FICTION
Greed, or Miserliness
The Last Human in the Milky Way — Excerpt from Chapter 20
He looked at the straight, yellow lines on the road ahead. He was a little doubtful, but had decided that it had to be this way. A couple of hundred kilometers of driving north-west, and then he would come to a town where conditions were perhaps still almost normal, where it was possible to make contact and talk to people and get sensible answers back.
He had decided that this was what he was going to do. Straight ahead, towards the goal that he could not yet see in the distance.
He sat and held the steering wheel steady while the cruise control kept the speed up. He began to think about the strange thing that happened. He thought of a large article he had read on a platform while the internet was still working. He had read the article several times. It seemed so crazy, and at the same time so hard to put it down. The thoughts that the author had conjured up in him did not let go of him. He knew he had no choice. Just had to figure this out.
The author of the article had started with a question for the reader, an open question, which he himself discussed further in the rest of the article:
“If you think of a quality in humans that is the cause of or fuels a lot of evil among humans, what would you mention then?”
He himself had immediately thought of betrayal, this fact that people fail each other, and indeed betray each other, are unfaithful to what they have previously stood for.
But the author of the article had come up with something completely different:
“Money,” it said, “might be high on the list. — Or envy. Or hate?”
But neither money, envy nor hatred, according to the author of the article, was the cause of much evil among people. According to him, greed is the source of so much evil in the world. Blind, brutal greed, or miserliness, the human characteristic, the ability to be greedy, the practice of miserliness, which destroy so many lives.
He turned and changed the word a little. Greed, avarice. Well, maybe there was something in that.
He was interrupted in his thoughts by something that appeared several hundred meters in front of the car. It was a human — no, it was two people standing on the side of the road a few hundred meters further on. He saw in passing that there was a man and a woman standing here, in the middle of the wilderness, miles away from people!
He thought — a little too late — that perhaps he should have stopped, asked them if they needed help. The woman had raised her arm and waved, and was a little unsure whether she had tried to hitch a ride, or whether she had just waved at him.
He blinked and thought back to the article on greed.
“We can try to look for explanations for why greed is so prominent among humans,” he thought.
“Why are so many people — and especially people in positions of power — so strongly marked by greed, thirst for money and the will to power over others?”
He thought of people who could fit the description, historical figures, kings, presidents, revolutionary leaders, dictators who throughout history had influenced the world by creating unrest, creating contradictions, wars. It was not difficult to find such persons, both heads of state, revolutionaries and others.
He thought of some such men — because most of them have been men, perhaps not so coincidentally! Some of these men had been inspired and driven by a strong idealism, by the urge to fight against oppression and justice, everyone knew that.
But it was also a fact that many such men were persons with clear signs of personality disorders such as narcissism, psychopathy and the like. There were people who apparently lacked empathy and who only saw their own needs for power over other people. Throughout history, such persons have acquired great power in the society in which they lived, and this has led to unimaginable tragedies for ordinary people who have been innocently affected by the destructive actions of the dangerous leaders.
It has been quite common to see the causes of evil, oppression, murder and war in the world as actions committed by individuals with personality disorders such as narcissism, psychopathy and the like. But it would be completely wrong to limit the causes of evil and war in the world to actions committed by such individuals. We cannot blame all the misery in the world on psychopaths and narcissists!
He felt sleepy again, took a deep breath and opened the side window. The air outside caressed his face. A warm wind caressed his cheek, and he couldn’t stop thinking about her again.
It bothered him a little — yes, it almost annoyed him that he kept coming back to her in his mind. The door to that part of his life had been closed for a long time now, so it was just nonsense to think back on her.
He concentrated on driving, gave it a little extra and enjoyed the sound of the powerful six-cylinder engine, the pleasant hum and occasional snarl from the engine, such as when he pressed his right foot down and the car roared and sped off.
“To understand the causes of evil, violence and other misery in the world throughout the ages,” he said half aloud to himself, “we must look elsewhere. We must look for characteristics in man, and we must look more closely at choices and priorities — how man, through conscious and random choices and through the design of laws and rules, has chosen to align himself in existence.”
This was what the article had mainly focused on. That how the state of the world has become, this apparent deep crisis — it is about values that people have chosen to believe in, and it is about attitudes and morals that underlie people’s fundamental beliefs.
He remembers something he had read a very long time ago, about what characterizes man — and many other species on earth — the survival instinct.
We absolutely want to live, survive and win over threats to ourselves and our genetic material. This driving force is embedded in most living beings, and it is particularly visible in humans. This is what is central, what lies beneath, he thought. Safeguarding and protecting the genetic material secures the future of the offspring.
He felt that he was smiling, but he did not feel happy. In earlier stages of man’s existence on earth, there were clearly such forces that lay beneath when men worked, loved, provided food, clothing, shelter and warmth and raised their offspring.
The purpose of everything one did was to meet basic needs and to create a better future for the offspring.
(…)
Read more: From chapter 21
I started writing The Last Human in the Milky Way early in 2021, and I took a pause from writing the novel last winter. The last months I have resumed the work on the novel.
The author is currently reviewing, rewriting, and editing the manuscript for the novel The Last Human in the Milky Way. Excerpts from selected chapters will be published as previews on Medium.
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