Sharing v. Greed

This morning I awakened to view this film on Facebook:

I love the work of Shel Silverstein. I dore this little film and the book from which it was made, The Giving Tree.

I have thought about the message of this book (altruistic giving) for many years. I think I have tried to live an altruistic life. Sharing what I have has always been important to me. At risk of making an unfair judgment, I believe that those who do not share are the greatest danger we face today.

The opposite of giving/sharing is greed.

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. ~  Erich Fromm 

In our daily life, we encounter people who are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley 

It is so simple and so obvious to me that the major quandary—the driving problem—facing our world today is greed. The problem is not new: greed has been with us ever since humans came together to form cities. And it has been a major force, not in building societies, but in destroying them. It was a primary cause of the fall of the Roman Republic and, then, just less than a thousand years afterward, the fall of the Roman Empire.

As I comprehend it, greed and the unwillingness to share can—and are—destroying us. Plato, in The Republic, recognized this:

"Do we then still doubt," I said, "that the stingy, money-making man, in virtue of his likeness, corresponds to the oligarchic city?"

"Not at all," he said.

"Then, democracy, must, as it seems, be considered next—in what way it comes into being and, once come into being, what it is like— so that when we know the character of such a man in his turn, we can bring him forward for judgment." ~ Plato, The Republic

The salvation of our nation—democracy and our way of life—is dependent upon our willingness to share our resources with one another. That this sharing is exactly what the contemporary Republican Party opposes is what is destroying our nation and the world. But that’s another story.

In my next related post, I shall reference the Hebrew Scriptures and  the Year of Jubilee.   

We look to the day when sharing by all will mean scarcity for none.

For further reading, I recommend: