Part Four: War, Avarice, and Greed

Avarice (from Latin avarus; "to crave") is the overwhelming desire to be greedy.

Greed (from Old English grædig, or "voracious," which means "always hungry for more.") is avarice succeeding.

Are retail-sluts destroying the planet? Is keeping up with the Kardashians a mortal sin against the secular religion of social justice? Is conspicuous consumption the cause of capitalism, its effect, or some synergy between the two? How about our ‘propensity for emulation’? Is that an irreversible feature of human nature? If your answer is ‘yes’ to these questions, then it’s likely you can see the thread that ultimately connects avarice and greed to war.

Often lumped together in vitriol, there’s an important distinction between avarice and greed. Avarice is a gateway vice. Lying, thieving, and murder are just a temptation. Avarice is an underlying predicate for The Lord of the Rings predicates. Tolkien’s Gollum (Smeagol) acquires the ring in the murder of his friend, Deagol. Without Gollum’s greed for his ‘precious’ ring the story would have no legs. Greed perpetuates a world of scarcity where there is never enough to consume. It opens the soul to all manner of wrongdoing. Unchecked, it will eventually kill the soul and thereby, all capacity for character virtue. Greed justifies envy and enmity. Wrath follows any attempt to deprive ‘the precious’ from greedy hands. Assemble enough greedy people into a nation and war is only a broken agreement away as history reminds us.

Bemusedly, capitalism, and religion are often cited as triggers for both avarice and greed. It may surprise many that the holy books of world religions mention avarice and greed more often than lust or adultery. It’s one of the seven ‘deadly’ sins in the Christian religion because it slowly kills the soul. Thomas Aquinas wrote, "Greed is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things." (from:
. . . [T]he Law of Nature and of Nature's God.)

Yet in our modern religious culture these vices receive far less attention than the sexual sin of lust. Is greed the default culture of capitalism and religion? Rare is the sermon that warns of avarice or condemns our greed. Popular are the sermons about how, when, where and with whom we put our genitalia.

Oh, it would be easy to put on my communist glasses and ask does my wife really need 20 handbags costing over $28,000.00 each all still in their Nordstrom shopping bags lining the floor of our closet. Does my boyfriend really need to buy me a $ 139,000.00 four-seat Porsche so we can take our surrogate children, the poodles, to our 20 room 6 bath beach house on Martha’s Vineyard while the other one on the Hamptons in being redecorated? And these are just ‘upper-middle class’ questions. We’re not even talking about the Gollums known as the ‘filthy rich’. Even the expression itself bleeds with envy and craving. Avarice and greed are middle-class sports.

Unless you’re a naked, starving monk in a desert cave you need not do without three-dimensional objects in order to perfect your soul. No. The fault lies not in insufficient ‘matter’, but a privation of ‘spirit’. Craving more objects than one really needs to be content indicates an unstable spirit looking for itself in a place that’s not a place. Greed, like fame erodes the character of the soul. For one thing the super-rich-super-star people have to hire other people to steal from them. They’re called accountants and retainers. One such name, far too prominent to even mention here, drove this point home to me one day counting the number of service vehicles parked in his courtyard. “One day, just one day, I’d love to stand here and not see a single truck or service car in my driveway” he sighed. After his death, it was revealed that his accountant had been embezzling large sums of money on a monthly basis for over 20 years.

Then, there’s the treacherous facet of avarice and greed that ends in personal and social ruination. Hatched in the envy of others goods avarice often cloaks itself as virtue. Our modern villain from Breaking Bad fame, Mr. Walter White, is a prime example. Life has cheated Mr. White out of well-deserved fame and fortune. Due to his vastly superior intellect he deserves to be a millionaire like others who used his ideas and paid a pittance for them. Reduced to teaching high school chemistry is life laughing at him. Walter deserves better. He doesn’t deserve to be dying of cancer unable to provide a comfortable future for his family after he’s gone. Once a crack-head student shows him the path to unimaginable wealth pushing home brewed ‘blue’ crystal meth, his once virtuous pursuit of a respectable family legacy collapses in ruin through lies, theft, murder, and mayhem. All from dancing with avarice and greed.

No wonder Dante reserves Circle 4 in the Inferno for The Avaricious and Prodigals. Circle 4 is a round plain occupied by two opposing groups of sinners—the Hoarders and the Wasters. They are condemned to push rocks against each other until the end of time, with the Hoarders on the left (from Dante's point of view) half of the Circle and the Wasters on the right. Dante doesn't talk to anyone in this Circle, as their punishment makes them unrecognizable. The Circle is guarded by Plutus, the Roman god of wealth, who shouts pig-Italian insults (Pape Satàn, Pape Satàn, aleppe!) at Dante. We derive the word ‘plutocracy’ from Plutus…government by the wealthy.

In Dante's Purgatory, the avaricious sinners were bound face down in the dirt because they coveted too desires and objects. Scavenging and hoarding of materials or objects takes modern form in suburban houses and garages stuffed to the rafters with every conceivable and unnecessary three-dimensional object. Retail-sluts are punished or dismissed if they do not up their UPT count. That’s Units Per Transaction. That’s what’s going on at the cash register with the clerk asks you ‘Would you like a rhinestone studded iPhone case to go with this pair of boxer shorts? They make great Christmas gifts and they’re on sale… 6 for $ 299.00. You save $ 79.00 off retail while supplies last. Can I open a ‘frequent shopper rewards card’ for you with this purchase? It only takes a second.” This is avarice for greed and it’s a very modern vice.

The cure is simple and immediate. Try giving away objects to those in need of them. Take half of your 200 pairs of shoes and give them to the poor. Clear those unopened boxes of unnecessary ‘things’ out of your closets and garage. Stop buying junk to hoard. Just as you annually unfriend scores from your Facebook account and delete contacts from your phone fill up a dumpster with your junk. Just say ‘no’ to retail sluts, their sale items and their rewards cards. Do more with less. Gandhi taught that “Earth provided enough to satisfy everyone’s need but not enough to satisfy everyone’s greed.” I put it to you. Would war gain a foothold in the soul that lives according to this axiom? Can war be waged where combatants lack avarice and greed?