Plutomania, Cupidity & Gluttony

Plutomania is excessive or abnormal desire for wealth, the abundance of valuable financial assets or physical possessions which can be converted into a form that can be used for transactions. This includes the core meaning as held in the originating old English word weal, which is from an Indo-European word stem.

Avarice or greed is an extreme or excessive desire for wealth or material gain, especially for property such as money, real estate, or other symbols of wealth. Here we run into two problems: defining excessive, and defining wealth, especially in terms of human psychology.

Greed isn’t the product of our forebrain’s logical deductive cognitive-emotive process. The greed impulse originates in the primitive fear center, in the amygdale and related reptilian parts of the brain.

As an individual’s wealth and status rise, so does their tendency to be unethical, concludes a new study of the relationship between socioeconomics and ethics. 'Upper- and lower-class individuals do not necessarily differ in terms of their capacity for unethical behavior, but rather in terms of their default tendencies toward it.'

“Occupying privileged positions in society has this natural psychological effect of insulating you from others,” said psychologist Paul Piff of the University of California, Berkeley. “You’re less likely to perceive the impact your behavior has on others. As a result, at least in this paper, you’re more likely to break the rules.”

Cupidity is inordinate desire for wealth, an uncontrolled longing for increase in the acquisition or use: of material gain (be it food, money, land, or animate/inanimate possessions); or social value, such as status, or power. Greed has been identified as an undesirable behavior throughout known human history.

“Greed is less about accumulating wealth than filling an inner void.” Gordon Gekko

Could it be that people who focus more on themselves wind up making more money?

Maybe selfishness leads to wealth, rather than wealth begets selfishness. This tendency for affluent people to focus more on themselves extends to the way they see people who are suffering. Not surprisingly, other research has demonstrated that more affluent people are worse at recognizing the emotions of others. The difference between selfish and greedy is that selfishness holds one's self-interest as the standard for decision making while greediness is being consumed by selfish desires.

Wealth is correlated with greed, dishonesty and cheating; are these effects or a causes?

There's a wealth of psychological research that correlates wealthy people in the real world with negative traits like rudeness (people driving fancier cars are less considerate of pedestrians and their likelihood of cutting off another driver is correlated to the cost of the driver's car); greed (rich people take more candies out of dishes set aside for kids than poor people); generalized unethical behavior; cheating at games of chance; and overall stinginess.

One possible explanation for all this is that getting rich is easier if you're dishonest, lack empathy, and cheat whenever you think you can get away with it.

Why do rich people lie, cheat and steal more than those on low incomes?

Money is greed, psychologically it shackles us and forces us to make irrational decisions. It is more easily available than heroin but far more addictive. Greed is an excessive love or desire for money or any possession. It is not merely caring about money and possessions, but caring too much about them. A greedy person is too attached to his things and his money, or he desires more money and more things in an excessive way.

Gluttony is over-indulgence and over-consumption of food, drinks, or wealth items, particularly as status symbols. In Christianity, it is considered a sin if the excessive desire for food causes it to be withheld from the needy. Some Christian denominations consider gluttony one of the seven deadly sins.

Voracity is extreme gluttony, it describes one's enormous, and inceasable appetite, which eats up a person so that he is wasted away due to the heat of the bad traits it makes or develops such as selfishness, anger, jealousy and unhealthy competition. It sucks up every strand of inner-peace and happiness, resulting in a sad, miserable death.

The root cause of plutomania, cupidity and gluttony is thinking of oneself in isolation from others or as member of elite peer groups that define what we should want. Please remember we are members of larger communities with many kinds of people, on whom we depend and who depend on us.

To stop being selfishness, practice putting other people's needs before your own and looking at things from other people's perspectives. Look for opportunities in your daily life to help friends or family members and spend time really listening to what others have to say about their own struggles and feelings.

Take a moment, look at yourself, realize you are being greedy, understand the greed inside you, let it go, and then choose the option that's best for everyone. When you practice this few times, you'll recognize that you always had the choice to choose between greed and generosity…

Food for thought!