Like it or not, and most of us don’t, modern life is founded on greed. But before I launch into yet another diatribe, let’s just take a quick look at what greed actually is. Well, Dictionary.com – I can’t be bothered to look it up in a proper dictionary – defines greed as ‘excessive or rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions’. I think the key word here is ‘excessive’; let’s forget about ‘rapacious’. Nobody would particularly mind having a bit of wealth or a few possessions – enough to get on with, for instance – but there are many people out there who have far more than they, or a hundred other people, will ever need in several lifetimes.

According to Wikipedia, the current richest person in the world is…surprise, surprise…Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, whose personal ‘net worth’ is estimated at some $40 billion. Now this might seem an extraordinary amount of dosh but Mr. Gates is by no means alone. In fact, if you add up the estimated ‘net worth’ of the 10 richest people in the world – all of them men incidentally – it comes to no less than $240 billion. This is approximately equal to the gross national product of Colombia. With the accent on gross.

Bill Gates

Or, to put it another way, if these 10 men distributed their entire wealth in the form of $1 million per person, that would result in the instant creation of almost a quarter of a million millionaires.

So what do these guys do with all this money? Well, the short answer appears to be ‘not a lot’. It’s true that some of them – like Bill Gates – are noted philanthropists. However, none of them are exactly philanthropic enough to give away, let’s say, 90% of their wealth – which would still leave them with more than enough to enjoy an extremely comfortable lifestyle and still bequeath something to the family. No, having accumulated your wealth, you then sit on it.

Now some people would argue that they’ve worked hard to earn this money and that they’re entitled to it. Rubbish. Do they work harder than you or I? Well, they probably work harder than you but I work damned hard, I can tell you. And unless they’ve added a few more hours to a day and not told me about it, these extraordinarily rich men simply cannot work much harder than the rest of us. So how come they’re so rich?

The art of wading through money.

Well, there are several reasons that spring to mind. For instance, some of them start rich. They come from rich families. If you already have wealth, it’s not rocket science to make more. Then there are those who have a really good idea that everyone wants to buy into and then they plaster it with copyrights and trademarks so that anyone who wants to use it has to pay. But most of all, they’re just damned lucky. They were in the right place at the right time and – probability being what it is – someone had to be there. Pity it wasn’t us though.

However, most of us take the existence of these super-rich individuals pretty much for granted. Why? Because greed is inculcated into us at an early age. Some might even argue that greed is part of our genetic makeup. Accumulating money is a way of gaining security, thereby ensuring your survival and that your precious genes will be passed on to the new generation. You don’t have to be big and strong to do it either, which is a step up from building muscles and being the first one to kill the mammoth.

A woolly mammoth cunningly disguised as a set of used golfing equipment.

Greed is also embedded in society. Income tax is a good example. By what divine right is any government entitled to a cut of the money we earn? Okay, most of us live in some sort of welfare state in which certain things have to be funded – like roads and defence, for example. If we’re lucky, we pay for healthcare and retirement through our social security contributions, and I think few people would object to that. At least not in principle anyway. But taking away a hefty slice of what we earn, by the proverbial sweat of our brow, can in no way be justified morally. It’s pure theft. Governments have no prima facie case to demand it of us.

Governments can raise the same amount of money – if not more – in many different ways. It just takes a bit of thought.

It might be argued that by voting a government into power we agree to its right to tax us but we are actually given no choice in the matter. Any government we vote in will tax us anyway – it’s just a question of how much. And how much actual say do we have in how that money is spent? In theory, we have a lot – you can read the party’s manifesto, for example, not that many people do – but how a government decides to spend our money AFTER it’s got into power is an entirely different ball game.
Let’s make no mistake about it, the more money a government can screw out of us, without fomenting civil unrest, the better. So to put it simply, governments are greedy too.

Some money relaxing after a hard day of accumulating.

25,000 years ago, things were a lot simpler. There were no taxes because there were no governments. The super-rich might possibly have been people who had a spare set of clothes, but you would meet them on a day-to-day basis anyway so there was always a possibility that the spare set might ‘disappear’ at some point. It’s true that life was probably nasty, brutish and short but, hell, who knew any different?

