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Greed is a Character Trait not an Emotion!


coberst

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Greed is a Character Trait not an Emotion!

 

Greed is a habit formed through constant repetition. It is an act of will. Emotion, also called instinct, is a product of natural selection. Only the human animal is greedy.

 

What is character? Character is the network of habits that permeate all the intentional acts of an individual.

 

I am not using the word habit in the way we often do, as a technical ability existing apart from our wishes. These habits are an intimate and fundamental part of our selves. They are representations of our will. They rule our will, working in a coordinated way they dominate our way of acting. These habits are the results of repeated, intelligently controlled, actions.

 

Habits also control the formation of ideas as well as physical actions. We cannot perform a correct action or a correct idea without having already formed correct habits.

 

“Reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction.” “The medium of habit filters all material that reaches our perception and thought.” “Immediate, seemingly instinctive, feeling of the direction and end of various lines of behavior is in reality the feeling of habits working below direct consciousness.” “Habit means special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts. It means will.”

 

My understanding of character and the quotations concerning the nature of character are taken from Habits and Will by John Dewey

 

Emotions equal instinct. First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling.

 

What are the emotions? The primary emotions are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. The secondary or social emotions are such things as pride, jealousy, embarrassment, and guilt. Damasio considers the background emotions are well-being or malaise, and calm or tension. The label of emotion has also been attached to drives and motivations and to states of pain and pleasure.

 

Antonio Damasio, Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, testifies in his book “The Feelings of What Happens” that the biological process of feelings begins with a ‘state of emotion’, which can be triggered unconsciously and is followed by ‘a state of feeling’, which can be presented nonconsciously; this nonconscious state can then become ‘a state of feeling made conscious’.

 

”Emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life…emotions are biologically determined processes, depending upon innately set brain devices, laid down by long evolutionary history…The devices that produce emotions…are part of a set of structures that both regulate and represent body states…All devices can be engaged automatically, without conscious deliberation…The variety of the emotional responses is responsible for profound changes in both the body landscape and the brain landscape. The collection of these changes constitutes the substrate for the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion.”

 

The biological function of emotions is to produce an automatic action in certain situations and to regulate the internal processes so that the creature is able to support the action dictated by the situation. The biological purpose of emotions are clear, they are not a luxury but a necessity for survival.

 

“Emotions are inseparable from the idea of reward and punishment, pleasure or pain, of approach or withdrawal, of personal advantage or disadvantage. Inevitably, emotions are inseparable from the idea of good and evil.”

 

Emotions result from stimulation of the senses from outside the body sources and also from stimulations from remembered situations. Evolution has provided us with emotional responses from certain types of inducers put these innate responses are often modified by our culture.

 

“It is through feelings, which are inwardly directed and private, that emotions, which are outwardly directed and public, begin their impact on the mind; but the full and lasting impact of feelings requires consciousness, because only along with the advent of a sense of self do feelings become known to the individual having them.”

 

First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling. There is no evidence that we are conscious of all our feelings, in fact evidence indicates that we are not conscious of all feelings.

 

Human emotion and feeling pivot on consciousness; this fact has not been generally recognized prior to Damasio’s research. Emotion has probably evolved long before consciousness and surfaces in many of us when caused by inducers we often do not recognize consciously.

 

The powerful contrast between emotion and feeling is used by the author in his search for a comprehension of consciousness. It is a neurological fact, states the author, that when consciousness is suspended then emotion is likewise usually suspended. This observed human characteristic led Damasio to suspect that even though emotion and consciousness are different phenomenon that there must be an important connection between the two.

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Hey Coberst how's it going?

 

Greed is a habit formed through constant repetition. It is an act of will. Emotion, also called instinct, is a product of natural selection. Only the human animal is greedy.

How can any habit be considered an act of will? Isn't habit by definition a thoughtless, almost involuntary, or rather subconscious, response to stimuli that usually goes unnoticed by the person exhibiting it?

Therefore greed can neither be a habit or emotion (as you already pointed out). I believe that greed is an example of animal behavior from before we started constructing societies. Think about it, if you put five squirrels in an enclosure and dumped a rather large load of nuts in a pile, would the squirrels only take as much as they need at a time? No they would literally squirrel (excuse the pun) the remaining nuts away for later, where they think the other squirrels won't find them.

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Hey Coberst how's it going?

 

 

How can any habit be considered an act of will? Isn't habit by definition a thoughtless, almost involuntary, or rather subconscious, response to stimuli that usually goes unnoticed by the person exhibiting it?

