Beneath the glass dome, and through the chambers of splendor, it is filled with so many things the heart craves. I saw the marvel of human skill and art. But apparently, they were all looking for something. "President Bush after 9/11 said: I urge all Americans to shop." "This brain is still going to make me money. It's something that's inside of me. I was raised in a way that I would still make money, even if I was released in the desert." "There are people who try to tell you you need this, there are enough people who think they need it. That's what marketing strategy is, always telling you: 'You shouldn't be complacent!'" "Humans are greedy by nature. Evolution has shown As long as this mechanism doesn't become too dominant, it serves the individual's purpose perfectly." "Right now I'm going so far as to say that this is a symptom of the disease." "I wonder if we are a form that can survive.
Maybe we're just a fleeting piece of evolution and we'll be sitting right next to the dinosaurs in the cockroach museum." GREED GREED A Fatal Desire The film by Jörg Seibold PART 1 I keep asking myself: Why are we like this? We give and we hoard. We create and destroy. What's our problem? What drives us? I want to find the answer. Fear "Humanity is at a crossroads. I think, historic momentum. The physical environment is being damaged to the point, where we need to confront it. War is something we have to think about, why is it happening? People are very unhappy - above all we are continue to build Walmart.
I see the insatiable greed that is closely linked to all these other difficulties, which if we don't recognize and adapt to them, we are literally putting our species at risk." "You may ask to talk about Darwin. If you ask to talk about Darwin, it must be about evolution. Evolution is the idea Darwin was trying to understand... And what was his very original origin? Natural selection!" "Humans on the one hand, are very similar to all other forms of life, in that we share a basic biological predisposition, to survive. But on the other hand, we are so smart that we actually realize that we exist. And the point here is to live. and knowing that, is the basis for great joy. On the other hand, it also carries a very terrible burden of existence.
If you know that you are here, you know that one day, like all living beings, you will not be here. If that's all we think: 'I'm going to die, I might go out and get a meteor's fall', we really will be paralyzed as objects of terror. What humans have done is build and maintain what anthropologists today call 'culture' And all cultures offer some recipe for immortality, whether literally through heaven and the afterlife and reincarnation of all of the world's great religions, or symbolically, through the belief that some remnant of our identity will endure over time. That's why you want to have kids, that's why you want to build pyramids, that's why we want to write great books and symphonies.
Humans are motivated to have a lot of things, because - psychologically speaking - it gives them a sense, that they might be able to live forever." "Desire, greed and struggle that fuel anger and aggression, from a philosophical point of view, Buddhist philosophy are all conditions that a person produces. who consistently tries to look at what is not the truth. We are talking about three fundamental truths: Things are impermanent, second: the fundamental principle of all things should be emptiness. But now what's happening is: We're trying to build something that makes us forget this. We try to make things permanent. And that struggle creates a third truth: suffering. We then start to depend on things.
I'll give you an example: You know, if I have a t-shirt... and every time I go shopping, I buy another t-shirt. You may have twelve in your closet, but you will buy the thirteenth. Only then An he had a feeling he would live long enough to wear all 13 t-shirts, or even more. So, there's a sense of consistently doing something every day, because we might be able to further strengthen our sense of immortality, our sense of being alive is constantly unchanging... And that struggle consistently builds all of these psychoneuroses and one of the most prominent of them becomes greed." "Death is a very real physical phenomenon.
It doesn't matter how good your symbols are - your religion, your politics, your money - they are still symbols and none of them will be enough to minimize the fear of death. You'd rather delete it. You can reduce it, but you can't get rid of it. And finally, only really to make things worse. We also don't like the idea that we are animals. From an absolute biological point of view, we are not much more important or immortal, than lima beans or armadillos." An animal takes only what it needs. But human animals are different. More than seven billion of us inhabit this planet. of us want something. Want more. Is this perhaps the secret to success? This is the job of the balloon.
The subject should try to keep inflating the balloon. The bigger the balloon, the better the value. In each round, the subject plays for real money. Every time they slightly inflate the balloon, they take the risk that it may pop, and then their money will be gone... We can show that people who tend to be greedy are more likely to take risks when doing this task. So they inflated the balloon far more than normal test subjects. And we saw that people who tended to be greedy also showed changes in brain response. In this graph, we see how the brain responds to rewards, and punishments. So far, we've been able to show that the more greedy the test subject, the weaker the punishment signals.