25,000 years ago, greed might have been defined as eating more than your fair share. Retribution was probably swift in the form of a hand connecting with the back of your head. Beyond that, there was no room for greed as we know it today. There were certainly no people who sold your inability to pay for your cave to a group of arrowhead-lenders in the next valley.

25,000 years ago, poverty did not exist. We were all poor.

And that’s the basic reason behind this article. Greed, and the extreme wealth that it engenders, would not be half as objectionable were it not for the fact that so many millions of people in this world are poor. According to the United Nations, 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes.

Do the maths.

One of the increasingly irritating aspects of modern life is our apparent inability to stay in one place for any length of time. This is nothing new, of course. According to the people who are supposed to know about such things, we started moving out of Africa about 60,000 to 75,000 years ago. At 3 p.m. On a Friday. The people who know about such things can’t be more definite than that, I’m afraid.

So why did we leave such a beautiful place as East Africa to settle in places like…Birmingham? Well, given the subsequent population explosion, it’s probably just as well that we did. 75,000 years ago, there might have been more giant warthogs in present-day Kenya than you could point a stick at but with a current world population of some six and a half billion, we’d be hard pressed to find a tin of sardines nowadays.

Leaving Africa was, to some extent, understandable. Obviously those who were a bit more clued up, stayed put, and were quite content to laze around on (by then) deserted beaches in Zanzibar, bathe in crystal-clear sea, eat fruit straight off the trees, etc. and leave arduous trekking across unknown land to someone else, thank you very much.

So where did these ancient forefathers and foremothers of ours actually go to? Well, predictably the jury is still out on that one too but the smart money is on India, Malaysia and Australia. So far, so good. Admittedly Australia turned out to be something of a dead-end – all the land you want but what can you do with it? – but India and Malaysia were pretty good choices. Lots of fruit and pretty good sea-bathing.

So why on earth did people end up in Northern Norway and Greenland? It certainly wasn’t for the fruit and water-sports. Of course it’s widely believed that when they first went there the climate was…well…tolerable? A bit like Manchester maybe? But that’s really no excuse for staying there when it started to get chilly. Ask any right-thinking Mancunian. And there’s even less excuse when you’re reduced to living on seals. Had they forgotten about the fruit? Had the crystal waters of the Indian Ocean been eradicated from their collective memory?

Manchester.

And there were even people who strayed up to Northern Siberia and…stayed there. Why? Did they lack the energy to go back? Were they waiting for the invention of satellite navigation? Or did they just have an unhealthy fascination with temperatures hitting minus sixty? Perhaps it was the ‘who can last longest in the sauna’ syndrome but then in reverse. ‘Hey, it got down to minus 45 yesterday so I stripped off all my clothes, rolled in the snow, danced around in the forest for an hour, and I can still breathe! Beat that, Barar!’

How infantile.

By now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with modern life. The answer is, quite a lot.
For a start, the human race is probably more mobile than at any point in its history. And yet we seem to have learned nothing. Immigrants will still gladly swap a comfortable but impoverished life in their country of origin for an uncomfortable and – in relative terms – equally impoverished life in their country of destination. There is a constantly promulgated myth that the land you are going to is the land of opportunity. And for some it is, but certainly not for everybody. After all, if you discount Native Americans, the United States is an entirely immigrant society, yet roughly 15% of all Americans live below the poverty line. On the other hand, if you stay put and don’t go for the easy option, you have all of the advantages of a language you understand and an infrastructure of friends and family, and therefore a safety-net of sorts if your plans don’t work out. Once you make the jump to another country, you’re usually on your own.

And then there are business trips. Well, we have the computer, the Internet, telephone, online conferencing and even fax. It might even be possible to resurrect telex and Morse code. So there’s absolutely no reason why most people need to actually get on a plane and physically go somewhere else in order to conclude a business deal. Unless personal smell is an issue, of course. There’s even less excuse for corporate junkets that involve transporting large numbers of people who work for the same organisation, and see each other every day, to a distant destination in order to say what they could equally well say at home.

