1. Table of Contents – An overview of the key sections and arguments presented.

2. Title – A clear indication of the central theme and focus of the essay or section.

3. Content – A presentation of all arguments used.

4. Reference List – Academic stuff you don't need to concern yourself with (unless you like reading then knock yourself out)

CONTENTS:

• Greed and Human Nature

• "Ownership" and Animals

• The Will to Survive

• Capital and Self-Interest

Greed is a cultural product, not a timeless human condition. If greed were natural, why didn’t it emerge as the dominant organizing principle in societies until the rise of capitalist or otherwise profit-based economies? Karl Polanyi (1944) thoroughly discredits the myth of the market as a natural extension of human behavior, showing that market economies had to be imposed, often violently, on pre-existing systems of reciprocity and redistribution. Capitalism did not arise because of human nature, it arose because of specific historical and material conditions, and it actively produces greed through its emphasis on individual accumulation and competition. This system forces people into behaviors that are celebrated as "natural" only after the fact. The ontological greed thesis is ideologically driven.

If this wasn’t bad enough, the ethical implications of this argument is equally revolting. To argue that humans are naturally greedy is to deny the possibility of meaningful moral agency. It’s a cynical, defeatist view that abdicates any responsibility for systemic change. How convenient for the wealthy and powerful that this argument absolves them of their crimes! If greed is natural, then why bother striving for a more just, equitable world? Why hold the exploiters to account for the misery they create when their actions can be excused as mere expressions of human nature?

Studies by Fehr and Schmidt (1999) demonstrate that humans are deeply motivated by fairness and reciprocity, not selfishness. Neuroscientific research, such as the work by Rilling et al. (2002), shows that cooperation activates the brain’s reward systems just as strongly, if not more, than individual gain. Again, anyone with even a cursory understanding of anthropology, sociology, or historical analysis would never suggest that greed is an inherent trait present in humanity, when the overwhelming body of evidence proves precisely the opposite.

Private property, as present in the form of modern capitalist societies, is an extremely recent phenomenon. For almost all of human history, humans lived in communal, collective societies where resources were shared and ownership was not individualized. As anthropologists such as Sahlins have studied, hunter-gather societies – which comprise 90 percent of human existence – existed without private property. The state of being called "the original affluent society" is how Sahlins described this, in that people's needs were met by cooperation and resource sharing, and not by individual ownership of resources. Clearly, this form of resource organizing did not exist until the emergence of agrarian societies and then subsequent to that, industrial capitalism.

Equally, as I stated above, illustratively misleading is the comparison of human's conception of "property" to animal function of territoriality. Wolves defend their territory and birds protect their nests; indeed, animals procreate territories, but obviously this is about survival, not in the character of ownership, in any philosophical fashion. Instinctive behavior in other animal's occurs because of a biological need, namely the protection of food, mates, and shelter and instinctive behavior is temporary and functional behavior. In the event resources run out, or the conditions or factors change, an animal simply moves onto another area unencumbered by ownership of the previous area (Lorenz, 1966). Humans, and primarily capitalist societies, have developed systems of ownership, with legal enforcement, that have no resemblance to these innate behaviors of survival. This is important, ownership, in its philosophical state, is not merely a mechanism for use of resources. Ownership is the right to exclude others and control resources indefinitely.

Philosophically, private property is anything but natural – it is a social and legal contract that was developed to serve specific economic and political interests. Thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx attacked the idea that private property is intrinsic to human society. Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755), traced the rise of inequality back to the moment someone first fenced off a piece of land and declared, “This is mine”. He argued that this was the beginning of civil society’s corruption – the birth of inequality, oppression, and exploitation. Marx took this argument further in Das Kapital (1867), demonstrating how private property, especially under capitalism, is the engine of labor exploitation, alienation, and the concentration of wealth. Private property is not human instinct – it is a historically contingent institution, devised and maintained by those with power to consolidate their control over resources at the expense of everyone else.

