tv GREED Deutsche Welle May 24, 2020 4:15am-5:01am CEST
4:15 am
we are working tirelessly to keep you informed on all of our platforms we're all in this together and together will make it so you. stay safe everybody stays in place stay safe please stay safe. sleep. carefully and don't simply choose to begin to. discover the a. lens. subscribe to a documentary on. the terms
4:16 am
4:17 am
seemingly rather. they were searching for something. such strange creatures. the world is in a big mess the more they get the more they want. president bush after 9 or one of them served our urge all americans to go sharpen this one still make me money it's the thing in me i grew up in the way that i'll still make money even if i was never in the desert. there is some money in which i still say.
4:18 am
there aren't enough people think that. that's what the marketing strategy is is that it always turns you should begin to. mention this one and all humans are by nature and. evolution as soon as times and as long as it's mechanism doesn't become too dominant and he it will me as if it solves the goals of the individual a perfectly as individual. real to hold to survive today i'd go so far as to say it's a symptom of an all nice. i wonder if world viable form of life. maybe we're just an ocean or a flash in the pan and will be set right next to the dinosaurs a cartridge museum. i
4:19 am
kept asking myself. why are we like this. we're caring and compassionate. but we're also eco centric correctly. we hoard. we create. and destroy. what is our problem. what drives us. i went in search of answers. i. am i am. humanity set the crossroads i think a historical moment the physical environment is undermined to the point where we
4:20 am
need to attend to it war is something we ought to think about why does that happen . people are pervasive we are unhappy on top of all of the we keep building wal-mart's. i see insatiable greed. as an extra cowboy connected to all of these other difficulties that if we don't recognize and come to terms with we're literally putting our species at risk. you know you might us to talk about darwin if you're asked to talk about there are one it has to be about evolution evolution is an idea the darwinist trying to understand and what's his strikingly original proposal. natural selection so.
4:21 am
humans or on the one hand very similar to all other forms of life and that we share a basic biological predisposition toward survival but on the other hand we're so smart that we actually recognize that we exist. in the point here is that being alive and knowing it is grounds for great joy. on the other hand it also carries a very terrible existential bird if you know that you're here you know that someday like all living things you won't be here if that's all we thought about i'm going to die i may walk outside and get hit by a meteor we would literally be paralyzed by abject terror.
4:22 am
what human beings did is to construct and maintain the after paul just today call culture and all cultures offer some recipe for immortality. either literally through the heavens and after lives of reincarnations of all the world's great religions or symbolically through the belief that some fasted show of our identity will persist over time never the less. that's why you want to have children that's why you want to build pyramids that's why we want to write great books and some phonies that's why we want to have over lot of money. human beings are motivated. true i have a lot of stuff because psychologically speaking of yourself. they may be able to
4:23 am
work for over. desire greed and the struggle that brings about anger and aggression from the philosophical but this for us offical perspective are all or result in states of a person consistently trying to look at what is not true. we talk about 3 fundamental truths that things are important and. secondly the fundamental principle of everything is said to be engineers
4:24 am
the but now what happens is we try to build something that makes us forget about we try to make things. and that struggle creates. this suffering. we begin to hang on to think. i'll give you an example you know if i have a shirt. and every time i go out to do some shopping you buy and at the shop you may have 12 in your closet but you're by the 13th just so that you have a sense of you live long enough to wear altered in shorts or perhaps even more than that so there's a sense of every day consistently doing something because of which we may be able to more solidify. our sense of immortality our sense of living continuous need not
4:25 am
changing and that struggle consistently been some all of these no horses and the prominent one of them becomes that. death is a very real physical phenomenon and it doesn't matter how good your some balls are your religion your politics your money there's still some bills and none of them will be sufficient to minimize death anxiety or rather to a woman aging you can reduce it but you can't get rid of it. and then finally just really to make matters worse we also don't quite the idea of the work. from a starkly biological point of view we're not all that much more significant or enduring
4:26 am
than lima bean sir armadillos. take some. of the human animal. more than 7000000000 of us populate the planet. designers designers and. the secret. base instrumental you know developed instruments to measure greed is a personality trait ms found also to elicit a state of grief in people mention in ireland.
4:27 am
that's a said ste along this is the balloon task we use it to measure our test subjects willingness to take risks of the subject has to try to keep inflating a balloon because the launch of the balloons all the more it's one via. in each round the subjects play for real money every time they inflate the balloon that they're risking that it might burst and then their money would be gone. but that's i could just we have been able to demonstrate that people who tend to be greeting are more likely to take risks when performing this task so they inflate the balloon further the new normal test subjects a while if a nice person. is they are off and we see that people who tend towards green are also demonstrate an altered brain response. induce a coffee say in this graphic we see how our brain responds to rewards and the punishment. so far we've been able to demonstrate that the more greedy the tests
4:28 am
are correct so the weaker are the punishment signals associations and sick knowledge. is the interest and that's what is interesting is that these people also tend to want to maintain nice state even the classic experiments of old and i milk on their brains double meaning system it's very interesting in this respect this mean system. if electrodes are implanted in exactly this region of a ransom brain mind. and the rush is then put into a situation where it can stimulate that dopamine system directly by pressing a lever like and. that is the rats will continue pressing the lever until they die as it passed in. and this is presumably one of the biological mechanisms that helps explain excessive greed.
