https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/03/16/18874507.php

Aristotle had already criticized it in his Nicomachean Ethics as Pleonexia, the constant urge to get more, with powerful words throughout history. Aristotle’s criticism of greed, pleonexia, the desire to have more than you ever need, is based on an understanding of the political which our society no longer shares…

GREED AS A MOTOR OF MODERN SOCIETY
By Nikolaus Egel

[This article is translated from the German on the Internet, http://www.academia.edu .]

Donald Trump already clearly presented his leading political maxim to us on January 9, 2016 during an election campaign speech in Des Moines, Iowa. To thunderous applause of his hearers, he said:
“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. But now I want to be greedy for the United States.”

That such a Machiavellian-Hobbesian theorem of the current president of the world’s greatest superpower can be formulated quite openly as a political program is so astonishing and at the same time so characteristic of our time and society that it deserves consideration.

Especially since the Trump-critical journalist Ezra Klein (in contrast to Trump’s remarks) posted this quote on Facebook already on 29th January 2016 with the foresighted remark that exactly this open greed will be an argument for Trump’s election victory:
“This is why he’s winning.” Ezra Klein (as we now know) was undoubtedly right about that. Donald Trump won the presidential elections, possibly because he – where other politicians as well as journalists sll feel compelled to at least maintain certain moral standards – quite openly describes the driving force of our society: greed, since antiquity condemned as socially endangering and disintegrating, declared by Christianity as one of the seven deadly sins, today a cardinal virtue that makes election victory possible. Free with Kurt Vonnegut: That’s how it works.

At least Trump cannot be accused of lying – at the latest since Augustine not a mortal sin, but a serious sin. Which may be a reason for his election victory. It will now be difficult for politicians and the press to deal with this man and the political establishment he stands for, and we can be curious to see how the public political scene and the newspapers will react to this. The public bustle of politicians and journalists will now have to take a new direction. We are curious. For a cynic “to whom nothing human is alien”, these are interesting times, especially because – as Balthasar Gracian has put it in his Art of Worldly Wisdom: “More is now required to deal with a single human being in these times than with an enre people in previous times.”

Nevertheless, this quotation from Donald Trump makes one think and is (if we are not yet complete cynics) depressing. Aſter all, in the past almost all philosophers and politicians spoke out against greed and condemned it with the strongest words.

Aristotle had already criticized it in his Nicomachean Ethics as Pleonexia, the constant urge to get more, with powerful words throughout history. Aristotle’s criticism of greed, pleonexia, the desire to have more than you ever need, is based on an understanding of the political which our society no longer shares, but whose opposite (and with Trump’s successful words quite obviously) even seems to be the driving force and motive behind all actions.

Aristotle discusses pleonexia in the fiſth book of his Nicomachean Ethics in relation to justice. For Aristotle, justice is the highest of all virtues, because it is essential and necessary for the good and orderly coexistence of the citizens of a city or country. It is the political virtue par excellence. Without justice, no political coexistence is possible for Aristotle, since the goal (telos) of man is in the political organization:

“This is why justice is considered the most important of all virtues, and neither the
evening star nor the morning star is so wonderful. In the proverb it is said ‘Every virtue is contained in righteousness’. And it is considered most of all perfect goodness of character, because it is the exercise of perfect goodness. But it is perfect, because the one who possesses it can also use the virtues in relation to another human being, and not only for himself. […] Therefore, the saying of Bias that the exercise of a political office shows what kind of person someone is, is correct. For the one who holds a polical office is already related to the other person and is already in a community. […]

Justice in this sense is now not a part of goodness of character, but the whole goodness, and injustice as opposed to it is not a only part of badness, but the whole badness.” Greed – let us follow Aristotle – destroys justice and thus the political foundation on which a society is based, which is why for Aristotle it is not only “a part of badness, but all badness”. For this reason, he condemns in the strictest terms those who strive for more – the pleonektes, the greedy – because they want more than they deserve (in relation to the other citizens), which is why they are unjust and destructive to society:
“On the one hand, those who violate the law (paranomos) are considered unjust, and on the other hand those, who want more than they are entitled to ( pleonektes), i.e. who have an atitude of inequality. […] Since now the unjust wants to have more, he will have to deal with goods, not with all goods, but with those to which outer happiness (eutychia) and misfortune (atychia) refer, thus with goods which as such are always goods, but not in every case for every man. People ask for them in prayers and chase aſter them. However, they should not do this, but rather they should ask that the things that are goods in themselves are also goods for them, and then choose these.”

