A mind dominated by Greed views the world from a self-centred perspective, approaching
every interaction with the thought, what will I gain from this?
Greed only thinks about itself, seeing itself as the centre of the universe.
It wants to acquire things from the world and hoard them.
It wants to use the things it acquires to protect and elevate itself.
But does that work?
What effect does greed have on a person, and what’s the cause of it?
In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dicken’s explores these questions, and the answer, in my opinion,
is best demonstrated through the character of Jacob Marley.
Marley mainly views the world through the lens of profits and losses.
What will I profit from this, he thinks.
What will I lose?
So what effect does this worldview have on him?
Marley spends the majority of his life working with his business partner Ebenezer Scrooge,
not really paying attention to anyone else unless it concerns his own profits and losses.
He focuses solely on taking as much as he can from the world while giving as little
as possible.
And when Marley finally passes, no one but Scrooge shows up to his funeral, and Dicken’s
says that even Scrooge is not really sad about his passing.
And so, seven years after his death, Marley visits Scrooge as a ghost wrapped in chains,
and he tells Scrooge that he’s doomed to walk the Earth with the burden of regret.
I think this final scene gives us the biggest insight into the fate of the greedy mind.
Marley spent his whole life acquiring things, and in the end, what did he really acquire?
Burdens, represented by the chains he wears as a ghost.
He carries the burden of regret, having wasted his life in a fruitless mission.
So basically, Dicken’s says that greed leads to regret, but how does this happen?
Greed is fuelled by an insatiable desire, and insatiable desire is the root of suffering.
When we want something, we’re miserable as long as we we don’t have that thing.
And since the Greedy mind always wants something, it spends its whole life in misery, chasing
one thing after another.
And when it reaches the end of its life, it realizes there was no point to the chase,
to the things that it acquired, because it can’t take those things with it.
The only thing that lasts after our deaths is the effect of our actions, or in other
words, the only thing that lasts after our deaths is the things we give to the world,
not the things we get.
And so the Greedy mind, which spends its life taking and never giving, realizes its been
on an empty chase the whole time.
So in the end, the Greedy mind is left with a life of misery and nothing of value to last
beyond it.
But what’s the cause of greed?
Dicken’s tells us, in the beginning of the story, that, essentially, Marley and Scrooge
are interchangeable characters.
So the cause of greed for Marley and Scrooge would be the same.
And what’s that cause?
Dicken’s writes, “You fear the world too much.
All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid
reproach.
I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain,
engrosses you.”
So the cause of Marley’s greed is fear.
He desires security from the world, and he seeks security through acquiring wealth.
But does that work?
The answer is, of course, that it doesn’t.
Marley still dies in the end because no amount of wealth, as far as we know, can protect
you from death.
But even as a wealthy man gains more money, he never gains enough.
At what point will he feel secure?
Once he has some money, he feels insecure about not having more money.
And then once he has even more money, he feels insecure about possibly losing that money.
And so the Greedy mind never finds the security it so desperately seeks in its wealth.
It seems the fate of the Greedy mind is regret, and one of the causes of Greed is Fear.
A person desires security which leads to fear which leads to greed.
But true security isn’t found through greed.
No matter how much we accumulate and how many walls we construct around ourselves, we’ll
never be absolutely secure.
And actually, security is more easily found in love.
If the world loved us so much that it desired for no harm to come to us, that would be true
security.
And this is an idea we’ll explore in the next video.
As always, this is just my opinion and understanding of A Christmas Carol, not advice.
Feel free to use this information however you like, and if you have a different take
on the story, I’d love
to hear your perspective in
the comments.