4:29 am
in iran. there you go. you can have 2 ok but. regrettably go you already have to. do. most primates are highly social but these guys are a typical in that they're also highly tolerant. there is a hierarchy and everyone knows who's on top and the individuals at the top get more . males get more meetings females get more access to resources but you don't have this really steep hierarchy where there is one individual at the top you can see everything and you also see some things that you don't necessarily see across the primates like respect for possessions. so we can look for instance at how do you respond when you get more and i get less how do you respond when you get less and i
4:30 am
get more and that's tractable to study experimentally. guys. so the experiment itself is very simple you take 2 monkeys or 2 apes sit them next to one another and you interact with them sequentially and what they have to do is a very simple task so we give them a token they return and give them the food reward for having completed it. but then the critical component is how does this individual respond to that medium preferred food like a cucumber a piece of bell pepper when their partner get something much better. not. see this. that could be due to an equity. be due to hey look my partner got something better than me or it
4:31 am
could just be due to general sort of greed for lack of a better term hey there's a better food out there and i want to. from an evolutionary perspective the behavior that we consider green which is acquiring as many resources as possible is important. most animals live more at the margin than modern western humans do so not acquiring as many resources for them is a real risk of death. in human societies though my perspective is that green has taken on not just acquiring as much as possible but acquiring as much as possible explicitly the expense of other individuals. and i don't think that that's something that you can apply to animals.
4:32 am
one day narcissus came upon a spring that was so clear that he could see himself in it as if in a mirror. when he saw his own reflection he fell in love with its beauty. we too like to see ourselves as the center of the world. the individual is now the measure of all things. and so we yearn for recognition and self esteem. we collect relationships photos and likes s.u.v.s show records. we like narcissists. addicted to our own ego.
4:33 am
being successful in business or not. and when you have it you can be able to take things to a level that people will be surprised how much of this will price this will probably lead to additional places to go but all prices 700 square meters be float my pleasure my 8 flows mop leadbelly local press one doesn't want it above those that it will cause you just 5600000 this is. a do those that will be with us as it was going to be it. and. i would tell you my fellow soldiers and simple there's a thin line separating a business man and a criminal wife because anything i do somebody is bound to say after the. so all of us has business been throughout the work whether it's bill gates. we all view is
4:34 am
the criminals but it's because we think beyond other people think president mugabe is my brother for the european perspective out be a nephew from my. brother. who did not have the will of critics the ones that i'm by the. brothers of 2 of the critics more do us tightly the world economy would be nice to live. in. i won't come to my house i want to show you around as well as the chief ms of it full for so many as. you know. it school which is near my old offices they give me an award for building a school block and then an organization help us help ourselves or not me for my work for humanitarian reasons so. they give me decide what we decide what from best
4:35 am
on its main focus is to recognise those who have done a lot of work in human rights affirmative action and empowerment issues you know international aid that's me. in here is my main long. way here. if you come in. friends and family. we would do mix and tours around and you don't have conversations over it's all its political economy and some of. the property has a heavy bed on top so when it's cold here we get we do put it they hate us so it really has you know heaters over here. in this room it's called them but the
4:36 am
dining room desire reception this house this is gone the room i don't visit because it gives me that sentiment oh relationship with the president and. the man that money can buy. and this is it. i know it came from i came from being a vegetable vendor my bad was death the ground or the thick flow that's why i used to sleep with a very poor linen blanket that goes the newest me and one on top and that. is why i want to you know be able to show. i go to leave well common.
4:37 am
things like the racetrack and all other forms of public spectacle are of interest to folks so for so many reasons one aspect of the racetrack is gambling and. another part of it is to highlight one's status relative to one so a fellow human beings somebody is quote better not by how big or strong he or she is but rather how one dresses how you conduct yourself and how you a stablish you are richer than more worthy than and therefore more amusing from than all of the other folks who surround you. in some ways this is
4:38 am
no different than dominance hierarchy crime. we love heroes and therefore become preoccupied with being the best at something even if it's how many hot dogs i can eat and 10 minutes. in america where number one not in science or literacy or anything important we are number one in depression. how could this be what you have to do is lie. look at cultural values to see if they're realistically attainable by the average individual. if you're a male you're basically valued by how much you have. this is the so-called american
4:39 am
dream if you work hard enough you can have as much money as le bron james or warren buffett or bill gates. or realistically for every millionaire there's got to be hundreds of thousands of people working part time a wal-mart without benefits. the same for women but they have a different cultural burden. we teach women that in order to be beautiful you have to be ridiculously stand your breasts excluded of course so if i can't floss my teeth with you you're too fat. and you have to remain perpetually young which of course is biologically impossible. wow we cherished values are simply not possible to attain.
