Pico Iyer and Greensmile On Greed

"I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack."

So wrote journalist and author Pico Iyer in a recent on-line op-ed at NewYorkTimes.com. "I’m no Buddhist monk," he continued, but "I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did." Happiness, he concludes, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

"I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down," Iyer writes. "The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied."

Greed isn't good, it doesn't get us what we want. Greed just creates more desire, plunging us into an endless cycle of craving and suffering.“I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.”

But not only the rich suffer from their wealth, as we're learning now. When the rich pay for more than they need, the poor wind up pay more for what they need. Commenting on the ethics of greed, Greensmile notes, "Whenever someone, enabled by their wealth to do such things, buys more of the limited and exhaustible necessities than they need, be it land, water, food, fuel or whatever, they bid the price of those resources out of the reach of someone else who was on the verge of not affording the bare minimum . . . The merit of having a plan for more sustained or broadly beneficial use of a resource is effectively nil under the reward schemes of our economy."

Less altruistic behavior is a common reaction to a scarcity of resources, but we make it worse with an economics that artificially worsens that scarcity by enabling some of us to hoard. The power to diminish the well being of others is not the advertised face of wealth.

Elsewhere, Greensmile notes, "The explosion of private debt enabled the massive current of nonexistent wealth to flow from banks to consumers back to banks with the result that only those who stood astride the stream pocketing interest and fees were left with real wealth."

Pico Iyer does not claim to be a Buddhist monk and does not appreciate renunciation just for the sake of renunciation. But in his simple life, he may have found the remedy for this greedy materialism. In New York, he notes, "a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all."