Great post and I apologise for not being able to reply sooner. Been preoccupied.
With this greed business, I am conflicted.
On the one hand, there's a lot of evidence that we are a more spontaneously empathic and altruistic species than many imagine, which is why I am a bit suspicious of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand-type assessments of human nature.
All that evidence can be found under one roof in Matthieu Ricard's doorstop of a book
Altruism. Interestingly, Ricard is the son of Jean-Francois Revel, According to the Wiki, 'Revel was a French philosopher, journalist, and author. A prominent public intellectual, Revel was a socialist in his youth but later became a prominent European proponent of classical liberalism and free market economics.'
Contrastingly, Ricard's multi-disciplinary study is also an attack on free-market economics and its underlying assumptions. So he could, in a sense, be reacting against his father. Ricard himself has a PhD in molecular genetics but eschewed a scientific career in order to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. In that role I think he currently serves as a translator for the Dalai Lama.
But no-one should imagine that he is a woolly thinker who espouses New Agey bollocks because of that. He is actually very clued up about both Western and Eastern philosophy, as well as economics, behavioural and evolutionary psychology, and a lot more besides.
For all that, I guess that I am conflicted because even Buddhist psychology - shorn of its supernatural/metaphysical accoutrements - admits that we are a greed-driven species. More than that, our psyche is additionally contaminated by hatred, as well as a fundamental ignorance of how things are.
Ricard has been dubbed 'the happiest man alive' in neuroscientific terms (see below) so maybe that makes him more optimistic about our ability to overcome greediness and our incipient tribalism. I am not so sure, as this attitude seems to engender an inherent myopia that - when allied to the narcissistic and even psychopathic tendencies exhibited by quite a few political leaders these days - might just lead to the death of us as a species.
Monk Matthieu Richard has it figured out. And he wants to help you figure it out, too.
www.gq.com
Apologies to readers of this thread for taking this thread off topic again.
