows people to think rationally and make good decisions, it lets us advance further as a species and has helped the human race more times than ever would be countable. There are very important events in human history that have been caused by greed, that resulted in general good. For instance, when the US entered WWII out of desire to keep its control over the Pacific it resulted in the end of the Holocaust, the destruction of the Nazi regime, creation of the United Nations, liberation of millions of people, saving the Chinese-Sino people from Japanese torture, and establishing a new world order of democracy. At the same time this greed for territory led to 2 atomic weapons being used, widespread genocide, destruction of families, property and lives. I do think there is merit to an argument that greed causes evil, but it is definitely an overstatement to say greed causes all evil. In fact, greed alleviates much evil in human lives and is an essential part of our existence.