I interviewed Norman Solomon at the 2008 Democratic Party Convention in San Jose, California. Norman is a columnist and his book "War Made Easy" was recently made into a movie. He talked about how he sees 'dog eat dog greed' as a Failed Conservative Value.

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

I interviewed Norman Solomon at the 2008 Democratic Party Convention in San Jose, California.  Norman  is a columnist and his book "War Made Easy"  was  recently made into a movie.  He talked about how he sees 'dog eat dog greed' as a Failed Conservative Value.
 

Norman Solomon:  Well, what goes by the term conservative is too often a sort of a euphemism for dog eat dog, whoever comes out on top, we believe in the survival of the fittest – a sort of perversion of Darwinism taken into a social realm, where generally, the predatory nature in the animal kingdom of one category of animal inflicted on another is sort of mimicked and replicated. So that within humanity itself there is a notion that we all have to be in competition with each other to such an extreme degree in the survival of the fittest.

Well, I think that is really a sort of dog-eat-dog notion of the way in which we are going to survive.  I’ll tell you, it goes against so much, I believe, about even what has brought us this far as human beings.  I mean, if parents looked at their kids that way, they would say, “well this is a competition for food, so just let them go.” 

I’m afraid that – rhetoric aside – so-called conservatives talk about the national entity of the United States.  Too often in practice it means “I’ll try to get mine, and if you can get yours, fine, but I’m not going to help you very much.”

So, I’m afraid it’s often a predatory model, whereas the progressive values at their best are really about “We’re all in this together, we’re going to find a way to help each other have more a human existence for ourselves, and then in tandem with other people”.

I think there’s been success and failure of the so called conservative movements.  They have certainly had successes in shredding the social safety net, in gaining and retaining power in the White House, in chopping up and discarding important parts of the New Deal, in terms of accountability, in terms of basic programs like, say, Medicaid, that have been under attack, and funding has been cut back egregiously.

So there’s been a success at that level.  But I think there’s increasing evidence – in 2008 anyway – that the so-called conservative movement has failed to capture the imagination and the passion of particularly the youngest couple generations, particularly people now in their 30’s and 20’s and teens. 

And that is a profound failure of the right-wing.  And if progressives can work appropriately to build on our values in political and social realms, that could mean a rollback of so many of the right-wing advances of the last decades.

Edwin  Is there one conservative value that’s failed, what would you say it is?

Norman:  We’re all in it for ourselves.  Greed by any other name.  In practice being, “I’ll try to get as much as I can, and you try to get as much as you can, and let’s let government help me as much as possible.  Let’s manipulate government as much as possible.  Otherwise, government has no responsibility to others”.

It’s the three “p’s”:  prison, police, Pentagon.  That is the conservative so-called belief system about what government should do.  And I think we’ve seen the failure of that approach in human terms.

Norman: Well, progressive values could be likened to water that flows and looks for cracks in the walls that constrain where we can go to, irrigate and nurture our own humanity in social terms.

Edwin:  And on the conservative side?

Norman:   I think it’s a bulldozing process in terms of rolling over people and institutions in the service of the quest for outsized profits.

What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system. 
Milton Friedman

Greed Definition:

- excessive desire to acquire or possess more (especially more material wealth) than one needs or deserves;

- reprehensible acquisitiveness; insatiable desire for wealth (personified as one of the deadly sins);


At Wikipedia:
Greed is the selfish desire for or pursuit of money, wealth, power, food, or other possessions, especially when this denies the same goods to others. It is generally considered a vice, and is one of the seven deadly sins in Catholicism.

Greed denotes desire to acquire wealth or possessions beyond the needs of the individual, especially when this accumulation of possession denies others legitimate needs or access to those or other resources. For example, amassing a large collection of seashells would not be considered greed, unless in doing so, the needs of others were jeopardized. Essential to the concept of greed is the awareness that the needs of others are denied, thus rivalrous goods exemplify greed while non-rivalrous goods may not. Greed also often involves using wealth to gain power over others, sometimes by denying wealth or power.....

Some Questions To Ponder:

    - How would you define Greed?

    -  Do you have a personal story or anecdote of how you learned some insight into the  Failed Conservative Value of Greed?

    - What is the progressive counter value to conservative Greed? common good, community, ?

    - Can you create a metaphor for greed, i.e. Greed is like  ?

    -  How else have conservative values failed?