Therefore greed can neither be a habit or emotion (as you already pointed out). I believe that greed is an example of animal behavior from before we started constructing societies. Think about it, if you put five squirrels in an enclosure and dumped a rather large load of nuts in a pile, would the squirrels only take as much as they need at a time? No they would literally squirrel (excuse the pun) the remaining nuts away for later, where they think the other squirrels won't find them.

 

I walk by a store front and notice in the reflection by the front window that I slouch as I walk. I am not pleased with this slouch.

 

I immediately suck in my gut throw back my shoulders and raise my chin. I walk like this until my mind wonders. Later I see that I still walk with my slouch. I command myself to develop a better posture.

 

This cycle repeats itself until one day I see my slouch has disappeared and I have a posture more to my liking. I have developed a better posture meaning that I have, through constant effort driven by my will, developed a new habit.

 

Emotion, i.e. instinct, is the result of natural selection. Our animal ancestors live at a subsistence level. They do not work for gain but only to stay alive and nature has selected them accordingly.

 

Humans have broken that chain, especially when we developed the age of what we now call the Industrial Revolution. We are now part of a self-regulating market economy wherein subsistence has been replaced by gain and everything depends upon production and consumption of natural resources.

 

We are all now commodities in a self regulating market system

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Could you point me to anywhere in the literature - scientific, or artisitic - where greed is described as an emotion?
No

Then I am confused. I take it that you are unable, rather than unwilling, to point me to any authority who identifies greed as an emotion. In that case we agree, greed is not an emotion. It seems, based on the absence of any contrary statements in the literature, that we share this understanding of greed with the rest, or most of the rest of humanity.

 

Therefore, what was the intent of opening your essay with the declaration that greed is not an emotion? It seems you could just as readily have said that greed is not an anchovy paste, or greed is not a form of retribution, since a similar number of people would agree with that assertion. So would you take the time to explain your thinking in using such a seemingly (I emphasise seemingly) irrelevant opening? Please.

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Therefore, what was the intent of opening your essay with the declaration that greed is not an emotion? It seems you could just as readily have said that greed is not an anchovy paste, or greed is not a form of retribution, since a similar number of people would agree with that assertion. So would you take the time to explain your thinking in using such a seemingly (I emphasise seemingly) irrelevant opening? Please.

 

I have heard many people speak of greed in a manner that indicates that they think of it as something that humans are born with. In fact what set me off on this OP was listening to Allan Greenspan speak of greed in this manner. I suspect that he knows that greed is not an emotion but he seemed to want to endorse that implication. I suspect few people give this matter any thought but I am confident that many people think that to be greedy is "jus doin what comes naturally".

 

I think that it is important for everyone to be conscious of this matter.

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Thank you for clarifying your position. I am puzzled that you equate 'something that humans are born with' with an emotion. That is a false equality. Humans are doubtless born with emotions, but they are also born with other things as well. I doubt that Greenspan meant that greed was an emotion - an instinct, perhaps, one that could give rise to emotions, but not of itself an emotion.

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Emotions equal instinct. First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling.

 

What are the emotions? The primary emotions are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. The secondary or social emotions are such things as pride, jealousy, embarrassment, and guilt. Damasio considers the background emotions are well-being or malaise, and calm or tension. The label of emotion has also been attached to drives and motivations and to states of pain and pleasure.

 

Antonio Damasio, Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, testifies in his book The Feelings of What Happens that the biological process of feelings begins with a ‘state of emotion’, which can be triggered unconsciously and is followed by ‘a state of feeling’, which can be presented nonconsciously; this nonconscious state can then become ‘a state of feeling made conscious’.

 

”Emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life…emotions are biologically determined processes, depending upon innately set brain devices, laid down by long evolutionary history…The devices that produce emotions…are part of a set of structures that both regulate and represent body states…All devices can be engaged automatically, without conscious deliberation…The variety of the emotional responses is responsible for profound changes in both the body landscape and the brain landscape. The collection of these changes constitutes the substrate for the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion.”

 

The biological function of emotions is to produce an automatic action in certain situations and to regulate the internal processes so that the creature is able to support the action dictated by the situation. The biological purpose of emotions are clear, they are not a luxury but a necessity for survival.

 

“Emotions are inseparable from the idea of reward and punishment, pleasure or pain, of approach or withdrawal, of personal advantage or disadvantage. Inevitably, emotions are inseparable from the idea of good and evil.”

 

Emotions result from stimulation of the senses from outside the body sources and also from stimulations from remembered situations. Evolution has provided us with emotional responses from certain types of inducers put these innate responses are often modified by our culture.

