The human race or most of it has always considered growth necessary. Yeah the argument for it is not difficult to make. After all why wouldn’t we want our lives to be supposedly easier and lengthier? But how do we encourage growth?
To ease out the issues of barter system money based market was created. With growing population and desire to stay in comfort zone with family and friends we had to find ways to grow more food in limited area of land. We had to improve transportation mode and also invest in health care to find ways to elongate our lives. For all this we had to create supporting infrastructure and it had to be sponsored by the market which had to grow not by number of consumers but more consumption. Also the person who achieved highest possible lifestyle in society we had to keep giving them more goals to achieve. Hence luxury market was created. If we did not support greed people might not have the want to make more money. Hence we had to continuously encourage creation of new wants with the increase in amount of wealth. If everyone became comfortable with one maximum level of things achievable how we would have supported growth of science, technology, infrastructure and other allied things with it. But while growing wealth individuals did not have the whole picture in mind. They still do not. They keep increasing wealth for the incentives society keeps providing. Those who are at the top of things achievable in society become role models for those below. Those who did not achieve this top level always strive for it for the importance and perceived benefits that are advertised and encouraged by society. Hence the means of making money could not stay limited to particular number of products or services. If there is market for luxury we had to exploit it because making money became a goal rather than process. When means become ends in themselves the pursuer of such ends gets stuck in a loop. Hence we kept on making money without any idea about why we are making it. This loop is what we can term greed in traditional sense. Even though Buffet does not need the amount of money he has he enjoys the status he has because of it and he wants to live up to it. May be I should ask him if he has any other motive to keep making money. Anyhow thus I argue that to grow human race chose to encourage greed.
What would have life been if we stuck to a simple life and did not encourage greed. Simply growth would have stalled. For increasing population newer groups would have abandoned older ones and scattered around. Considering the resources limited wars would have kept going on. Age up to which people lived would have been less. But yes we would have had simple lives. Yes wishing for growth would have been possible if we could accept death easily and could move on with simple life.
But the question is the extreme conditions argued need not be the only options available to choose and follow. In Sanskrit there is a verse saying excess is always dangerous (Ati sarvatra garhitam). Hence (ati sarvatra varjayet) wishing for excess should be abandoned. We could have grown wealth with controlled amount of greed. However such control over the expectations of the society would have needed some sort of communist rule throughout the world. We learnt about is peril from Russia and China already. Yes controlled capitalism as supposedly practiced in democracies like India or USA could have been the solution. But the problem is, tools of evil aka sins always bring their friends together. With ambition for more wealth there is power and thus corruption involved. Hence those who reach the top try to make ways to make it easier for them to reach the sky being deluded that it is an roof at an achievable height. Hence the designed system of controlled capitalism actually skewed itself to reduce the control over itself. Yes regulations need to evolve as the aspirations and need of the society evolves. But deregulation means leaving the evil to takeover.
What’s the solution then? Difficult to think of and once conceptualized it is difficult to even think that it can be implemented well. We can make people introspect and make them understand the reason behind the design. Encouraging a question and reason attitude could help. But as usual our society will have people who will rebel against such design and will decide actively that they refuse to think. After all having our system called human race completely stable and stuck to a design will make it appear mechanical. Hence we should just wait and hope that we adapt and evolve to betterment holistically. Even if a better world could be designed we cannot break the ambitions and dreams of people. It is like Neo not being able to choose the option of destroying the matrix to bring people to real world. Instead we should choose the way he chose to just improve the existing design :)
