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10 OPINION maltatoday | THURSDAY • 26 JUNE 2024 IN her first address shortly after taking the oath of office, Pres- ident Myriam Spiteri Debono said that greed and the wish to accumulate more money often lead to various forms of corrup- tion. She rightly added that this has become the current Maltese social scourge, even worse than the all-pervasive drug problem. Today, ordinary, honest, law-abiding and tax-paying Mal- tese are outraged at the greed of the few at the cost of so many. To an infinite extent, their out- rage is abundantly justified. And this makes it a particularly good time to take a hard look at greed, both in its general form and in its peculiar Maltese incarnation. If infectious greed is contam- inating Maltese business, poli- tics and society, then we need to try to understand its causes and who and how it may have contributed to it. Why are so many falling prey to greed? With a deep, almost reflexive trust in the free market, are Maltese somehow greedier than other people? And as we look at the wreckage around us, can we be sure that there will somehow be a stop to it? Freud argued that greed was natural and that man was born greedy. He acknowledged that money can be a measure of our status, even our freedom, but he recognised that we are deeply ambivalent about it. Greed may be seen as part of human nature, traced back to the death drive. Human beings are unavoidably self-destructive, and they project that destruc- tiveness onto the outside world in the form of insatiable acquis- itiveness, envy and hate. At the unconscious level, greed aims primarily at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring helpless fellow human beings. There might be an existential connection between humanity's mortality and its desperation to acquire good things. Essential- ly, it's death that makes people greedy for life; they seek to get as much as they can for themselves before the game is over. Still, man is born good, and it is the environment that corrupts him. Greed, in other words, comes out of nurture, not na- ture. It compensates for the emptiness that results from feel- ing that one didn't get enough love or affirmation in one's life. When children repeatedly don't get enough affection and em- pathy, they grow up to be the type of people who try to force others into meeting their needs. In the process, these individu- als become aggressive, manip- ulative and often enraged. And when their grandiosity becomes pathological, you get greed. Whether greed emerges from our psyches, our environment or our genes remains an open ques- tion. No one can say with cer- tainty why the few, in contrast to the many among us, are so desperate for more money. They may not know the reason for it themselves. What's important, though, is to acknowledge that greed is a deep, perhaps even primal, instinct in man. Which brings us to a crucial question: Why do those few spend all their time in self-inter- ested acts of money-grubbing? Why are all their human transac- tions guided by avarice? The an- swer is that greed, like all poten- tially destructive human drives, is tempered by social norms. Greed can be harnessed to serve social ends. It can spur en- trepreneurial innovation, lead- ing to broad prosperity. It is soci- ety that channels greed for such constructive purposes. And it is society that decrees how much greed is enough and how we de- fine where, say, healthy ambition ends and unsavoury self-inter- est begins. The social rules can, moreover, change very quickly. Yesterday, it was fine for CEOs to earn a bit more than the aver- age worker. Today, it seems dis- tasteful, even immoral. Jesus Christ warned us that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. The Apos- tle Paul was less equivocal. The love of money is the root of all evil, he wrote. Thomas Aquinas took the argument against mon- ey a step further, arguing that ac- quisitiveness involves withhold- ing good things from others and thus impoverishing them. In today's Maltese society, the term "cost of living" is an insuf- ficient and somewhat ironic de- scriptor. For many, it is, in fact, the cost of merely surviving. The phrase has morphed into something far more haunting, a ticking clock that reminds many of the distance between living and staying alive. Many are con- fronted with the profound irony of this land, one that proclaims endless opportunities yet suffo- cates so many with the weight of mere existence. It does not feel as though we are a rich country. Instead, this often feels like a very poor coun- try that is home to a great deal of Greedy, greedier, greediest Mark Said is a veteran lawyer Mark Said Myriam Spiteri Debono delivering her first address after being sworn in as President of Malta