An Article by Sanjukta Dasgupta

GREED IS GOOD/GREED IS GOD: GLOBALIZATIONS and TRANSNATIONALISM

 

As students in a Roman Catholic Missionary school in the nineteen sixties we were drilled and grilled about abhorring the seven deadly sins, listed in the Bible aspride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. We were so conditioned that every time we stepped into the snares of temptation, lured by the machinations of these deadly sins, we were guilt-stricken, abjectly penitent and quite terrified too.  We were Indian students born in Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Muslim and Christian families, who studied in this Roman Catholic English medium school. We all believed without an iota of doubt, that those seven sins explicated in the Bible were truly deadly and catastrophic.

However the winds of change in the late nineteen eighties onwards advanced with tempestuous fury.  So we noticed as adults, how produced in  a Christian majority country, specifically, the USA, the Hollywood filmWall Street(1987) which had Michael Douglas playing the role of Gordon Gekko, a suave, unscrupulous corporate raider, became a huge hit. The film was distributedworldwide, it claimed blockbuster success and Michael Douglas received the Academy award, for his role as a violator of all laws and ethics.

We further noticed that in the film Wall Street (1987)Gordon Gekko’s address at the annual shareholders meeting in the film, seems to have become a normative practice in the 21st century, if not the new gospel truth of globalization in the millennium era – “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, money, love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind”  .

Directed and written by Oliver Stone with Michael Douglasstarring again as Gordon Gekko, the sequel to Wall Street (1987) was released in 2010, with almost the same title with a tag line, Wall Street Money Never Sleeps. This sequel received mixed reviews but Gordon Gekko once again spoke for the new capitalist era of unbridled corporate greed. In the 2010 film Gordon Gekko states that he recognizes that his statement greed is goodhas been institutionalized in the 21st century, and everyone is heedlessly driven by the urge to possess more and more.

So in the sequelWall street Money Never Sleeps (2010) Gekko remarks, “ Someone reminded me the other evening that I once said, "Greed is good". Now it seems it's legal. But, folks, you know, it's greed that makes my bartender buy three houses he can't afford with no money down. And it's greed that makes your parents refinance their $200,000 house for 250. And then they take that extra 50 and they go down to the mall. And they buy a plasma TV, cell phones, computers, an SUV. And hey, why not a second home while we're at it?” 

 If only Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist could have been reborn in the 21st century, he would have surely wondered, what was all that fuss about his asking for more, when the evolutionary wheel now glorifies more, as the most sought-after signifier,and the premiereway to go.

Gordon Gekko and those of his followers would probably find such motivating one-liners of the Bible incomprehensible and ludicrous- Luke 12:15 ("Guard against all greed"), 1 Timothy 6:10 ("The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil"), and Matthew 6:24 ("No one can serve both God and money").Hebrews 13:5: "Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have".

If such musings seem alien and culturally remote, despite the homogenization of cultures that globalization has effectively initiated and has been successful too, though resistance is not unknown, let us turn to British India in the 20th century.

 Not unlike the Biblical surmises, Mahatma Gandhi in his Harijanmagazine (1933-1955) quite categorically emphasized how ruinous the instinct of greed for much more than one needed could be. Gandhi wrote, “A certain degree of physical harmony and comfort is necessary, but above a certain level it becomes a hindrance instead of help. Therefore the ideal of creating an unlimited number of wants and satisfying them seems to be a delusion and a snare. The satisfaction of one's physical needs, even the intellectual needs of one's narrow self, must meet at a certain point a dead stop, before it degenerates into physical and intellectual voluptuousness…

Harijan, 29-8-36, p. 22

Also, in the chapter ‘Plain Living and HighThinking’ in hisSelected Works Vol V Part 11 Section V11 Gandhi had further elaborated, “If by abundance you mean everyone having plenty to eat and drink and to clothe himself with, enough to keep his mind trained and educated, I should be satisfied. But I should not like to pack more stuffs in my belly than I can digest and more things than I can ever usefully use. But neither do I want poverty, penury, misery, dirt and dust in India.

Harijan, 12-2-38,p 20

 

Rabindranath Tagore too emphasized unequivocally, the toxic impact greed can have, whicheffectively ruined individuals, nations and the entire world. So in the poem Sunset of theCentury written in 1899 and appended to his outstanding book on international integration, Nationalism, Tagore had issued a searing caveat against the monstrosity of greed- ‘The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses ofvengeance.The hungry self of the Nation shall burst in aviolence of fury from its own shameless feeding. For it has made the world its foodAnd licking it, crunching it, and swallowing it inbig morsels,It swells and swells…’

 

If Tagore and Gandhi seemed to have reiterated the values of ancient religious texts like the Upanishads about the need to transcend impulses of greed, hatred and envy, and prioritise peaceful co-existence and universal humanism,  in the 21st century, we have truly gone that extra mile, by institutionalizing the concept of greed is good, despite all divine cautioning.

 

But then, applied religion is drastically different from religious theories. Religion is ruthlessly used and abused by global and local politicians, corporate sectors, institutions and establishments that advocate or are made to advocate a fantasy mixture of glamourised resurrected belief systems. It’s a drug more lethal than opium and it is meant for both the disadvantaged masses and the privileged classes.As in his latest book NEXUS, Yuval Noah Harari states,

 “The tendency to create powerful things with

unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine

or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have

summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but

occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood”

 

Expectedly, we notice that the immensely popular motivational speaker Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudevpublished a book titled GREED IS GOD in 2014. Sadhguru has truly outsmarted Gordon Gekko of Wall Street. He states that greed for spiritual enlightenment and greed for corporate success are the driving forces leading to a sense of fulfilment. He even quotes an African adage, ‘"When the lion feeds, everybody else gets fed,"-implying the benefits of the trickle-down effect, the leftovers that the lion finds unpalatable. This phrase about the feeding lion as a philanthropist will remind readers of Wilbur Smith’s novel When the Lion Feeds, published in 1964, describinglifein South Africa, wherein Wilbur Smith states ambivalently,

 “'Something always dies when the lion feeds and yet there is meat for those that follow him. '”

 

When Greed is Good as a slogan in the Global North is further revised as Greed is God, in our own native land,  is the short-term call to Occupy Wall Street enough or should we introspect and ponder on the possibilities of course correction as we are precariously lodged on the edge of a pernicious precipice.

 

‘The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind’.

 

Sanjukta Dasgupta

December 24, 2025