For Aristotle, greed – pleonexia – Is the highest form of injustice and thus the worst of all vices, because it endangers the existence of a political community. This is especially true when leading political officials are greedy and place particular interests above the common good. In Aristotle’s conception, the political community of his time (the polis) did not consist primarily in economic independence (as our understanding today suggests) and in maximizing the profits of the individuals/institutions living in a political community (also these modern terms), but rather in securing a common and thus good political life for the citizens, which the hedonist endangers through his exaggerated desire to have more than the others.

Even if the Romans generally dealt with moral and political questions more loosely than their Greek predecessors, the (at least public) condemnation of greed remained a basic component of the political discussion at that time. In this sense, Cicero (exemplary as the best known public figure to us) already addressed the vice of greed in his work On Duties (De officiis), in particular in relation to the officials important for each state. Especially officials should not be out to enrich themselves personally, because – following Aristotle – this leads to unjust actions, which endanger the existence of a community:

“No vice is more repulsive than greed, especially among leading men and those who run the state. To have the state as a source of income is not only shameful, but also criminal and nefarious. […] But those who are at the head of the state cannot win the benevolence of many more easily by any means than by abstinence and self-control.”

Also for the Stoa and Epicureanism, as well as for the enre ancient philosophy greed remained the basic evil par excellence, with the same argumentation that we already know from Aristotle and Cicero: Because it is unfair, puts personal interests above the welfare of the community, and thus leads to profoundly apolitical and asocial results, which dissolves an existing political system: with all the resulting consequences that are known in history (all this is not new, one reads only Thucydides, Plutarch and Sueton for the Greek respectively Roman antiquity or Montaigne, Hobbes and Grimmelshausen for the beginning of the modern era) and which are now announcing themselves to us again.

Likewise, greed was of course condemned in Christianity, albeit less as political
misconduct, but rather as a personal sin endangering the salvation of the soul, which was mostly characterized as an inordinate striving for earthly possessions and as a lack of trust in God. Greed (avaritia; cupiditas) belongs both to the catalogue of the seven main vices and to the three temptations. Following the biblical passage 1 Timothy 6:
“Greed is the root of all evil” greed was described as bad in itself. Moreover, on the basis of Jacob 5 it was even condemned as a “blatant sin” which was even worse than the deadly sins because greed promoted the exploitation of the workers. Jacob says:
“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.”

In the Middle Ages, the criticism of greed received an even deeper weighting as a
reaction to the bourgeois economy of money and goods that had developed. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the mendicant orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans were founded (each as a reaction to changing political and economic circumstances), whose principles of poverty (paupertas) were completely opposed to greed. Take for example a text written in the middle of the 13th century: in this text Saint Francis himself goes in search of poverty, which is called the “foundation of all virtues” ( fundamentum omnium virtutum). In her speech, poverty complains about the fact that her opponent, avaritia, understood as “an inordinate desire to acquire or retain wealth”, masquerades under the names of “distinction” ( discretio) and “foresight” (providentia) – which we will still
encounter in Hobbes – and corrupts people.

Here one could still add infinitely many examples of the time, from Thomas of Aquinas to Dante Alighieri, who leaves the desirous in the Divine comedy with their backs up in the dust, because they are not allowed to look at God, to Bernardine of Siena, whose sermons Poggio Bracciolini in Florence had used as an occasion to write in 1428 with his Dialogue On Greed (De avaritia) probably the most important treatise of the Renaissance on this subject. The point is clear: since antiquity greed has been condemned until the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance because – following these authors – It has been dangerous for society and disintegratng for each individual.

