Glorifying Greed - Capitalism Brings Out the Worst in Us

Greed is Good. This is what any mainstream Economic "Expert" will tell you about Capitalism and Consumer Culture. In fact, the idea that self-service, competition and material incentives are essential to drive progress in modern society is the cornerstone around which the whole socio-economic system of today is built.

Many would argue, based on anecdotal evidence, that the monetary system is the only realistic way to organise society, because humans are greedy by nature and always seek power over others. However, I would contend that this assumption largely discounts the influence of NURTURE, while inflating the importance of NATURE in human cognitive and social development.

Society as Emergent Behaviour

Emergent behaviour is the tendency for a group of creatures to self-organise around a set of simple urges or drives. It allows relatively simple rules to produce very complex patterns of behaviour without any direct planning or management of the members of that group. Examples of emergent behaviour in nature can be seen in the way flocks of birds and herds of animals move together or how ants, bees and other social insects can produce relatively complex structures without any apparent pre-planning or top-down organisation.

Is it such a stretch to imagine that many of the behaviours displayed by humans in modern society are Emergent Behaviours produced by the formal rules and perceived imperatives of society? Is it possible that the Consumer-Capitalist structure of society itself could be responsible for many of the negative behaviours seen in society? Could it be that society encourages and reinforces the more negative aspects of the human condition over the positives?

The Rules of the Game

It is my contention that the structure of the world economy, along with the consumer society it
produces, is an amplifier of the worst traits of the human condition. A society that glorifies greed by using material wealth as a measure of success will inevitably reward selfishness, profiteering and wasteful hoarding of resources.Think of playing a game of Monopoly, which is a simple simulation of our socio-economic system. How many warm, generous and giving people have you seen turn into ruthless business-sharks in order to win the game? Their behaviour is dictated by the rules of the game, it is emergent.

Other more complex simulations of Capitalist Economies, with a more tangible sense of attached value, exist in the more modern realm of computer games. In these virtual worlds value can be attached either via "real" currency or by time invested gathering resources. The Verge recently printed an article about emergent classes in modifications of Minecraft which had a trading and currency system modification installed. Also, my own experiences in the brutal sci-fi simulator Eve Online - where destroyed items are lost forever and almost everything you can purchase has been found, built or stolen by another player - taught me that emergent behaviour in a competitive/capitalist system affects even the most humane of us, despite ourselves.
 
Although you may think the comparisons I have drawn above are weak, I challenge you to find an Eve Online player and ask them how real the loss of an expensive internet-spaceship feels. The time invested in acquiring the in-game currency gives those pixels a solidity that I would contend rivals the material and the in-game currency (ISK) actually has an effective, albeit one-way, exchange rate with real currencies. It also gives a stark example of the kind of behaviour that could be displayed in an unregulated capitalist society, as detailed in this article from the financial times online. Extortion, scamming and espionage are considered part of the norm in Eve, just the way the game is played.

The Bottom Line

In the digital age, the detachment we have from the source of money's value has increased further and the structure of big business means; that many of the highest earners in the management positions of big companies not only have low personal productivity, but are so far removed from the people they are supposed to be supporting that their role is little more than a title. Couple this with the whole idea of the financial markets and it's easy to see how people can become so extraordinarily detached from the damage being done by their quest for profit and material wealth.

The current socio-economic system causes us to express some of the worst traits of the human condition. When Greed is Good, it is "acceptable" to sell goods for more than they a worth, to pay the front-line employees of a company as little as possible and to engage in immoral market-fixing in order to gain more material wealth. While it may have driven progress in the world through competition, it has done so at a great cost to the environment, equality and our own views on human nature.

Fanfare for The Conscious

Sources

Finances Online: Income Inequality vs. Crime Rate
Non-Linear Effect of Wealth on Crime
The Verge: Problems with Capitalism shown in Minecraft
Financial Times: Hardcore Unregulated Capitalism in Eve Online