The myth of profitable greed: It's time to begin the search for actual (inner) wealth

King Midas' warning: Terrifying data on the effect of wealth and privilege

What are you greedy for? Go on, be honest. Do you collect clothes, books, jewellery, nice household things? Do you secretly yearn for more money or power or status?

We all experience greed in one way or another, it's just not a thing we tend to fess up to. But is our secret avarice actually making our lives worse? And, if so, what can we do to turn it around?

Today, let’s talk about greed (not to be confused with gluttony, the food-related version of greed and a separate "sin"). The greed I’m interested in is the kind that makes us hungry for more wealth, status, possessions, power, control, etc.

The second of the seven deadly sins: Greed

“There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
Mahatma Gandhi

Surely the most famous story to warn, ostensibly at least, of the sinful dangers of greed is the myth of King Midas. Here's how it goes in brief.

Midas was the ruler of a modest kingdom. Like any other king, he was wealthy and lived in comparative luxury, but he wasn't the richest of kings. What he did have, though, was a beautiful rose garden, and he'd spend his happiest moments wandering among the blooms, smelling their sweet scent and enjoying time with his beloved daughter, Marigold.

Midas' weakness, however, was real gold. Obsessed by the accumulation of wealth, this king believed that gold was at the root of his happiness, and so he wanted more.

One day, the god Dionysus passed through Midas’ kingdom, and one of his entourage, Silenus – who was also a rustic god of the forest, drunkenness and wine-making – got lost along the way, and wound up napping off his hangover in the king's famous gardens.

When Midas and Marigold found Silenus passed out under a rosebush, rather than casting his smelly self out, the king offered Silenus generous hospitality. He fed and watered the old man, and enjoyed his company for a few days, before delivering him back to Dionysus, who was so impressed by this generosity that he offered King Midas a wish.

Without hesitation, Midas asked for the power to turn everything he touched into gold. Upon hearing this wish, Dionysus raised a godly eyebrow and said "Are you sure about that?" Midas, however, was insistent – the "golden touch" was what he wanted. And so the god huffed out a knowing sigh and told the king to go home and wash his hands with wine. After that, he said, Midas' wish would come true.

And it did, and Midas rejoiced. He ran around his palace alchemising everything he could see – chairs and tables and all manner of other things, watching them all transform into pure, shiny golden gold. Then he ventured out into his beloved garden, high on the thrill of his success, and lifted a rose to his nose. But, of course, the moment he touched it, the rose became metal. "I'll just have to enjoy the fragrance without touching the roses," he thought, a little disappointed. Next, though, he tried to eat a grape, which also turned to gold, as did a slice of bread, the water he attempted to drink. And now… fear was upon him.

Desperate tears began to fill the king's eyes, and in that moment, Marigold entered the room. Instinctively, Midas pulled her into an embrace, hoping for comfort but, of course, she transformed into a cold and motionless golden statue.

In horror, Midas realised the error of his ways. He raised his arms to beg Dionysus to reverse the spell. Thankfully, the god took pity on the foolish king. "Go down to the river of Pactolus," he said, "cleanse your hands with its water, and your curse will be released."

Midas did so without delay, and watched in astonishment as the gold of his touch washed away. He then returned home, a changed man, to find Marigold – and everything else that he'd transformed – restored to its rightful state.

From then on, Midas vowed to share his great fortune with the people of the kingdom, who all thus led prosperous lives. And when one day he died, they all mourned for their beloved king.

“Greed is not a financial issue. It's a heart issue.”
Andy Stanley

As with all the myths and fairytales we're exploring in this series, the tale of King Midas clearly warns of the dangers of greed. We're invited to think about our unchecked desires, and to consider the consequences of overreaching and becoming slaves to our own hunger.

The psychology of greed

But of course avarice, as with all seven of the deadly sins, is not fundamentally bad. Indeed, greed has genuine benefits. As a social species that exists in a hierarchy, we have evolved the desire to accumulate resources because these determine our position in that hierarchy. They win us rewards such as attention and care from others, alliances, the opportunity to start a family (if we want such a thing), etc.

