Greed

I happened to read a news clip that a woman from Kerala wired around Rs.40 lakhs -roundabout US$48,000 — over a period of time to a virtual male facebook friend whom she had never met as the man convinced her online that he had sent a Rs. 2-crore — roundabout US$240,000 — worth of gifts, hence, needed money to pay customs duty at the Delhi airport to clear the gifts and send them to her. After realizing that she was conned, the woman filed a police complaint only to know that the man was sitting somewhere in Nigeria! News of people getting fooled are aplenty nowadays! Scams after scams of people getting defrauded through false but seducing promises by phony financial companies have become news with shorter shelf lives as the society seemed to have become callous to such news in abundance. I  wonder why people get fooled in such easy ways. Lack of reasoning, which happens mainly because of greed, is the main cause of getting fooled. Greed is anathema to reasoning and vice versa.

What is that which drives a man? It is ambition! It is the one factor that lifts man up from the falls, fuels him to recoup, renew, and resume the journey. It is like the currents in an otherwise stagnant water body, giving life to the waters to flow — with their presence or absence, currents make waters to flow or go stagnant respectively Ambition, similarly, creates the momentum to go uphill irrespective of the nature of terrains to tread. Even hope without ambition is hopeless! Without ambition, man is dead as the wood waiting to go smoke and ash. Whether it is in a material sphere or a spiritual universe, ambition energizes man to build the accrual for the next step to happen, sooner or later.

Ambition not supported by hard work and reason is greed. When ambition takes shortcuts to circumvent the hard paths to progress, it changes its chemistry to become greed. Ambition has parallels while greed is unparalleled, giving the greedy ample space to become susceptible to fraud as well as to defraud others. Ambition is person-centric, making it to survive irrespective of the fortunes or misfortunes of others. Greed can succeed only at the misfortunes of others, so its sustainability depends on external factors.

Greed is borne out of lack of reasoning and has an anteroom of negative traits that a man harbors with or without his conscious knowledge. Laziness, jealousy, lack of knowledge of how nature works and similar self-defeating traits create an unholy space within a man for the unreasonableness to take a firm hold on how he views life, sometimes without him being fully aware of it. These negative qualities are forgiving to oneself as they set no limit for themselves, thereby creating a sense of normalcy in being unreasonable.

Laziness has no known medical remedies as it is not a physical or mental illness. Many may dispute this by stating that laziness is a state of mind, so it can be set right by psychological treatment. Well, I will not be a student to such an argument. Laziness arises out of lack of goals in life. Goals add timelines to one’s life, then, everyday becomes an elapsing dot in that timeline of marching toward that goal. And this wakes up a man from the sweet slumber of laziness and go into action mode. Life without goals is like a ship without a functional engine meandering directionless to where and when the winds and currents ask it to go — the ship has set no shore to reach. Similarly, man without goals switches off the engine of reasoning, making himself a unstable ground ripe for longing for gain without pain.

Jealousy is the acceptable uncomfortable  about the well-being of others.  It stops a man from learning the reasons behind others’ success, still, coerces and cajoles him to yearn for the same level of  success. So jealousy aims for success without making any investment to learn from the lessons and master the reasons. In other words, jealousy stops man from being reasonable. Jealousy is a big hindrance to progress in life; it ties down man to the narrow confines of his mind where he, instead of competing with the attributes of success, gets obsessed with his limited knowledge about others’ success, thereby absenting himself from exploring the times that offer opportunities for progress. A neighbor’s progress ought to be an event for inspiration, so is a classmate’s scaling of career heights a proud recognition and a case study to point to our children. But such perspectives are possible only if man is bereft of jealousy.

Nature’s laws are non-negatable and unforgiving; they take their course irrespective of who and what are involved. For example, if a moving mass like a car with passengers collides with another significant moving or non-moving mass at a speed which is unsustainable for human life, then, irrespective of whether the passengers were going to a religious or non-religious place, they will die from the forces of collision. This is a demonstration of the physical laws being non-negotiable and unforgiving.

Nature offers nothing free, and everything has a cost to and for it. There is no reaping without sowing in the books of nature. There is no reaction without action, nor is there any return without investment. For every drop of water from the skies, the skies have to make an investment of energy in the form of heat and wind to evaporate ocean waters and bring up in the skies. Greed does not take this simple, straight fact into consideration — the greedy believes and anticipates that something is going to come to him or her out of nothing. Another notable aspect of nature is that it does not love anyone or anything unconditionally. The existence of innumerable food chains is the explicit notification from nature about this limiting nature of nature. The woman who wired money to the man thought that he had unconditional love for her that he would send free gifts worth millions. Greed takes for granted these laws of nature!

Greed is incompatible, incongruent and disharmonious in nature. Man, being a nature’s produce, is bound by this ruthless and unchangeable law. Trespassing this law will inevitably be met with pain and loss.