Dr. Forbush Thinks

Greed is a reflection of someone who fears that they don’t have enough money. If you think about a person who seems to have everything that anyone could want, you will undoubtedly think of greed. A person amasses a huge fortune because of many reasons, and among them is greed. We can think of Scrooge from the Dickens story A Christmas Carol. His focus was no longer on the purpose of his company but instead on making money at all cost of human suffering. Putting money above human need is the traditional definition of greed. And, the most obvious reason that someone would put money over other people’s needs is because of a fear of not having one’s own needs met.

Not long ago I wrote about fear and its relationship to our motivations. We react out of fear when we don’t think through the logic of the situation. Fear is a natural reflexive emotional reaction to the unknown. In the case of greed, we don’t know if we are going to have enough money in the future so we strive to make more money and save more money and spend less money in order to protect ourselves from the unknown future.

On the other hand, gluttony is another form of greed. Gluttonous people fear that they will not be able to eat the food that they love, so they eat more of it. A person in this state of mind suffers an even more exaggerated problem when they try to cut high calorie foods from their diet. This is because they are accustomed to eating particular foods, and they have formed a habit of eating them. There is comfort in eating what one is familiar with, and when someone denies themselves from a particular treat the mind begins to fear that it will never have this treat again. Over time the fear grows larger the long that the fear remains unsatisfied. Ones mind is quite imaginative, and that imagination makes the fear grow, until the person ravaged by fear finally caves in and eats the treat to allay the fear and receive the comfort sought.

The odd thing is that gluttony is the greed of food and also the fear of starvation. But, a very similar but exactly the opposite problem is anorexia nervosa. In this case narcissism has gotten out of control because of the fear of obesity. People suffering this affliction begins to fear that they will not measure up to the social or cultural standards. They fear that not measuring up will result in an isolated existence where people will shun them for their appearance. As a result a sufferer will do anything to reduce weight and even starve themselves. The fear becomes so large that all other fears are minimized. Obviously a person suffering from anorexia nervosa fears being fat above the fear of not having their favorite treat. In fact they fear being fat beyond the fear of death in some cases. It is quite curious how these two extremely opposite fears can play such havoc with people.

And, in this sense I was beginning to think about my personal health. As I have written many times before I have been a bit more health conscious over the last few years. I have increased my exercising and decreased my calorie intake. I have lost 50 pounds and I am currently maintaining my weight. And, this is where the fear comes in.

I have been very rigid about my workout schedule. In fact, any of my previous attempts to control my weight have generally failed because of the randomness of my commitment. So, I had been working out every morning for about one hour. This workout generally burns about 800 calories, based on my treadmill work. I assume that swimming with about the same effort for the same amount of time would result in the same number of calories burned. Therefore, I have been burning 4800 additional calories per week on average for a couple of years now. But, in September things changed. The last two years I had continued working out for an hour each day, and my wife would drive the second car to the health club and work out about 15 minutes less in order to get home to make sure the kids were ready for school on time. This year I thought that the 15 minutes wasn’t so important, so I decided to go with my wife, leave with my wife and work out 15 minutes less. Therefore I could help getting the kids ready for school.

The weird thing about this is that I know that I don’t need to burn as many calories now that I am not trying to loose any weight. But, I have an irrational fear that I may not be doing enough. If I am burning 75% of what I was burning which means that I am now burning 3600 calories per week on average. Rational thoughts that float through my mind keep telling me not to worry about it. But the irrational thoughts come back occasionally and tell me that I should be doing another 1200 calories worth of work per week. Maybe I should run an extra hour and a half on Sundays. Or maybe I should run an extra half hour every other day at lunch time. But, I know that I am doing enough the way that it is. The battle of fears continues in my mind.

Even when you know that it is there fear can make you do irrational things. I guess that’s why laws work so well. People know that it is against the law to steal things, so for the most part people don’t take each other’s stuff, even if they see it sitting on the side of a building. Only a small number of people actually do break into people’s home and steal stuff. These are obviously the people who are not subject to the same fears as most people. These are the people who don’t fear being arrested or going to jail. People who don’t fear traffic tickets will disregard the traffic laws. People who fear the retaliation of local gangs will break the laws to avoid the more fearful prospects. Whatever the fears are, it is difficult to control our reactions to them.


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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


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Fear, Psychology