"Call it 'greed' if you want. But greed built the light bulb, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the vaccine. Envy never built a thing."~ Rock Chartrand
"Call it 'greed' if you want. But greed built the light bulb, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the vaccine. Envy never built a thing."~ Rock Chartrand
6 comments:
Love it. We live in an age where I think pithy statements like this have more of an impact than long essays or abstract philosophy.
The classic speech - and like others produced by Hollywood such the opening to Patton and Jessup's in A Few Good Men, it was written to blacken the character of the speaker, but instead rebounded on them, which is why it's on YouTube...
Greed is Good
Although it's this speech in a lessor known movie that is even better, Other People's Money, where Larry The Liquidator responds to Gregory Peck's pleas to the stockholders, in what would be his last role, expounding ideas that he likely truly believed in real life.
Here's the bad news though, as I wrote about five years ago when I played both these clips for my kids and their Gen-Z friends,
Don't know what happened to the end of that comment but here's my piece from 2020, The Seeds of 21st Century Socialism:
"But the second OPM clip with DeVito’s speech brought forth anger: real hatred of the character and what he was about to do. Why could the company not be saved? Why could investments not be made to grab those new opportunities in fibre optics and the like? Why did it have to be destroyed? What would happen to the town that depended upon it?"
Nonsense quote! The Wrights did not build their first fliers out of greed. They just wanted to see if they could get a heavier than air machine to fly. That wasn't a greed thing. Not at all. Not even a bit of it. There was nothiung to be greedy about. Now if you want to argue they were not the first, that's OK. Name who you think it was. Whether you nominate Richard Pearse, Gabriel Voisin, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Clément Ader, Traian Vuia or even Aleksandr Fyodorovich Mozhaysky it isn't greed which motivated them...
Building the aeroplane is one thing. As you say, Richard Pearse, Gabriel Voisin, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Clément Ader, Traian Vuia or even Aleksandr Fyodorovich Mozhaysky all did that. They were all greedy for *knowledge*.
But building a profitable aircraft factory that introduces the new technology — ah, that's something else altogether. That takes greed on a whole new level—that takes greed for real success..
"Greed" is a bit like the work "selfish", or "arrogant". There's no widely accepted and clear definition, and so it's used to describe both genuine negative behaviour, and virtuous behaviour that tall poppy cutters want to smear. This post is about the latter, and in that context can define 'greed' as simply going after something you want purposefully and determinedly. You may want money, or you may want something else.
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