The cultivation of greed and envy in the public at large was consciously promoted beginning in the mid-1920’s.  These two qualities were the fuel for the economic engine which was to see a rapid expansion for well over half a century. But has it really been in the interest of humanity?

“We must shift America, he wrote, from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” – Paul Mazur – Lehman Brothers (1920’s)

“For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” – John Maynard Keynes (1930) – One of the most influential economists of the last century.

“The modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy, and these are not accidental features but the very causes of its expansionist success. The question is whether such causes can be effective for long or whether they carry within themselves the seeds of destruction.” – E.F. Schumacher – Economist and Philosopher

“If human vices: such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures.” – E.F. Schumacher – Economist and Philosopher

“I suggest that the foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modem sense, because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man.” – E.F. Schumacher – Economist and Philosopher

“A person who is not disturbed by the incessant flow of desires—that enter like rivers into the ocean, which is ever being filled but is always still—can alone achieve peace, and not the man who strives to satisfy such desires.” – Bhagavad-gita 2.70