Avidity

Food is at the heart of the ecological problem. As Gandhi said a long time ago: “The planet will always be large enough to satisfy everyone’s needs, but too small to satisfy the greed of some.”

It thus drew our attention not only to the emerging ecological impasse, but to the fundamental difference between greed and satisfaction of needs. The greed begins from the moment when the legitimate desire to satisfy a real need is replaced by a desire for free satisfaction, thus by a search for pleasure without it meeting a real need.

A certain amount of pleasure is by nature associated with the satisfaction of a need. Seek pleasure by the mind, regardless of this satisfaction is the proper desire as defined above, and seek it in the demeasure, the own greed. But why are we moving from the legitimate desire for satisfaction to mentalised desire and then greed? These are psychological processes that can be questioned whether they belong to the human nature as determined genetically, or whether they are, on the contrary, dysfunctions induced by cultural or environmental factors. Unlike the animal, we look very systematically for pleasure for pleasure, beyond or regardless of any real need.

For example, we tend to eat beyond our hunger, as if to prolong greed. We replace the need for food with a desire for pleasure. The animal seems by far “wise” than the human being, it never goes beyond its real needs: the ruminant stops grubbing up as soon as it covers its need for cellulose, the predator to hunt as soon as it no longer needs protein. You never see a gnoo or a lion suffering from obesity.

We even create many false needs, for example with psychotropics: we invent excitings, sedatives, euphorizers on which we become dependants, starting with alcohol, tea, coffee. All of these artifacts create habituations such that weaning becomes painful. We are trapped, victims of a fictitious need, terribly imperative, linked only to physiological or psychological addiction mechanisms.

Advertising makes us eager to own all kinds of gadgets that we could very well do without. But once we get used to it, we believe we need it to ensure our comfort, or to furnish our lives. Thus end up in landfills, or directly in the nature of the masses of appliances, furniture, carcasses, plastics to the point of forming a new continent floating in the middle of the Pacific…

It is urgent to ask what is the cause of this greed. The intensity of desires varies from individual to individual and from moment to moment. Like any psychological process, the level of greed depends on certain factors that it would be useful to know better if we ever want to control it and stop this race for consumption that is increasingly threatening our biotope.

Note that the population explosion poses a threat to the environment regardless of greed. If too many of us survey continents and oceans, even our legitimate needs will eventually exceed renewable resources. So we also have to ask ourselves what is the root cause of the demographic problem: where does this exultation of the “growth and multiply” that is now likely to lead us to self-destruction? Would this be another form of greed…