The interesting thing is that these people also tend to want to keep things that way. Olds and Milner's classic experiment, particularly interesting in this regard. If electrodes were implanted in this region of the mouse's brain, and the mouse was then put in a situation where it could stimulate that dopamine system directly by pressing the lever, the mouse would continue to press the lever until it died. And this may be one of the biological mechanisms, which helps explain excessive greed." "Most primates are very social, but these primates are not unique in that they are also very tolerant. There is a hierarchy, and everyone knows who is on top - and the individual on top gets more.
Males get more females, females get more access to resources, but there are no really steep hierarchies, where there is one individual at the top who gets everything. And also seen things that are not important among primates such as respect for ownership. We can see for example, how do you respond when you get more and I get less? And the response when you got less and I got more? And it's easy to learn experimentally. So the experiment itself is very simple: you need two monkeys or two apes, place them next to each other and you interact with them in order. And what they have to do is a very easy task: you give them a token, they return it, you reward them with food because their task is done. But the critical component is this: how do they respond to gift choices like cucumbers or peppers, when their partner gets something much better? Nala?
Here it is... Look at this! It could be because of injustice, it could be because: 'Hey look, my partner got something better than me' - or it could be some kind of general greed, for lack of a better term. Hey, there's better food out there, I want that!” “Nala, want some wine?” “From an evolutionary perspective, the behavior we consider greedy, i.e. acquiring as many resources as possible, is important. Most animals live more within the minimum limits than modern western humans. So, not getting as many resources as possible, for them is a real risk of death. In human society, from my perspective, greed has been viewed not only as getting as much as possible, but getting as much as possible by explicitly sacrificing others. And I don't think that's something you can apply to animals." One day Narcissus discovered it was a lake so clear that he could see himself in it, as if it were a mirror.
When he saw his own reflection, he fell in love with his good looks. We, too, like to see ourselves as the center of the world's attention. And by doing so, we crave recognition and self-respect. We collect relationships, experiences, photos and likes, SUVs, shoes, records... Are we like Narcissus, addicted to our own ego? Don't talk about international prices, let's talk about our prices... - that's 700 square meters per floor, times eight floors, times our local prices - a thousand and so... That's about 5.6 million ... " "I would say, my philosophy is very simple: There is a fine line that separates a businessman from a criminal. Why? Because no matter what I do, someone will say that I have cheated on him. So, all of us businessmen around the world, whether it's Bill Gates, Richard Branson...
we are all seen as criminals, but that's because we think beyond the way other people think. President Mugabe is my brother. From a European perspective I'll be called a nephew. From an African perspective I'll be called a brother. We can't have a world full of critics. We want the numbers to shrink! Less critics, more doers! That way the world economy will be fun to live in." "Welcome to my home! I want to show you that as well as the achievements I've made over the years and, yes, you know... At the school near my old office, they gave me an award for building the school block... And then an organization
"Help us help ourselves" honored me for my work on humanitarian causes - so, they gave me this award. Well, this is a BEFTA award - the main focus is recognizing those who have done a lot in the field of human rights, friendly relations and empowerment issues. You know, internationally. That's me. Here is my main room, where... if you come in... and friends and family... we meet and discuss, talk about thoughts , politics, economics and family.This property has a helicopter pad above... So, if the weather is cold, here we put the heater on, so there's actually a space heater in there... This space is called Ru ang Eats Mugabe.
If I fix this house, this is the only room I won't fix because it gives me a sentimental connection with the president... And, yes, the man money can't buy. And here it is... I know where I come from. I'm originally a vegetable seller. My bed was floor, granulated floor, that's where I used to sleep - with very bad linen duvets, one under and one above me. And that's history. That's why I want to be able to show it to you. I have to live well!” “Things like horse racing and all other forms of public events appeal to people for so many reasons. One aspect of horse racing is betting. The other part is, it is important to highlight his status among other human beings.