The justification of private property as natural or inevitable continues to become even more ridiculous when considering the different forms of property arrangement that have existed in societies that humans have created. There are many diverse indigenous cultures across the planet, the majority of which cannot be reconciled with the Western, modern, propertied view of private property; these cultures have developed systems of collective ownership and stewardship over land and collective uses of natural resources – every single way of thinking that is absolutely opposite to the exploitative, individualized, human-centered social ideologies surrounding private property. For example, many Native American cultures in North America collectively viewed land as a thing to care for, not as something to own and exploit for an individual (Mann, 2005). These cases demonstrate private property is hardly a universal human norm. Private property is a recent construct that developed under specific historical conditions and continues to be reproduced through the varied systems of legal and economic violence.

The ethics of this argument for private property is also troubling, however. For example, defending private property as a desirable and/or natural institution ignores the tremendous kind of harm private property has inflicted upon human beings by dispossessing them of land, commodifying life and human welfare, and deepening inequalities between social classes. For instance, the enclosure movement in England during the 16th through the 18th centuries transformed the landscape of common property into private property, forcing people into unacceptable poverty and individualized wage-labor work, excluding the people nearest to them from the means of subsistence (Thompson, 1963). This process was repeated in various forms across the globe, such as colonial land seizures towards contemporary gentrification, all under the justification that private property is a natural right.

When predators hunt for their meal, they only eat as much as they need to sustain life. Herbivores will graze until their feeling of fullness has been satisfied. Animals do not stockpile wealth or hoard assets or exploit others for more than they need to survive. Instead of greed driving survival, animals have adapted; they meet the need for basic and adequate sustenance behaviors. They operate on the basis of "enough", rather than "more".

Unlike the instinctual act of survival, greed usually involves exploitation and violence against others which are preconditions for inequality. Survival is neutral and natural in the world like the perpetuation of life. Greed presupposes attitudes and acts that create inequality, exploitation, and violence through extraction. People secure and hoard wealth; that is, they monopolize access to resources whether in liquid form or in defined immobile forms (all to later benefit of extraction and labor even while sustaining benefits), not out of need of survival but simply to be vengeful and greedy. The issue is not the "greed for survival" but Greedy – hoarding wealth is social, economic, not biological. A classic example of Greed is where wealth rest in the resides of a few privately-owned sources, as such billionaires do not become billionaires out of a heightened will to survive rather exists whereby the system rewards these individuals for more greed, to dominate quality of life of another person or the many, rather than facilitating the mutual coexistence of all for purpose of survival or to survive. There is predation in animal societies where greed put life in oppositional and objectionable tension that undermines the whole system by looking for an underlining benefit and beyond.

Much to note is the moral components of greed when compared to the relatively simple act to survive when measured. Greed seem to be envy with little concern for the fact that some must incur a great deal less than strain someone or many to acquire increasing degrees of wealth without heed. Surviving is finite and necessary. Greed is infinite and destructive. Greed is a social and economic phenomenon that is usually driven by the monopoly of power and wealth beyond what any person needs to survive. Greed does not reflect a natural or inevitable condition of humanity; it is a by-product of systems that prop it up as necessity.

Fundamentally, capitalism is predicated on the concept that competition and profit maximize are necessary for sustaining innovation and growth. This idea, popularized by thinkers such as Adam Smith (1776), has been weaponized to uphold a system that values corporate profits and individual wealth maximization over the interests of people and the environment. However, this notion of greed as a “natural” or “necessary” motivator of human behavior is not supported by evidence. As cultural and psychological studies document, humans are motivated by diverse interests beyond self-interest, including compassion, care, and collective welfare (Keltner et al., 2014). The claim that greed compels the engine of progress is nothing more than a convenient lie that excuses vast systems of exploitation and inequality.

Capitalism's supporters conveniently ignore how capitalism inherently rewards the centralization of wealth and power, facilitating immense inequality between rich and poor. These inequalities are not coincidental by-products of "natural competition", they are the direct result of a system that privileges corporate profit over people. The accumulation of capital by a handful of resource monopolists, while the masses labor under increasingly precarious work conditions, is not evidence of economic efficiency; it is instead evidence of systemic injustice. The Oxfam report from 2020 states that the total wealth of the world's richest 1% is more than the wealth accumulated by 6.9 billion people combined. This obscene imbalance of wealth is not merely a pessimistic outcome of capitalism, it is inherent to the system itself.

