Gandhi, the loincloth clad spartan Mahatma, said there’s enough in this world for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed. The amoral and flamboyant Gordon Gekko in the 1987 Oliver Stone classic movie Wall Street flipped the script, giving a more realistic assessment of an interconnected and fast-digitalizing world by valorising greed – or effort, enterprise, ambition, drive, hunger, frontier spirit, if a better euphemism is needed.
“The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind”, observes Gekko. Un-ironically, the famous biography of Vincent Van Gogh, the Dutch painter, is titled Lust for Life.
This ‘better word’, which covers the gamut between the sacred and the profane, from ideologies, religions, revolutionary ardour, sacrifice, altruism, is effectively similar to Churchill’s quip on democracy – deeply flawed, but better than what’s already been tried, over and over again.
Invisible Hand vs Clenched Fist
Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand and enlightened self-interest, offer the most tangible incentives to people in the most identity-agnostic and value-neutral manner. Markets have been markedly proven to be better, more efficient, and unbiased equalizers and allocators than the motley Messiahs, or Marx, Marcuse, and Mao. The invisible hand is always more impersonal, and by extension, equally capricious, rather than the selectively ruthless visible fist of the state.
In the same movie, there’s a memorable line by Bud Fox, the Charlie Sheen character, ‘I never realised how poor I was until I started making real money’. Money is different things to different people – for the everyman it’s just an exchange token that guarantees well-being and keeps penury and privation at bay. While for the more well-off, it’s a tool to hedge the future and insure against any uncertainties. But once these thresholds are crossed, money, and what it buys, remains mainly a surplus gratification. Thorstein Veblen, the Norwegian economist who coined the term Conspicuous Consumption in 1903, described it as a signalling, filtration, segregation, and psychological fulfilment mechanism.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is all about charting a middle path between Gandhi & Gekko, which effectively means balancing between self-reliant sustainability and hyper consumption ‘you only live once’ carpe diem.
Travails of ‘Zero-Sum’
Anyone who has played monopoly board game as a child, written a highly competitive exam, participated in athletics, or been an Options trader, instinctively understands what a zero-sum game is – you got to win, and you can only do it if somebody else loses. Fight or flight, winner-takes-it-all, victory or surrender mindset is deeply ingrained in human thinking. It is mainly due to the frequent outbreak of diseases, war, famines in the ancient times and the looming uncertainty associated with all facets of human existence. The best insurance policy for those lacking power and pelf was either guile, bargaining, luck, or God.
The fundamental flaw with this thinking, however, is that life is way more complex than certain case-specific scenarios, and what’s narrowly applicable isn’t axiomatic. The smartest people everywhere try to follow or believe, not in win-lose but in win-win – mutually beneficial outcomes. David Ogilvy, the founder of the namesake advertising giant, once famously noted about how only hiring people smarter than you could allow your set-up to become a company of giants.
The Zero-Sum Game
“Zero-sum thinking can be so problematic: It pinches perspective, sharpens antagonism and distracts our minds from what we can do with cooperation and creativity. People with a zero-sum mentality can easily miss a win-win”, writes Damien Cave, the New York Times Vietnam Bureau Chief.
Zero-sum thinking would be not just be less rife in creative fields, science, research thinking etc, it surprisingly remains absent even in the roughneck and unorganised world of the mafia and other semi- or illegitimate business where trade-offs and compromises are a part of life. Interestingly it is explicitly pronounced in fields where all value is contestable, abstract, subjective, and whether or not you rise up the ladder depends solely on your ability to partake in charades, performative art, and engaging in roleplay. This is the great paradox of boardroom bureaucracy.
The rise of a New Managerial class, as anticipated by James Burnham in the 1960s, which resembles Soviet urban mandarins a lot, would enhance the anger, envy, and malice associated with zero-sum thinking.
New Dimension
“Zero-sum thinking is crucial to understanding the politics and economics of America today”, writes Stefanie Stantcheva, Founder & Director, Social Economics Lab at Harvard University. “This way of thinking doesn’t just appear out of nowhere; it stems from people’s economic environment and experiences—not only their own, but also those of their families and even earlier generations”, she adds.
However, one hopes that this changes. The exponential growth through technology advancements and innovation—semiconductor revolution, the World Wide Web, or smartphones and social media—have all played a critical role in magnifying growth and boosting production.
The top-rated companies in NASDAQ, FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) were all created in the past 20 years. Technology has proven to be capable of widening the net of access, reducing inequality, and broadening people’s horizons. Could technology eventually wield enough power to break these recurring traumatic patterns of the inherited neuroticism, to gradually instil new behaviours and modes of thinking? Could it balance between Gandhi and Gekko?
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labour in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity” (William Faulkner)