A person is called 'better' not by how big or strong he is, but by how one dresses, how you treat yourself and how you determine that you are richer than or more worthy than others and therefore more immune from death than anyone else around. You. In such a way, it is no different from the dominance hierarchy in primates. We love heroes and therefore have been fixated on being the best at something, even if it's just how many hotdogs I can eat in 10 minutes. In America, we are number one. Not in science or literature or anything important, - we are number one in depression. How could this happen? What you have to do is: Look at cultural values, to see if they can be realistically acquired by the average individual. When you're a man, you're basically rewarded for how much you have.
This is what is called the 'American Dream': If you work hard enough, you can make as much money as LeBron James or Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. But realistically, for every millionaire, there should be hundreds of thousands of people working part-time at Walmart for nothing. It's the same for women, but they have a different cultural burden: We teach women that to be beautiful, you have to be very thin - except for your breasts, of course. So if you're not as thin as dental floss, you're too fat. And you must forever stay young , which of course, is biologically impossible. 'Wow!' We value values that are simply impossible to obtain." If you say 'I want to be honest with the world', you must give up all your 'I'. And when I say 'I' from you, I speak of 'I am' this' and 'I am that', 'I can do this and I can do that', 'Oh yes, I did this last year', 'oh I can do that', 'oh I'm better than him'. So all of the 'I' is ego.
There are a lot of people in South Africa, both black and white, who carry ego badges on them, carry them up high like a flag. And they are people that we will see as the future bureaucrats of the country. this. If you drive into a poor area, where you know people are dying of hunger and drive your Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce there, that's the worst thing you can do. You drive with this ego to show 'I'm better than you. You know, you're not going to well that's where I am.' Those people are missing." "If I believed that I should assert my ego, the only way I could do that was through greed. I was forced to constantly put something inside of me that gave stability to my ego. It could be material, but it could also be spiritual things, for example ideas. Like 'I am important'.
Or 'I am someone, because of money, or fame, or my title, or something like that.' Our whole modern world is based on this. Greed destroys people. Why? Because it isolates us. And because greed is like a drug. So no what I really have that satisfies me - it's a constant quest for more. Religion has known for centuries that this drive lies within us humans, but this drive is also our downfall." Since time immemorial, there are stories of people who can never have enough. People like King Midas. He asked Dionysius to grant his wish: that everything he touched would turn to gold. He seemed to have died of starvation or thirst. Gold and wealth have always been seen as the ruler of all and a whisper to eternity. What, I asked myself, does money exert such a strong attraction?
Money "I chose banking as my career. I am an accountant, and I worked for the bank Julius Bär & Co. AG, first in Zurich and then in the Cayman Islands, which is a tax haven. obey the law. A certain amount of greed creeps into you. That applies to me too, I must admit. You start to think only of monetary matters. The dollar symbol appears before your eyes and in your heart. Then they are there, and that's one only thing that matters. Big profits, and making sure you don't get caught! That's how I operate it too, of course.
In my function as a compliance officer, I conclude that we have criminal clients. There are names like Bin Laden, there are a Mexican drug boss. It became clear to me that I worked for a criminal organization, and that the bank was a participant in tax evasion and fraud. only moral conflicts, and then resolve these issues with management. We were threatened, and the whole family ended up leaving the Cayman Islands very suddenly... There was once a Swiss banker in the Cayman Islands who had been murdered. To some extent, my decision to leave the system is a moral issue. But what was more important was that I realized, the system had turned against me.
For example, the threats made against me in the Cayman Islands, the way I was fired, then threatened again. The bank will destroy me if I try to press charges against them! I had to change the route I took to work, change my hours. When I saw the black car it made me angry. I was really scared. I even considered suicide. They want to drive me crazy. The state prosecutors had all the information, but they didn't do anything with it. This is a political issue. This will make criminal clients uncomfortable. They will realize that they are also no longer safe and protected. So with that in mind, the authorities are not after banks. They are after the person who made the truth public.
I spent 217 days in prison. The first 30 days in 2005, and the rest in 2011... Both I was in in solitary confinement, spending 23 hours a day alone in my cell. Some prisoners went crazy, started banging on doors, screaming. The golden calf in Switzerland is banking secrecy. That's why no one will investigate Julius Bär's bank, even though state prosecutors know that Julius Bär has helped defraud the US tax authorities, and so on. For political reasons, state prosecutors will never investigate anything." "Our question is: how can we create test conditions, which will approximate the behavior of stockbrokers, for example? We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate brain activity in our trial subjects. We can look deep into the brain, including into the structures responsible for reward responses.