4:40 am
if you say i want to be true to the won't you gotta get rid of all the oh i see and i say oh i'm so i'm talking about i'm this in i need that i can do this and i can do this oh yeah i did this last year oh i can do that oh i'm better than so all those items it's egos. there's a lot of people in thought that he can. both black and white who carry the eagle badge on them and they carry it high as a flake you see and those other people who we would see as the future
4:41 am
bureaucrats of the country that was. if you are driving into a poor neighborhood where you know people are starving to death and you're driving down with your mercedes benz or your at all surprised that is the worst thing you could ever do. driving with this eagle to say i'm better than you you know you'll never be where i am goes people are lost.
4:42 am
then if i have to leave i have to assert mikey go the only way i can do that is through grief i'm forced to constantly break something into myself that lends stability to my ego those can be material things but they can also be spiritual things for example ideas like force or tricks on school or somebody due to money or fame by title or something like that our entire modern world is based on. for too much green destroys people's why because it isolates obvious and because greed is something like a drug you know i have a more i want to have because whatever i have no longer satisfies me as only so it's not what i actually possess that satisfies me it's the constant striving for more religion has known for centuries and this drive lies within us humans but this drive is also our ruinous of those offered up to just.
4:43 am
since time immemorial there have been stories of people who could never do enough. people like king midas. diana sr grandma which made everything he touched turned to go. even his room and his drink turned to gold it seemed he might starve or die of thirst. cold concrete jews have always been cast under the spell of on the moon and it was my turn to. do what i ask myself and use money such a powerful allure. help
4:44 am
people overcome a else bank it read i chose banking as my career move i'm a trained accountant and i worked with the area's bad about vast in zurich and on the cayman islands which is a tax haven gallop i was promoted to compliance officer lanny i was the legal conscience of the company gets these open amundsen. i make me sick a year the a certain amount of greed is instilled into you that was true for me too and i have to imagine thanks a lot and you start to think only in monetary you know all cyclical dollar signs that have before your eyes and in your heart all day then then that and that the only thing that matters. a lot of profits and mikey show you don't get cost the odds are way i operate how to go. in my new phone to alls in my function as compliance officer i determined that we
4:45 am
had a criminal by also been like in. largent mexico i was a mexico drugs it became clear to me that i was working for a criminal organization and the bank was a participant in tax evasion and from health industry into your book i ended up feeling morally and united given a sense of the matter up with management me down management. involved because we were threatened with the entire family ended up leaving the cayman islands very suddenly. writes a bank they're going swiss bankers in the cayman islands who have been killed. to an extent my decision to leave the system was a moral issue but what was more important i think was that i realized the system had turned against me it was the in a good match for example the threats that were made against me in the cayman islands and the way i was fired and then threatened the gamble of the bank would
4:46 am
destroy me if i tried to file charges against them and people quick to go off. all that up to bonk with i'm sending private detectives after us. one is i was followed on my way to work week i had to change the route i took to work to change my work hours a job on the 1st sign of a blank car would upset me and i was completely split off from them which my even considered suicide about they wanted to drive me crazy they'd want to buy. a lot of the state prosecutors had all of the information but they did nothing with it but the stuff for the it's a political problem it would make the criminal clients uneasy if they felt they would realize they're not often safe and protected either so with that in mind the old forages don't go out to the bank for me 1000 phone call was again either the man who made the truth probably lost their lives on the earth.
4:47 am
i spent 217 days in prison the fastest 30 days were in 2005 the rest in 2011. by those times i was in solitary confinement spending 23 hours a day alone and myself there were prisoners who flipped asked to stop banging against the doors screaming. and they tried sort of switzerland to the basically every country all day protects their golden calf school because coffee and switzerland is banking secrecy of the arts why no one ever investigated the unions bad bank even though the state prosecutors know that unity is bad it helped to c.m.e. us tax which go so far through coercion and for political reasons the state prosecutors would never investigate about any of that makes going to.
4:48 am
be a valid question was how can we create test conditions that would approximate the behavior of a stock broker for example articles in. something they're not makers and we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate brain activity in our tests up there is. we can look deep into the brain of the hour including into the structures responsible for the reward response and your saw. for softness or our subjects play a stock trading game missions and have to decide whether they want to invest a large amount of money or a small amount and. then they get feedback during the game as to whether the share price is rising or falling in the finest. we've been able to determine that people who are especially really display a more muted response in regions responsible for punishment and loss of money if this mechanism enables a kind of disinhibition i mentioned this most i did not intend no.
