Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Greed and laziness have long been popularly perceived as flaws in the human character. While greed and laziness can express themselves independently, they are in many ways intertwined in the human psyche.

Even the lowest dregs of humanity can and often are quite capable of demonstrating basic greed and laziness. In fact, the ability to exhibit these behaviors is often sited as the primary reason for the failures of these sorry humans. At the other end of the scale there are the idle rich - a state aspired to by many. So at both ends of the social scale we have manifestations of greed and laziness, with the primary difference being their competence at being greedy and lazy.

Much effort is made to redirect or suppress the natural inclinations of children to be greedy and lazy. But are we right in trying to change these most basic and natural aspects of human nature? The fact that these characteristics have proven so durable and wide spread would seem to indicate that there is some evolutionarily valid reason for their persistence.

As contradictory as it may sound, I think a compelling case can be made that greed and laziness in their more evolved forms have provided much of the fuel for the engine that created our modern world. The difference between self destructive greed and laziness, and the higher motivations that have driven us to build civilizations, is the difference between the superficial and profound forms of these human characteristics.

Greed and laziness arguably evolved out of basic survival mechanisms needed by our predecessors. As pack hunters and scavengers, early prehumans lived in a world of irregular food supplies. In a world of feast or famine, an individual needed to eat as much as he could when he could in order to survive periods when food was scarce. Dogs, still largely adapted to the irregular life of hunting packs, also exhibit this tendency to compulsively overeat when given free access to food. Laziness probably evolved out of the survival advantage of conserving energy when possible. By avoiding unnecessary energy outputs, the individual lowers his food needs and conserves his energy reserves for escaping from predators and other unavoidable demands.

Largely isolated from their original evolutionary advantages, these basic instincts are transformed by human societies into a variety of human behaviors ranging from entirely negative socially destructive manifestations to transcendent altruism and apparently selfless sacrifice. The key to these apparently higher aspects is the evolution of profound greed and laziness into the intellectual abstraction of enlightened self-interest.

Consider two prospective farmers faced with fields full of rocks and the need to construct some sort of shelter. One farmer is only superficially lazy while his neighbor has achieved profound laziness. While the superficially lazy farmer seeks to do as little as possible for as long as possible, the profoundly lazy farmer dreams of achieving ultimate idleness and the lowest possible total effort over a lifetime.

The superficially lazy farmer expresses his basic nature as we would expect - he constantly attempts to minimize his activity level, doing only as little as necessary to sustain life. He removes just enough of the rocks from just enough of his land to grow just enough food to stay alive. He builds a crude shelter that provides the bare minimum of protection from the elements. As he goes through life he attempts to find ways to expend the minimum effort at that particular moment, and only does what can't be avoided. For example, when faced with the unavoidable need to fetch water he only fills as many pails as he needs at the moment.

The superficially lazy farmer achieves his maximum avoidance of work early and is then obliged to maintain that level with little hope of reducing it further. In order to sustain even this level of laziness he is obliged to make sacrifices in his standard of living. Perhaps more importantly he is never able to afford the labor saving devices that would have made the work he is unable to avoid so much easier.

Now consider the profoundly lazy farmer. Instead of trying to avoid work, he puts his efforts into creating permanent solutions for the work he doesn't want to do. While the merely superficially lazy are faced with the endless repetitive grind of avoiding work, the profoundly lazy are willing to work very hard over the short term to outright eliminate the need to work in the long term. And each time the profoundly lazy individual eliminates another form of repellent work, he frees up yet more resources that can then be brought to bear on eliminating the remaining annoying demands of life.

The profoundly lazy farmer sees that most problems in life can be approached a bit like building a siphon. He can see that if he puts out a little extra effort to lay out the pipe and prime the flow, from then on the siphon will deliver a continuous supply of water without any additional effort. Even though he appears to work harder at first, he knows that over the long haul he'll put a lot less effort into hauling water than his only superficially lazy neighbor.

The profoundly lazy farmer approaches the problem of rocks in his fields in the same way. Instead of laboriously clearing just enough land to survive by hand, he puts his efforts into building a rock clearing machine. Not only does the machine take care of the hard work of clearing his land, but he can then rent the machine out to his neighbors for enough money to pay someone else to build his house for him. With more land cleared for crops the farmer earns enough to buy the latest labor saving devices and hire others to do much of the rest of his work. As he becomes more and more successful in the traditional sense, he puts in less and less of the hard physical labor that is the focus of his innate laziness.

Although while building his rock clearing machine he might give the uncritical observer the impression of tireless industry, one must consider the overall results to see the farmer's true nature. The profoundly lazy farmer is willing to make these extra efforts in the beginning because he expects them to eventually allow him to achieve a substantially lazier life-style than his neighbor. Considering the effects of their different levels of laziness over a lifetime, while the profoundly lazy farmer had periods where he worked much harder than his superficially lazy neighbor, he achieved a better standard of living while expending less effort overall.