This view of man, his goals and human coexistence in general changed for the first time systematically and philosophically with Thomas Hobbes, whom we can see as the theorist of a modern society, in whose wake (though probably without knowing it) Donald Trump still stands with his public affirmation of greed – with the difference, of course, that Hobbes’ books were burned in Oxford while Donald Trump was applauded for it. Machiavelli had already hinted at a new view of the human being, the political as a sector in its own – In which greed plays a fundamental and action-motivating role – and its goals in his Principe and Discorsi, but Thomas Hobbes for the first time in his Leviathan theoretically founded and analyzed the concept of a society in which we still live: A property market society in which atomized and completely dissociated individuals
meet, who are only held together by overcoming their respective self-interest – which Hobbes no longer questions, but (due to and in extension of his experiences during the English Civil War) is assumed to be given factually in the nature of man – by a strong sovereign, the only power “that can frighten them all”, in order to realize a single political goal: The desire for peace, which (according to Hobbes) can only be realized through the limitation of the greed of each individual, which is presumed in human beings, by a strong sovereign.

In order to make clear this fundamentally new view of man and the emergence of
society at Hobbes, I will only allow myself to contrast Hobbes with Rousseau: At the beginning of the second chapter of the Social Contract, Rousseau writes: “The oldest and only natural social entity is the family […]”. Hobbes writes in De cive [On the citizen], summarizing, as it were, the core of his entire anthropology: “We now want to go back to the state of nature and assume that humans, like mushrooms, would suddenly have grown out of the earth and grown up, without being obliged to each other.” For Hobbes there is no political goal to be realized among mankind, no acceptance of man as a political being who makes his life a fulfilled and happy life only in living together with others. For Hobbes – who here subconsciously or consciously describes his (and also our) time in the form of the “state of nature” – there is no happy life anymore. There is only the limitation of greed with all available means – mind you: against human beings and their egoistic particular interests, which are assumed to be eternal, their striving for the will to have more and more.

This is the first time in history that Hobbes has clearly formulated and worked out the drive of his and our time: According to Hobbes, what drives people, what only leads them to create “that great Leviathan through art, called community or state,” is precisely that passion that has been condemned since antiquity as pleonexia, as avaritia, as greed. Man submits to an overpowering state in order to be safe from his own greed and the greed of others and not to have to be afraid anymore: The state as administrator of our fear, the undisturbed enrichment as its basis. But behind this is also the feeling that society is already so fluid or fragile that the behavior of overly greedy people forces all others to take part in the race for power over others. This consideration is both terrible and overwhelming: it is that artificial “let’s make man” which Hobbes was the first to think systematically and clearly – with great concern and deep aversion – and which he formulated as an attempt to overcome the terrible conditions of his time; and which is now the driving force and basis of our society: “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy.” With greed elections are won today, this is the way politics is made today quite openly.

Accordingly, John Locke and Adam Smith were to turn this brutal diagnosis, which
Hobbes still formulated with concern and deep aversion, into a positive one only a little later and make it socially acceptable in public: Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) describes how those who pursue only their own advantage are led by an “invisible hand”, so that they “without intending it, indeed without knowing it promote the interest of society”. And in his work The Wealth of Nations he formulates the assumption – destructive for all of us in his succession and not only reckless, but inhuman – that self-interest is the “cause and source” of public prosperity.

Here we have arrived – oppressively – in our time. In a present in which greed is not only publicly declared a virtue with which the world is governed and with which elections are won, but also in which all other vices condemned for centuries seem to have become virtues.

For the seven deadly sins are well known: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. These sins – still condemned in the latest Catechism of the Catholic Church – seem to be the very qualities with which the world is currently governed and to which a large part of the people – subconsciously or quite consciously, thus confirming Hobbes’ diagnosis – have subordinated themselves. These sins have become the motor of modern society: “All my life I was greedy, greedy, greedy. I grabbed all the money I could get. But now I want to be greedy for the United States. I want to collect all that money. I will be greedy for the United States.”

I close this article not with Donald Trump and his promise to his constituents, but with a much older warning: “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them.”
This is a warning that will also have been written in the two Bibles on which Donald Trump laid his hand during his inauguration.