HEALTH PLUS:When wealth and greed is the measure of worth, hubris is never far away, writes Marie Murray
THE WORD greed has surfaced in recent times as one explanation for the demise of prosperity and the onset of the recession. Whatever its economic portent and global implications, the psychological significance of the unnecessary, quasi-pathological acquisitiveness inherent in greed is worth considering.
This is because greed, of its essence, contains anxiety and addictive dimensions that, unrestrained, can impact on the happiness and mental wellbeing of those who suffer from it.
And suffer they do. They suffer from the disposition, the emotions, the activities and the ideological positioning that greed entails. They suffer from a need that can never be sated: a need that increases as it is fed and that diminishes sufferers as they cross more ethical boundaries in pursuit of the unattainable.
It is the denial of the rights of others in the acquisition of possessions that distinguishes greed from other acquisitive conditions. With that denial, comes emotional desensitisation to the needs of others: a sense of entitlement, an unwarranted grandiosity, a belief that one has a superior right to an unequal share, and a sense of power over those who have less.
Those whom one has dispossessed may become objects of scorn rather than pity. Greed is a deadly condition indeed.
Like most addictions, the exercise of greed creeps up unawares, gains a behavioural hold, a psychological grip, takes possession, is denied, rationalised and exercised in the belief that the behaviour is normative rather than out of control.
Like most additions, there are many people surrounding the addict who suffer as a result. Possessions become confused with success. Success becomes blurred with self. Wealth becomes the measure of worth.
Discontent is rarely attributed to emotional aridity but misplaced on to lack of the next desired object. If one does not know where the vacuum lies, how can it be filled? If emotional emptiness is answered by acquisition, then it is not answered, it is displaced, denied and diverted into what will never fill that void.
The obsessive-compulsive aspects of greed condemn sufferers to anxious awareness of potential opportunities that must be capitalised upon and potential losses that must be guarded against.
Having acquired more, one has more to defend, more to secure, more to insure, more to worry about, more that others might take away and more that can be lost in a single market crash.
Life gets complex. Simplicity is denied. Habituation dampens delight in things. With extreme wealth, the immediacy of gratification denies anticipation and the duration of joy when what is desired is acquired.
Artist Pablo Picasso's statement that he would like to live like a poor person with lots of money, points to the paradox of possessions: life is difficult without them and difficult with them, if a balance between being and having is not achieved.
Children who are given too many things, who always receive what they desire without delay, are not well served and are often identifiable by their levels of discontent.
The goals of greed are short term and object-based, rather than long term and skills-based. Children struggling with greed may confuse love with objects. They look to external resources rather than their own internal skills or relationships to solve their problems, and they are denied the process of taking appropriate possession of self rather than inappropriate craving for possessions.
Experiments on children's capacity to delay gratification has found that those who can do so tend to achieve more cognitively, emotionally, educationally and socially. The skills required to cope with "waiting" are those required for attention, for turn-taking, concentration, frustration-tolerance and long-term planning.
Waiting is not just a temporal thing. It is a cognitive skill, an emotional capacity and a tolerance that is helped by being taught to the child in a gentle and compassionate way. But the advantages of challenging greed are not confined to developmental psychology or to the individual child. The advantages are social and societal. They are global.
The earth has enough for man's need, but not for man's greed said the great Indian visionary Mahatma Gandhi. If our children cannot draw that distinction and address its implications, they may face excessive psychological challenges that we would not wish them to have to face.
• mmurray@ucd.ie
• Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is director of the Student Counselling Services in University College Dublin