This system does more than say, "all wealth should be concentrated at the top", Capitalism actively supports and motivates greed. For example, in a capitalist system, corporate executives are legally bound to put shareholder profits first and no other priorities. They will cut jobs, take pay cuts, or pollute the environment to boost profits (Stout, 2012). The ongoing search to seek profit is given the impulse of economic efficiency, and greed changes from a moral failing into economic necessity. Under these conditions, corporate “social responsibility” is a cleverly stated form of plausible and disingenuous bail-out. Any consideration that puts human welfare or environmental health as a priority over profit is viewed as a rip of fiduciary duties. Therefore, capitalism institutionalizes greed at the very core of economic structures.

Next to its relentless pursuit of profit, the environmental costs of capitalist greed are surely one of capitalism's most serious charges that can be made against capitalism. The belief that all profit is a good, whether it comes from the extraction of natural resources, the destruction of ecosystems, or fossil-fuel driven climate change, is the essence of capitalism. Capitalism's insistence on perpetual growth of the economy to avoid collapse or failure, at a time when our planet has finite resources, makes capitalism fundamentally inconsistent with the planet we live upon. Marx stated capitalism treats the Earth as an infinite fountain of resources to be exploited as opposed to a cohabitated home. We live in a world embroiled in ecological disaster, a disaster largely driven by capitalist corporations, that are actively destroying forests or like the owners of oil wells creating catastrophic pollution of all unearthed fossil fuels for profit. It is these same capitalists who will jump from "The Earth has infinite resources" and "The Earth has finite resources" depending on which fits the narrative best, the concept of infinite gain, and the fear of scarcity.

If that is not enough, there are those that try to appease or dodge the rightful argument that capitalism is immoral, advocates will argue that ultimately the market will self-correct itself over time, as if an invisible hand will usher in a fair and socially responsible outcome for humanity. This argument is not funny, it is just wrong. The marketplace is not an agent of good, it is a battleground where the privileged wealthy and powerful participants manipulate systems to their own advantage while other participating citizens are left in or impoverished, regardless of race, ethnic background, gender, sex, or sexual orientation similar to those who resisted the pursuit of justice and equality in political and economic systems. The marketplace is not a friend; it only offers greater accountability and standards to give off the appearance of an honorable outcome. The presumption that a friend exists is a ruse to allow the incumbent interests to absorb greater concentrations of power and capital while the rest of society receives crumbs of household goods an pennies is deserving of all its misery. In this framework, we live under a ruse collectively known as "trickle-down economics" where the wealthy and powerful cabal pointlessly placate the masses until they can skim away the spoils for "self-improvement" (Piketty, 2014).

Systems based on profit, such as capitalism, have the effect of distorting human values, so that relationships and social structures are reduced to mere transactions. In a capitalist society, everything – labor, profit, education, healthcare, and even human lives – has a price. Humans are no longer regarded as having inherent dignity in their own right or from their contributions to community; they are valued according to the profit they are able to generate for employers, landlords, or shareholders. Society’s focus on commodifying life reduces people to cogs, mechanisms, in the capitalist machine, and ultimately strips their humanity. Karl Marx’s concept of alienation is an adequate description of the process: in a capitalist society, workers are alienated from the products of their labor, from their fellow workers, and ultimately, from their own humanity, as their life is based on the regime of profit and the law of value. Alienation is not a substantive part of existence; it can be traced directly to the regime of capitalism.

Time and again, capitalism has proven itself to be a form of societal organization that only benefits a layer of elite at the expense of the remainder of society; inequality disfunctions, exploitation, environmental degradation, and social alienation, to name a few. The idea that this arrangement is a best or only way to order human society puts a shame to one's ability to consider alternative methods to arrange society so that the direct welfare of human beings, their cooperation, and ecological reasoning are at the center of civilization.