Greed Is Good!
This is the famous motto of Gordon Gecko, the nefarious villain in the movie, Wall Street. Those investment bankers who are at the heart of the engine that drove the sub-prime bubble saw their activities as not stemming from rapacious greed, but as being just and good, and in the best interests of family and country.
It is tempting to see these individuals as inhuman, self-serving monsters. Instead, they should be seen as the natural product of a process, which has engulfed our entire society. To indict them is to indict our whole society. They are the winners of the game, which has been sold to us and into which we have all happily bought in.
A population of voracious consumers only superficially connected to one another is one which can be relied upon to greedily consume the outputs produced by the economy. Believing in little other than their own entitlement implies that they are unlikely to balk at society’s transgressions against their neighbor. The distrust those in the narcissistic paradigm feel towards one another means there is little likelihood of their banding together to create an organized opposition to the status quo. Lacking the collective will to be defiant; those in power can rely upon their mute compliance.
This makes them relatively easy to manage. In this sense, the capitalist system is far more efficient than communism or autocracy, requiring a much smaller investment in a police apparatus – here the sheep can be relied upon to herd themselves. Gradually the government can remove their freedoms safe in the knowledge that whatever resistance they may offer will only be temporary. If this process is sufficiently gradual, the majority will never even notice.
John Berling Hardy is a Chartered Accountant who performs audits on numerous Fortune 500 companies.
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Filed under Leadership and posted on 22 November 2009
