Do Greed and Vengeance Promote Health?
By Phyllis Kritek | Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
By Phyllis Kritek. Seems like a no-brainer question. Of course not! As the dust settles from the recent elections, however, it seems timely. Media coverage of the nation has obsessed for months over the dissatisfaction, anger, even depression of the nation’s citizens. They might have been wiser and more productive to focus on greed and vengeance. They are costly indulgences with consequences.
If the often-evoked iconic Abraham Lincoln were alive today, I suspect he would not posit that greed and vengeance are manifestations of “the better angels of our nature”. Perhaps they provide a temporary sense of satisfaction. They do not, however, serve us well in the long haul toward the “pursuit of happiness”.
This observation flies in the face of assumptions that have increasingly been treated as inevitable. While individuals, minute to minute, myself among them, make choices about these two impulses, their manifestation as acceptable and inevitable national moral practices is treated as a given. We argue that we wish to be moral beings while concurrently accepting moral choices for the collective likely to do harm to the collective. Indeed, we insist that we MUST manifest greed and vengeance. Much of the post-election analyses available will easily document this insistence.
There is for many a perceived quaintness, of course, in even raising the question. Once both were viewed as “deadly sins”, greed garnering its own status and vengeance posited as an expression of wrath. Now they are norms.
Our comfort with cynicism is enormous. We even confuse it with sophistication and knowledge. And we confuse greed and vengeance with freedom, as if somehow I have a right to be greedy with a vengeance and be vengeful with insatiable intensity.
Both “health” and “healing” are rooted in the Old English word “haelen”, which means wholeness. It indicates that all dimensions of the human are in some way integrated, interrelated, a well-woven tapestry of completeness. We seem to grasp that this includes physical dimensions of humanness, and occasionally we give a nod to emotional dimensions. Less often do we address the human dimensions that acknowledge we are intellectual, social, moral and spiritual beings. Even recording this thought is a bit countercultural. (more…)




