GREED MAKES STUPID?

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had a much-quoted gem about the greedy capitalist, who, if the price was right, would be eager to sell the communist a rope with which the communist would then proceed to hang him. In other words (and this should be a very natural conclusion), greed is stupid. The fact that this observation is quite true seems to be corroborated by too many examples to mention them all, but, mind you, the greed we are dealing with here is pure greed, unintelligent greed, all-consuming greed. The investors in Madoff’s fraudulent scheme were rejoicing in the high return on their investment without questioning its rationale, or bothering themselves with the old capitalist wisdom: if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.

Lenin was a clever manipulator of popular psychology, of course. He was a genius of agitation and propaganda. Brilliantly, he substituted the perfectly healthy capitalist will to profit by the unhealthy human emotion of greed, and passed the latter for the former. Enough said.

However, this is not the terminal of our ride. The experience of our modern times tells us that there is a far worse thing than stupid greed, which raises stupidity to a much higher, global level. And here is the gist of it:

Stupid politics trumps the stupidity of greed.

And here is just one example.

The fairly recent policy of American-led Western sanctions against Russia, predictably countered by Russia’s countermeasures, has not hurt Russia in any significant way, but has clearly boomeranged against its initiators. In fact, stupid politics has indeed wreaked more damage on American and Western business interest than any kind of greed would ever have been able to accomplish.

I wonder, what would Lenin have said, had he been alive today in his Mausoleum?..