Now consider the related concept of superficial and profound greed. The superficially greedy individual defines his desires relative to those around him on a moment to moment basis. Whatever those around him want, he wants to have more of it than they have. His greed can be satisfied either by acquiring more himself, or by those around him having less. It doesn't matter whether his definition of wealth is having a few more grains of rice in his bowl than the next guy, or more dollars in the bank, it's all relative.

Even the least developed intellect is capable of expressing superficial greed. The infantile intellect always wants more milk than his internal organs can accommodate, the biggest piece of the candy bar, the biggest office, the biggest bonus check. Superficial greed is almost always contrary to the individual's best interests and harmful to those around him. Superficial greed focuses on acquiring possession of existing resources and privileges, and requires a winner and a loser.

Achieving truly profound greed requires a far more developed intellect and understanding of how the world really works. At its ultimate evolution profound greed becomes enlightened self-interest. Henry Ford first evolved beyond the crude superficial greed of his contemporaries in the car business when he realized he could make more money selling lots of cheap cars instead of a few very expensive ones. His greed transcended into the profound with his revelation that if he paid his workers a bit more money they would become his customers as well, and he'd make back more far more in increased sales than the apparently humanitarian gesture of paying a decent wage cost him.

There is always a downside to superficial greed since in order for there to be a winner there must also be losers - who tend to resent being cast in the role. The greedy winner must always be on guard that one or more losers will turn on him and destroy his fragile privileged situation. In order to defend his relative wealth it becomes important to suppress or distract the efforts of others to prevent their success compromising his relative position. While the superficially greedy individual might attempt to exploit the productivity of a group of others, he can't allow any group to achieve its maximum effectiveness. The primary criteria that he have more than those around him dictates that he not allow the other members of a group to benefit from their own efforts to the extent he benefits from them.

The greater the success of the winner, the greater the effort he must expend to defend his ill gotten gains. Many of the superficially greedy are forced to become so involved in defending their hoard that they in effect become the victims of their own baser instincts.

The profoundly greedy measures his wealth not against the assets of his neighbors, but against a utopian ideal. The goal of the profoundly greedy transcends simple crude avarice to seeking the best possible life he can live. If achieving his goal also means others will benefit from his efforts, so be it. The utopian goal is far more important than preserving the fragile illusion of relative wealth.

Most importantly, the profoundly greedy is unwilling to pay a downside for his greed - he wants it all without having to expend a lot of effort to defend it or suffer the nagging fear of eventually losing it. Once the individual's greed has evolved to the point where he can appreciate both the real value and infinite potentials of seeking individual advantage even if that same advantage is enjoyed by those around him, the stage is set for the evolution of advanced civilization.

The social contract that forms the very foundation of civilization is an extension of profound greed. The social contract provides the basic structure necessary to allow those whose greed has transformed into enlightened self-interest to work together to create a higher standard of living for all. By agreeing to respect each other's lives and property, the participants in the social contract minimize the downside costs of their acquisitiveness. They also realize that the wholly independent efforts of a single superficially greedy individual pale to insignificance compared to the individual returns from the organized efforts of an entire society of profoundly greedy individuals practicing enlightened self-interest.

The individual operating under enlightened self-interest appreciates that he receives substantial benefits from acting as part of a larger system. As such, he understands that the smooth efficient operation of the larger system is to his advantage, and that serving the general good is also serving his own goals. His enlightened self-interest allows him to see that to the extent he cooperates in helping others achieve their goals he also helps himself.

With our current perverse politically correct aversion to greed and laziness we're not seeing an elimination of these basic instinctual drives, but rather a disturbing resurgence of their most primitive forms. Turning away from the mentality of plenty born of enlightened self-interest, we're regressing back into a perception of scarcity where those driven by their superficial instincts become obsessed trying to grab an ever larger slice of an ever smaller pie.

I submit that the proper approach isn't trying to deny these most basic aspects of our nature, but rather to revel in our greed and laziness to the point where these base instincts transcend into the high level function of enlightened self-interest. Only the profoundly greedy attain the transcendent understanding that the easiest way to achieve their self-interested goals is to create new wealth - that it's a lot easier to create a new pie by creating a new product, technology or opening a new frontier, than to waste their efforts squabbling over the old pie of existing wealth.

Greed and laziness become powerful forces advancing the human condition when expressed as enlightened self-interest. Only those less evolved intellects among us still vainly struggling to actualize their primitive superficial greed and laziness pose a danger to themselves and to modern society.

While superficial greed focuses on trying to grab up as much of the past as possible, only the profound greed of enlightened self-interest can create the new future that will take humanity to the stars and beyond. Only profound laziness can summon up the drive and force of will to make the trip armchair easy.