Greed Is Bad (Essay Sample)

Greed Is Bad

In the 1987 film, Wall Street, Gordon Gekko gives a speech and asserts that greed is good because it will save the country and companies from bankruptcy. Is greed truly a positive element in society? No, greed will never be good as it is one of the worst human attitudes. It consists of taking more than one deserves or has worked for it and can lead to extremely adverse processes and outcomes. Greed is bad because it can result in illegal activities and extensive, unethical human exploitation apart from directly harming your health and relationships.

Greed is appalling because it can motivate you to conduct illegal activities for your own selfish benefit. A good example would be corporate executives who have been greedy because their salaries are related to stock prices. Enron and similar executives doctored or asked someone else to manipulate the financial statements of their company in order to reach millions of rewards in terms of performance-based salaries and bonuses. Another example would be sales agents who practice fraudulent acts to dupe customers. If you are greedy, you may be predisposed of thinking and implementing illegal things due to significant financial rewards. Avarice of this kind can turn you into a criminal and put you behind bars.

In connection to the effect of greed above, greed can cause wide-scale human exploitation. To illustrate, some corporate executive simply think about how much they can earn from increasing stock prices as well as stealing funds from employees’ retirement savings, thereby resulting in their companies being bankrupt. They exploited their people by abusing their trust and making them think that everything is alright. Another example of the impact of greed is slavery. Slave traders abducted millions of blacks and brought them to America. They took away their liberty and turned them into possessions because they are hungry for wealth and power. One of the worst things of being greedy of money is that it can suck your humanity and turn you into the most malevolent kind of inhumane being.

Greed harms your health and relationships. Due to greed, you may not be getting sufficient sleep as you get obsessed with how you can take advantage of other people. Moreover, you may be somewhat depressed because of how hard it can also be psychologically to mistreat others. You may binge eat to satisfy the inner cravings and dissatisfactions. Either way, you are increasing your blood cholesterol, blood pressure, and weight as well as raising the risk of hypertension, heart attack, and other diseases. Thinking ill about other people in the process of avarice, you can also be harming your health. Likewise, greediness damages your relationships. Desire for too much can spill over to how you treat your family. If you desire power, you will never listen or share power with your spouse. As a consequence, the marriage will be very unhappy and has a high risk of breaking apart and turning into a divorce. A greedy person will most likely make the people around them unhappy.

Greediness can produce illegal and unethical actions, making it bad for your well being. Greed affects your thinking and perceptions of other people as it puts you on a spot where you think that it is right to take more than you deserve and to use people as if they are only means to an end. Greediness can make you unhappy when you are using everyone around you and have nobody to love you. Money is not everything in this world, and to have a good life, you also need to feel you have lived as a good person and you are loved. Being greedy produces more harms than good as it is nothing but asking for death inside your soul and wreaking havoc in society.

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