Greed and Fear

As I write this, human societies are combatting the challenges of a spreading virus. Most people are following the precautionary directives of their governments. They are restricting their social gatherings, adopting new patterns of sanitation, and monitoring the health status of themselves, their families, and friends closely.

Others, I must acknowledge, are ignoring those policies, going about as they please, proclaiming themselves young or hearty enough to withstand the disease, and disregarding the prospect that they may be transmitting it to others. Many people have committed themselves to the hoarding of needed supplies, like basic food items, disinfectants, and paper products. A few retailers have been charging exorbitant prices for those supplies. Some are standing in lines to buy guns, purportedly to protect their homes against societal collapse.

Whatever their responses, people, in general, find themselves unsure, even fearful, about what is to come. Will the organizing bodies of societies be able to coordinate the behaviors of their freedom-loving populations and institute the needed health policies? Or will those populations adopt narrowly protective, even anti-social practices?

Questions of the above sort were central to the work of one of sociology's founding figures, Emile Durkheim, who argued that societies maintain themselves through networks of support, sharing, and trust. This is true even for countries that emphasize the freedoms and powers of individuals. Such places, and the United States is a conspicuous example, allow people to travel about in relatively unrestricted ways; they encourage them to establish their own educational trajectory, find their own jobs, and marry persons of their choosing. Dependent on their financial resources, individuals can select a place to live and acquire various forms of property. Decisions about religious expression, political persuasion, and community involvement are also their own.

At least that is the theory of social living in democratic, capitalist countries. Durkheim's point was that all this coming-and-going by individuals is not simply a fabulous aggregation of self-interest by the millions. Nor is it some mystified "market," as the then-rising breed of economists would have it, in which dispersed populations continually adjust their life prospects and strategies to the actions of others. Quite the opposite, modern societies function as well as they do because of shared values, norms, and social organizations, which effectively coordinate all this human traffic.

Government plays an important role in this process, as it legally restricts some of our most selfish ambitions, provides support to the disadvantaged, organizes necessarily public functions (think of police, fire, military, education, and disaster relief), and otherwise oversees the conduct of giant social actors (like other nations and large businesses). However, Durkheim was interested much more in the role of society-at-large, as something that transcends government. Fundamentally, people find unity through systems of public support, essentially collective understandings that they will abide by certain traditional rules of behavior, respect one another, honor their agreements, acknowledge their responsibilities to the community as a whole, and more generally affirm the view that personal success depends in no small measure on the success of others.

In this second view of things, people are able to conduct transactions with one another (like buying a house or car), because they believe that the participants will honor their end of the bargain. For example, you may extend me credit because you believe I will be able to pay you based on my keeping a stable source of income like a job. Extremely, you do not expect me to rob or kill you during the transaction or otherwise engage in random behaviors. More generally, you judge me to be the person I say I am.

In that light, you may board an airplane I fly or enroll in a class I teach because you anticipate that I have the kinds of competence I claim. When you return home, you expect your family and friends to be much the same as they were when you left them. Continuity breeds assurance.

All this is just a way of saying that human relationships depend on our having confidence in other people doing the right thing. However much those people irritate us sometimes with their requests and interferences, we need them. Indeed, their orderliness and general goodwill is the foundation of our vaunted freedom and individuality. We go to stores, doctors, pharmacists, schools, churches, government offices, and the like with that confidence.

In periods like these, then, we need others—even as we keep our distance from them. This health crisis—with its various economic and social impacts—is a collective affair. We must address it collectively.

There is, of course, another prospect: that people will turn from each other and pursue entirely selfish behaviors. That pattern of social entropy was Durkheim's great concern. He called it "individuation" or "anomie."

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Two examples of that dissipation, usually thought of as emotions, are pertinent now. They are greed and fear. In their extreme forms, they become frenzy and panic.

Greed is familiar enough to all of us. Every person wants valued things they do not currently possess. Greedy ones want more than is their due. They do not care about the circumstance of others; they seek only to expand their own resources, needed or not.

In the movie "Wall Street," financier Gordon Gekko proclaimed famously, "Greed is good," in a speech to a gathering of stockholders. Greed, as Gekko saw it, represents a lust for life and all that life offers; it breaks down barriers; it clarifies the mind.

To be sure, such desires are deep within us. The affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified seven neural circuits that seem to be hard-wired in the brain. Among these circuits is the "seeking/expectancy" system, which assists our attempts to reach valued end-states (and doses us biochemically for our efforts). All of us have felt that thrill of effort resulting in goal-attainment.

But the vast majority of us realize also there are differences between desires and needs. We know that private questing (to get as much as we can) is a childish fascination that adults try to temper. We understand that other people count.

Unbounded greed is a pathology, which expands its reach during times of social disarray. Some people plot: How much can I sell these paper towels or bottles of hand sanitizer for? Having jumped out of the stock market early and fanned the flames of the economic decline, what investments can I make now to capitalize on the health care needs of the population and recovery efforts by the government? Will I be able to take advantage of possible defaults on home mortgages by suddenly unemployed people? Really, what is in all this for me?

Fear expresses our dread of losing the status and possessions we now hold, and in worst cases, life itself. Sometimes we can see clearly the forces that threaten us, but often we are fearful just because we cannot grasp the character of those dangers. The latter condition, combining fear and anxiety, characterizes the current months. Once again, fear manifests itself through our neural circuitry. So also, as Panksepp sees it, do the anxieties we feel as "separation/panic."

These emotions have their uses. In the evolution of our species, they motivated us to flee immediately or to hunker down during times of attack. Those functions having been noted, most of us know that fear must be kept in its proper place; neither should we dither fretfully about an imagined future. Fear itself, as Franklin Roosevelt explained, may be as great an enemy as the real dangers that confront us, for unbridled fear destabilizes and undermines concerted response.

My point here echoes Durkheim's. Emotions, like greed and fear, may be deeply psychological matters, but they are also profoundly social in their character, causes, and consequences. People operate with a shared knowledge of what emotions are, what they feel like, and what their implications may be. That knowledge allows us to be sympathetic to others—or to exploit them.

Be clear also that social factors instigate and sustain emotions. During normal times, we are encouraged to be greedy by many of our businesses, advertisers, and legal advocates. These agencies tell us to get what we can, to realize ourselves by obtaining and enjoying things we do not really need. That "private-regarding" ethic does not serve us well now.

Similarly, political and economic actors may whet fears. Some of those actors tell us to mistrust outsiders, who presumably will invade our territories, take our jobs, commit crimes, and consume our tax dollars. We should, or so those sources inform us, surround ourselves with protective devices.

Our media outlets know that fear-mongering commands attention. Better that than reports of normalcy, good works, and progress. Our financial advisors, if we are rich enough to afford them, tell us to manage an uncertain future by "investing" in stocks and bonds. Social security is not enough; we must take care of ourselves with a private retirement plan. That market, I note with some irony, is especially sensitive to two emotions: greed and fear.

Perhaps, this accustomed selfishness makes it easier for us to stay away from one another during this time of social distancing (contrast this to the changes required by more publicly effusive countries in Southern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). But such beliefs do not assist the kind of coherent, coordinated, uniformly supported policies that are needed at this time.

Common plights are also opportunities for common bonding. The current crisis is a chance to appreciate how similar we humans are in our basic vulnerabilities. It allows us to reexamine what really matters to us. It encourages us to plan coherently for the next, heretofore unanticipated disaster. It helps us reconsider the meanings of the "good society" and the "public good." It reveals the breadth and depth of our global connections.

When we emerge finally from this pandemic, let us do so not on terms of the old ideas of "normalcy," but on the foundation of something more secure and public-spirited.