So greed is adaptive and, in one way or another, unavoidable. But there is a big difference between someone who acknowledges and accepts greed as a part of being human and therefore factors this into their decision-making, and someone who allows themselves to be driven and consumed by this force.

To underscore the importance of this, let's take a look at how greed affects our behaviour.

Greed and privilege

Professor Paul Piff from the University of California, who has devoted much of his career to researching greed, has some very intriguing data to share.

One of his studies set pairs of people up to play a game of rigged Monopoly. The game began with a coin toss, the winner of which received extra money before the start of play, and were allowed to roll two dice as opposed to just one when they moved around the board, and they made double the income whenever they passed Go. Oh, and they got the luxury car playing piece as opposed to the old boot. Nice touch.

The idea was to test the effects of putting someone into a temporary position of financial advantage. What they found was that, at the beginning of the game, the lucky rich player would often seem a little awkward and act apologetically. As the game went on, though, and they got wealthier and more successful, they started to gloat, became louder, ate more of the food on offer, and generally revelled in their success. Apparently, they literally took up more space at the table. And the bigger they got, the less attuned they became to the plight of the poor player.

To really cap this off, after the game, when filling out a questionnaire that asked the rich players how they had won, they took credit. They talked about how their superior decision-making led to their triumph, not that flip of a coin that clearly dictated the result.

In another study, people of varying levels of real-life wealth were paired up, then one of them was given a tenner and the other nothing. The one with the money had to decide whether or not to share their ten pounds, and if they were to do so, how to make the split. What they found here, which is equally terrifying, was that the more wealthy the participant in real life, the less likely they were to share this gifted money.

The conclusion drawn by Piff and his team was that greed has a lot to do with circumstance. The more we have – wealth, status, power, whatever – the more entitled and greedy we become. Even when an advantage we enjoy is not something we've had to earn, we will usually feel deserving of the success we experience as a result.

"The mind seems to translate feeling better off than others into feeling better than others. When you feel better off than someone else, you feel more deserving of good things in life."
– Paul Piff

Moreover, and worst yet, this line of research indicates that when someone has more money than someone else, they will operate in a way that suggests they feel superior – fundamentally better – than those who have less.

So why is this the case? Piff proposes one possible answer: money buys you space. If you are rich, you'll probably have a big house, your management role is likely to grant you your own office and fewer equal-level peers to work with, you take cabs rather than the tube, and fly business class. Also, the more financially independent you are, the less you need other people. And when you don't need others, Piff claims, your empathy can diminish.

Indeed, studies have shown social class and neural empathetic responses to be inversely correlated.

Greed and isolation

“Then he said to them, 'Watch, and be on your guard against avarice of any kind, for a man's life is not made secure by what he owns, even when he has more than he needs.”
Luke 12:13-21

So, does greed come hand in hand with disconnection? Are greed and loneliness linked?

This brings us back to King Midas. Like the coin-toss-winning Monopoly players, Midas' presumably inherited wealth gave him a sense of entitlement and an insatiable desire for more. When he started to get more, though, rather than delivering happiness, the golden touch rendered the king unable to fulfil his most basic needs: food and water were inaccessible; his beloved daughter, paralysed; and he could no longer enjoy the sweet scent of that beautiful rose garden. He was literally unable to stop and smell the roses.

Once wealthy beyond measure, Midas found himself lost and alone. The richer he grew in a material sense, the more profound his disconnection and spiritual poverty.

A quick note here that the popular belief that "money can't buy you happiness" is not as black-and-white as it might seem.

The data is mixed, but most agree on one thing at least: if someone doesn't have adequate income to comfortably satisfy their basic needs, more money absolutely does increase happiness. What it doesn't seem to touch, however, is a heart-felt sense of authentic self-worth and purpose. Because that’s an inside job – a different job. Self-worth can’t be bought, added, or accumulated; it’s already right there. Our job is not to acquire it, but to reconnect with it as something that has existed from the very beginning.