 

“It is through feelings, which are inwardly directed and private, that emotions, which are outwardly directed and public, begin their impact on the mind; but the full and lasting impact of feelings requires consciousness, because only along with the advent of a sense of self do feelings become known to the individual having them.”

 

First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling. There is no evidence that we are conscious of all our feelings, in fact evidence indicates that we are not conscious of all feelings.

 

Human emotion and feeling pivot on consciousness; this fact has not been generally recognized prior to Damasio’s research. Emotion has probably evolved long before consciousness and surfaces in many of us when caused by inducers we often do not recognize consciously.

 

The powerful contrast between emotion and feeling is used by the author in his search for a comprehension of consciousness. It is a neurological fact, states the author, that when consciousness is suspended then emotion is likewise usually suspended. This observed human characteristic led Damasio to suspect that even though emotion and consciousness are different phenomenon that there must be an important connection between the two.

 

Damasio proposes “that the term feeling should be reserve for the private, mental experience of an emotion, while the term emotion should be used to designate the collection of responses, many of which are publicly observable.” This means that while we can observe our own private feelings we cannot observe these same feelings in others.

 

Empirical evidence indicates that we need not be conscious of emotional inducers nor can we control emotions willfully. We can, however, control the entertainment of an emotional inducer even though we cannot control the emotion induced.

 

I was raised as a Catholic and taught by the nuns that “impure thoughts” were a sin only if we “entertained” bad thoughts after an inducer caused an emotion that we felt, i.e. God would not punish us for the first impure thought but He would punish us for dwelling upon the impure thought. If that is not sufficient verification of the theory derived from Damasio’s empirical evidence, what is?

 

In a typical emotion, parts of the brain sends forth messages to other parts of the body, some of these messages travel via the blood stream and some via the body’s nerve system. These neural and chemical messages results in a global change in the organism. The brain itself is just as radically changed. But, before the brain becomes conscious of this matter, before the emotion becomes known, two additional steps must occur. The first is feeling, i.e. an imaging of the bodily changes, followed by a ‘core consciousness’ to the entire set of phenomena. “Knowing an emotion—feeling a feeling—only occurs at this point.

 

Quotes from The Feelings of What Happens by Antonio Damasio

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Thank you for clarifying your position. I am puzzled that you equate 'something that humans are born with' with an emotion. That is a false equality. Humans are doubtless born with emotions, but they are also born with other things as well. I doubt that Greenspan meant that greed was an emotion - an instinct, perhaps, one that could give rise to emotions, but not of itself an emotion.

:phones:

Emotions equal instinct. First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling.

Maybe from a touchy-feely philosophical viewpoint, but not insofar as the terms are used in the relevant sciences.

The biological function of emotions is to produce an automatic action in certain situations and to regulate the internal processes so that the creature is able to support the action dictated by the situation. The biological purpose of emotions are clear, they are not a luxury but a necessity for survival.

But this in no way supports your prior quoted statement. As Eclogite is pointing out, it's necessary, but not sufficient.

 

I agree with Greenspan's meaning: Greed is instinctual, a point I'm making over in the [thread=3799]Moneyless Society

thread. It is essential to survival in a world with limited resources.

 

Can innate "greed" be intensified to be sociopathic? Certainly.

 

Is the desire to "hoard" food when it is scarce completely unrelated to greed? Not so much.

 

What you seem to be arguing is the same as the Greed=Money folks: take money away and there will be no environmental reinforcement to allow people to "practice being greedy."

 

I find such an argument to be a gross oversimplification of a complex and nuanced issue.

 

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt though and just argue that you have insufficiently defined greed for this discussion to continue further in a useful manner.

 

We are born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy, :cheer:

Buffy

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Animals other than humans do not display greed.

You obviously have not owned enough dogs....

 

...I once had a miniature pinscher--a tiny dog only slightly larger than a chihuahua. He would eat until he could eat no more and then growl and bark at my australian and sheltie who were four to five times his size to keep them away from whatever was left in his dish. I owned him from puppyhood, and he never had less then more than he could possibly eat, but he pulled this routine until the day he died.

 

Don't try to tell me that only humans demonstrate greed....

 

My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to 99 cents a can. That's almost $7.00 in dog money, :phones:

Buffy

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If greed where an emotion we must have inherited it through natural selection. Animals other than humans do not display greed.
As buffy has observed, this is simply untrue. If you define greed as the selfish aquisition of 'things' beyond your actual need, then animals are greedy.

