If you’re just sitting in a cave for nine years, desire intelligently doesn’t seem to come into play very much. But if you’re in the world with other people and you’re living a life, how do you desire, how do you connect, how do you attach without greed, without trying to control other people in order to not lose them or lose their love? We have to learn to attach, to desire intelligently, to hold lightly.

CHINESE AMBASSADOR Exactly. But you have always taught us that liberty is the same thing as capitalism, as if life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be crushed by greed. Your American dream is financial, not ethical.

people in different cultures have different relations to deeper emotions such as greed.

One way to look at it is that corporations are never your friend. They love talking about building communities and ecosystems, but eventually they need to monetize user-generated content and change licensing to make your content their property. When their policies and promises change overnight 180° all you get "we are sorry you feel that way", "our hopes and prayers" and "that was a deliberate business decision we had to make with a heavy heart". And then they laugh all the way to the bank.

when we're investing in the stock market, we're mostly just hoping that the value of those shares will rise. That money is not actually reaching companies and being used in productive ways. And that's true. We can see it with private equity too.

Or, in Lallemant’s words: ‘I can say in truth that, asregards intelligence, they are in no wise inferior to Europeans and tothose who dwell in France. I would never have believed that, withoutinstruction, nature could have supplied a most ready and vigorouseloquence, which I have admired in many Hurons; or more clear-sightedness in public affairs, or a more discreet management inthings to which they are accustomed.’25

“Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely. Disregarding all of bitcoin's shortcomings, a financial instrument that brings out the worst in people—greed—won't change the world for the better.” —https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html.

And protecting life-supporting cooperation requires suppressing certain kinds of selfishness. Biologists, unlike many economists, grasp when the “greed is good” ethos gets deadly.

Many of the deceptive practices mentioned below, have each become larger than any Fortune 500 Business.

noBounds or Measures can be prescrib’d to their Desires

a more insidious and cancerous progression took hold through municipal fiscal discipline, property speculation and the sorting of land-use according to the rate of return for its ‘highest and best use’.

neglected all the good things which this study affords, and became nothing more than professors of meddlesomeness and greed