Our subjects played a game of buying and selling stocks, and had to decide whether they wanted to invest a large amount of money or a small amount. Then they get feedback during the game, whether the stock price is going up or down. We've been able to determine that people who are particularly greedy display a more muted response in the areas of the brain responsible for punishment and loss of money. This allows a kind of disinhibition, the inability to block impulses. Based on the assumption that the average person is risk averse, it makes sense for the financial industry, which is optimized for returns, to hire people who tend to be more risk-averse. They achieve it with bonuses, and with targeted hiring. I believe it's only a matter of time until the next financial crisis will occur." "When I started hearing about the fortunes of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, then it was around 30, 40 billion, but now it is 70 billion dollars.
You know, in life, if you had just a billion dollars, you could live for 273 years and spend 10 thousand dollars a day. So if you have a billion dollars, then you could even spend 30 thousand dollars a day, because you're not going to live that long. But still other people make more. No one can say that I don't want more.” “If people like me don't make money, there are no taxes that allow government to function. So, because of that, people who make money make things possible. And I'm one of those people." Greater growth, more prosperity, more contentment. This is the promise of well-meaning people to us. And we are too happy to trust them. We do our part. Are we buying happiness? for yourself? The Happiness Machine "A lot of Western Europeans and Americans, they no longer really have a firm belief in God.
But you have to believe in something. And we have belief systems, which reduce the fear of death. But there will always be a roar of panic beneath the layers of consciousness. We will experience this fear of death and we must do something about it. And one thing we can do is buy a lot of crap. By the time you can speak, you've been bombarded with advertising images - like Nike and Arch Gold - we know them subconsciously. Our children grow up in a very different world from the one you and I grew up in - and their brains have been modified accordingly. Manufacturers of consumer goods, they spend billions of dollars making sure no children are left behind in that commercial rat race. We are essentially no different from the amoebas.
We are attracted to everything that promotes life and pleasure, we resist and fear everything that threatens that state of affairs." "Shoes, shoes, and shoes... everywhere shoes! Sometimes you don't want to let something be worn, you put it away... For example these shoes, I've never worn them, but I guess they've been hanging out here for three years?... Still totally new! Same with this one - brand new... brand new!... These are designer shoes! I don't want to be limited because the Book of Genesis says: You must have power over everything. It gives me strength. No one, in the Bible - I can open it to you - is not a poor person! Abraham, Moses...everyone is a rich man in the Bible! The Bible does not speak of poverty. The Bible is the biggest money machine. Every verse, every verse, talks about money! And, I'm glad there's something like this!" "I think the key to a materialistic society is that it will always tell you something is missing - you need something else.
We all contributed. You can't just blame someone for trying to sell you something. So there is demand and supply. We all support each other in it. And we've all gotten into this cycle, where we can't break free from that." "Speaking of 24 hours, I'd say 23 hours and 55 minutes. Samsara says: Come on, you're missing something. And by Samsara, I mean habitual patterns. And you keep thinking, they called me. Samsara called me. I need to get there, have a car, have a house, have a partner, so busy, so neurotic. That's what I would say. Of course, you don't call it that, you call it: 'become someone, be capable, find your identity'. When there is dissatisfaction, you are always looking for more.
Struggle, brings so much insecurity and unhappiness." "One of the reasons why people earn so much is because it tastes good. There is a neurochemical and psychological feedback loop. This keeps you from doing more than you really need. It's one thing when you go out and have a warm cup of coffee on a cold rainy day. But it's totally another thing when you buy your 75th pair of shoes. You really don't need those shoes. But they will still make you feel comfortable. There is a push that in the US is called 'to keep up with the neighbours'. In the affluent area of Park Avenue, at everyone's 16th birthday party...last year everyone shared an ipod...this year they shared an ipad...this year will share this. So there's a kind of short-term consumption function." "There's nothing wrong with being a consumer. I mean, to stay alive we have to consume things. But, we literally surround ourselves with stuff, to the point where we are imprisoned in a 'golden cage'. We become 'consumed by consumption'. We will continue to buy goods, until the last drop of petroleum. It's very dangerous, I think."
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