 

(If you don't define greed that way you are not following the accepted definitions. e.g. thefreedictionary.com defines greed as 1. excessive consumption of or desire for food; gluttony; 2. excessive desire, as for wealth or power)

 

Coberst, there is a wealth of published research on this that demonstrates very clearly that you are absolutely wrong. Simply because I have a considerable interest in primate behaviour I would recommend you read 'In Man's Shadow" by Jane Goodall. Her work in the Gombe Stream Reserve transformed our understanding of our closest relatives and contains plenty of examples of chimpanzee greed.

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We have successfully struggled against Mother Nature to gain great material wealth only to discover that, as Pogo might say, “we have met the enemy and it is us”. The enemy is our great material play-form itself; it is our own profit-and-loss economy, our money-over-the-counter game that is defeating us. We have lost all relationship with our nature. Our created fiction has crippled our ability to rationally adapt to our world we have created. We run as fast as we can from school to shopping center to the bank and back home in our new SUV only to discover that the gods have already made us mad. Our own fictions are killing us.

 

One technique used to maintain the slave economy in the Antebellum South was to outlaw any form of behavior that allowed the slave to become learned. It was necessary that the slave not only be illiterate but that s/he be isolated as much as possible from the world around them; if they knew little of the outside world they were more easily confined, constrained, and controlled.

 

Ignorance in the free white community and the black slave community in Antebellum South was no accident. I suspect the depth of ignorance within the American population today is, likewise, no accident.

 

Potlatch was a common characteristic of primitive cultural practice and ritual. Potlatch ceremonies were a common practice in the winter months because the summer months were busy times for gathering wealth for the family and community.

 

Quickie from wiki:

“Sponsors of a potlatch give away many useful items such as food, blankets, worked ornamental mediums of exchange called "coppers", and many other various items. In return, they earned prestige. To give a potlatch enhanced one’s reputation and validated social rank, the rank and requisite potlatch being proportional, both for the host and for the recipients by the gifts exchanged. Prestige increased with the lavishness of the potlatch, the value of the goods given away in it…The status of any given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most resources. The hosts demonstrate their wealth and prominence through giving away goods.”

 

In primitive communities social life was a continuous dialogue of gift giving and reciprocation. When there was food there was food for all when there was scarcity all shared in this scarcity. The successful hunter kept the least desirable parts of the kill for himself and gave the most desirable to the community. “This was the core truth in the myth of primitive communism.”

 

Primitive man was judged not by the magnitude of his accumulated wealth but by the magnitude of his shared wealth.

 

Greed is historically a new happening. Primitive humans were not greedy; sharing the wealth, not the accumulation of wealth, was the key to success in early human history.

 

Present day economic theories are of a self-regulating system of markets. Such a social theory did not come from history. We are taught that this practice of private property and gain are the natural order of human social evolution; such is not the case. “Gain and profit made in exchange never before played an important part in human economy.”

 

Adam Smith theorized that the division of labor results from man’s “propensity to barter, truck, and exchange one thing for another…This phrase was later to yield the concept of the Economic Man.” This observation represents a misreading of the past and a great fallacy that has led us into today’s culture of human social behavior becoming dominated by economic ideology.

 

We must discard some 19th century prejudices underlying the hypothesis of primitive man’s predilection for gainful employment. The bias that caused Smith and his generation to incorrectly view primitive man induced succeeding generations to lose interest in early man.

 

“The tradition of the classical economics, who attempted to base the law of the market on the alleged propensities of man in the state of nature, was replaced by an abandonment of all interest in the cultures of “uncivilized” man as irrelevant to an understanding of the problems of our age.”

 

Anthropologists inform us today that there has been a remarkable sameness for all societies throughout earlier history and that sameness is “that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social assets…the economic system will be run on noneconomic motives…All social obligations are reciprocal.”

 

Our present economic system of acquisition with little or no regard for the rest of society is not our naturally evolved culture. This is a totally artificial system that we have been raised to recognize as a natural phenomenon. Our ignorance of many things is maintained by those who manage to control social policy and especially our educational systems.

 

We are maintained in a semi sophisticated state of ignorance in order to prevent us from critically evaluating our institutions and changing them in a manner that is less alienating to our nature.

 

Quotes from The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi

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Very good coberst. How about we make a deal. You address the points I have raised refuting your contention that only humans experience greed. In return I'll give your last essay the attention it merits, even though it is quite irrelevant to the discussion as it currently stands. Agreed? Or do you think that's a greed.

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  • 8 months later...

What I know about greedy people. The one's I have met have something in common with me. They were conditioned by deprivation of some first order needs early in life. Only instead of fearing for their safety, they feared for lack of shelter or food. If you get to know one, they will tell you a story about how when they were a kid everyone thought they lost their shoe when really they just found one.

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  • 3 months later...

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