References:

High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being; Daniel Kahneman, Angus Deaton; PNAS; September 7, 2010, 107 (38) 16489-16493 / https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1011492107

Killingsworth, M. A. (2024). Money and Happiness: Extended Evidence Against Satiation. Happiness Science. https://happiness-science.org/money-happiness-satiation

Real Self vs. Ideal Self

The message of Midas' story is no less relevant today than it ever was, but rather than depicting the dangers of greed as a fundamental sin, I'd say it's more helpful to understand this story as a reminder to handle the archetypal energy of greed with care. It's okay to want more. What matters is what we choose to want and why?

In psychology, the terms "real self" and "ideal self" are used to describe our different versions of self-concept.

Your real self is who you actually are. This is the part of you that wants to live, love, connect, be present, laugh, cry, and enthuse about the things that truly matter to you. The real self isn't concerned with keeping up appearances or fitting in. It just is.

And here's the important thing: only when we live in our real, authentic selves, can we experience true, pure, authentic happiness.

Your ideal self, on the other hand, is a product of the superego, or social conditioning – it's who we think we should be, and how we want others to see us. The ideal self is the part that believes things like:

"Someone of worth has money, beauty, class, intelligence."

"I should have a big house, a fast car, a gorgeous partner, a Ph.D."

"I will be happy when I'm thinner, stronger, prettier, more qualified."

These messages are potent, and they are fed to us moment by moment, day by day, because this capitalist world in which we live needs us to believe those things. And we do believe them. This is why the people who took part in Piff's greed experiments seemed to exhibit a sense of unconscious superiority whenever they were richest in the room .

Having more money means that we feel like we're winning the Ideal Self game. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), success in that game does not convert to a deep-felt sense of fulfilment, because the harder we buy into the ideal self, the further we move away from the real self.

Midas' Mistake

For King Midas, the ideal self looked like the archetypal king – drenched in glittering gold. His real self was the version of him that loved to walk through his beautiful rose garden – which serves as a symbol for the experience of being present – with his daughter.

The Jungian interpretation of this myth sees Marigold as the anima – that is, as King Midas' soul – and therefore the only gold that can actually make him happy. The king's moment of truth, then, comes when the golden touch effectively kills his soul, turning Marigold into a pretty but inaccessible echo of her former self.

Midas' real self was also the generous, caring king who gave hospitality to stinky old Silenus. This means that it was his real self that impressed Dionysus enough to reward him with a wish. Here, the god Dionysus can be seen as a representation of the capital-S Self, and the awesome power and potential within each of us to make things happen. Dionysus' warning, when he first heard the king's foolish request, can be understood as the voice of Midas' deeper, wiser self. He wasn't ready, at first, to hear it. He had to fall before he learned to listen to that authentic knowing.

Midas' Redemption

We probably have to do that, too. If you've been listening to this and thinking "Oh, man. I definitely hold the belief that more of (whatever) will make me happy", then don't worry because we all fall for the spell of greed and the promise it makes. And it's entirely possible that we have to. The fall is a standard part of the Hero's Journey, after all. It's an archetypal stage on the path to self-actualisation. So the question is not whether we fall, how we fall, or what we fall for, it's what we do with the information our falls deliver.

What do you want to be greedy for?

In the context of greed, the thing to consider is this: what do you really, authentically want to be greedy for? Rather than the disconnecting promise of gold, power or respect, what if we chose to be greedy for authentic connection? What if we chose to be greedy for joy in the little things, the thrill of intrinsic motivation, for passion, for the fire of authentic pursuits? What if we chose to be greedy for purpose, fairness, mutual respect, the joy of others, or real love?

Perhaps even more importantly, what if we factored into our decisions the knowledge that, if we’re in any position of advantage, then we’re unconsciously predisposed to stinginess? If we were to really own this, surely we would adjust our behaviuour accordingly, and give more.

That we're wired for greed doesn't mean we have to chase what the world expects us to be greedy for. There is an abundance of riches out there for all of us. But only if we decide to feed our souls as opposed to our egos.

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Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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