4:49 am
i want to take one dynamic based on the assumption that ordinary and average people would be risk averse it's not to make sense for the finance industry which is optimized for outcome to hire people who are more inclined toward risk you know i'll buy it and they achieve that with bonuses and with targeted hiring practices and it just came to us and i was fine. you know because it's my believe it's just a matter of time before the next finance crisis will hit.
4:50 am
the only place to go with what you're just looking at is what you get paid ok thank you for this book. when i started hearing a bug what in buffett's and bill gates wealth goes on about the $3040.00 billions but now the vinta 1000000000 you know in life if you have only a $1000000000.00 you can be able to leave for 270 years. and eat well spent $10000.00 at a. nominal fison you for doing that is that he is. so if you have good a good and bad music and even spends 30000 a day because no one the last couple of other people make much more. you know nobody can say i don't want more.
4:51 am
people like me don't make money is go taxes either never goes government to function. so therefore people make money enable things to happen. and the more of those people. more growth more affluence more. this is the promise of those who mean well with us. we're only too happy to believe that. we do our part. we'll be able to buy ourselves happiness.
4:52 am
many western europeans and americans they no longer really have a firm belief in god. but you have to believe in something. you know we have these belief systems that reduce death anxiety but there's always going to be a rumble of panic the name of the surface of consciousness we're going to take this that plank sidey and we've got to do something with it and one thing that we can do is buy a lot of. the. by the time you can talk you have already been pelted with commercial images like the nike shack and the golden 'd arches we know the sublime and all of. our children are growing up in a world that is radically different from the ones that you and i grew up and their brands have been modified accordingly manufacturers of consumer goods
4:53 am
they are spending literally billions of dollars to ensure that no child is left behind in the commercial rat race. or basically in a sense no different than a mini us we are attracted to anything that fosters life and pleasure and were repulsed and afraid of anything that threatens that state of affairs shoes shoes and shoes every wish. sometimes you don't want to let go of something you keep it for is that this you have never won it but i think it's been sitting here for like. still bring you. and this is something with this one still burn you. still going. this is
4:54 am
a design issue i don't want to be limited because. in the bible genesis say you must have dominion over everything that gives me that strength. nobody in the bible i can open it for you nobody is poor. moses ever he's a rich man in the bible bible does not talk about paul that the bible is the biggest money machine every best. talks about money that's something that people need to realize. and i'm hoping that the something like this. to do it i don't owe them to do this work. let's go with a part of your response to see if you. can but.
4:55 am
i think the key issue for the material society is that it will always tell you that there's something missing you need something else they're all contributing i don't think it's on the you know your conscious blame someone who is trying to sell you something so demand and supply you know we're all sort of supporting each other and i have all gotten into this cycle that we are unable to find ourselves free from. you know what but i knew where i would save me i was a good 5 minutes. from sorry saying. you're missing something and by some sort i mean. do you think. some sites with money would there have
4:56 am
a card about how. hard did this neurotic. but you don't call it that they could call that. being someone. being capable by doing your identity. where there's this contentment you're always the king for or you're always looking for what that struggle brings about so much insecurity and. one of the reasons why people acquire so much is because it feels like they're both you're a chemical and psychological feedback loops that causes you to continue doing it well beyond what you actually need. it's one thing when you go out and i can get a cup of coffee or warm coffee on a cold rainy day it's completely another thing when you buy you know 75th pair of
4:57 am
shoes he really really don't in any stretch of the imagination need those shoes but they're still going to make you feel good. there is this drive to save us a cup with the genesis. in our wealthy set on park avenue everybody 16th birthday party last year everybody handed out i pods well this year we're going to hand out i pads well this year we're going to do this and so there's also this sort of ratchet effect. there's nothing wrong with being a consumer i mean to stay alive we have to consume things. but then we were always around that are so full of stuff to the point where we've become imprisoned in a gilded cage and. we became consumed with consumption. we're going to keep buying stuff and told go drop of petroleum has been burned
4:58 am
4:59 am
reputation. 13. good shape. most people have a lot to look forward to. that's when you're diagnosed with cancer ever since the whole. dr carsten like good job talks to young people who are fighting back. and will learn about the latest developments in cancer treatment and good shooting . in 60 minutes on t w. globe life is on its way to bring you more conservation law how do we make city screeners how can we protect habitats we can make
5:00 am
a difference global ideas fundamental series of local $3000.00 on g.w. and on mine. playing. live from berlin this is. a pleasure and protests in spain as the country begins to ease one of the world's toughest lockdowns there are smiles from some but anger from others who feel the handling of the pendennis has harmed the economy also coming up. from brewing beer to serving up suit volunteers in cape town and are helping to relieve the rolling hunger under the coronavirus walked out. and in week
27 Views
Uploaded by TV Archive on