Illegal businessmen wading ashore on the coast of Spain. Photo ©Roger Bamber

Which brings me to the aspect of tourism. Tourism was all well and good in the days when your knowledge of a distant place was born of hearsay. However, given the advances in media and multimedia over the past years, you don’t really need to go to a place to get a knowledge of what it’s like to be there. The Travel Channel can supply that. No, the major reason for a large number of tourists is that visiting a different country allows them to behave in a way that would not be regarded as acceptable in their own neighbourhood. Like getting completely drunk and having sex in the street for example. Or insulting a waiter. But thankfully there are still a few who prefer to eat fruit straight off the tree and bathe in a crystal-clear sea.

Today, most people in the western world are in constant movement: from their home to their place of work, from their country of origin to a tourist destination or simply for a ‘weekend away’. Many people think nothing of travelling many miles, and even crossing borders, simply to do a bit of shopping. Finally, the desire to move is simply a reflection of man’s constant inability to be happy with what he has.

But I guess that there are still some people who are more than happy with what they have. And it’s quite possible that many of them still live in Africa.

Paradoxically (I love a nice paradox, don’t you?) the curse of modern man is modern life. To put it briefly, we’re simply not cut out for it.

This might seem a bit strange but you’ll just have to bear with me. After all, it is rather a sweeping statement to call modern life a curse but, following the usual in-depth research, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are very few aspects of living in so-called civilisation that escape this judgment.
Take getting up in the morning, for instance. When we were hunter gatherers, there was sod all to get up for. As far as hunting was concerned, most of the good stuff – the game that was really worth getting up for – was just going to bed. Any hunter worth his salt will tell you that the best time to hunt is dusk, even night if you can see what you’re doing. As for the gathering, anything that you gather is more or less waiting around to be picked up, so a few hours won’t make any difference.

We started to get up earlier when the cows had to be milked, ergo when we had succeeded in domesticating animals. Now this, like many aspects of modern life, was supposed to be a good idea: make the animal tame and you don’t have to spend hours creeping around in a damp, dark forest trying to kill it. And, if it’s a cow or a goat – even a sheep at a pinch, but certainly not a pig – you can milk it, which is a nice alternative to water.

Pig, version 1. Later versions had thicker feet, less ear and a shorter tail. They were also bigger.

But, of course, it all went horribly wrong. The cows didn’t want to be milked when you wanted to milk them. They had their own ideas. So you had to get up early. True, it was theoretically possible to go back to bed after the milking but I suppose most people felt that since they were up anyway, they’d better employ themselves usefully. Not that there was anything very useful to do, of course, which led to the invention of Art. Art is something you can only do when you have time to waste.

Or you could turn your hand to something even more horrible: inventing things.

It was inventing things, and then selling them to whomever you could convince might actually need them, that led to further pressure on getting up early. Having invented your pot and successfully sold it, you quickly realised that by making more pots and selling more, you could get more money. Or bits of wood or a shiny stone or whatever you used for money until money was invented. It made sense to employ other people to make pots for you, which meant that they had to get up early to do it – you want a full day’s work from your employees – and that you too had to get up early to make sure they didn’t nick all the pots and sell them themselves.

There naturally came a point at which it all got a bit out of hand and people were required to work in sweatshops seven days a week – which they still do in some parts of the world. Inevitably the workers organised and put pressure on employers to reduce working hours and pay them the same amount of money for doing less. The employers were understandably miffed at this idea, which has led to all sorts of social unrest and the odd revolution. Yet we are all pathetically grateful to these pioneers of the union movement for reducing our burden of work to what we have today. Things are definitely better than they were, we feel. Now we only have to work 40 hours a week for someone else in order to get enough money to live on – after the government has stolen its share, of course. And we get anything from a week to a month to do whatever we like.

Inspecting the workforce. 7 a.m. Monday.

Doing whatever you like for a few weeks is called holidays. Or vacation if you’re feeling suitably vacant.

Holidays basically mean that you wear different clothes – thus providing a visible distinction between working and not working – and you go to live somewhere else. Don’t think I’m being facetious here – the clothes are very important. Anyone walking around Benidorm wearing a suit is definitely not on holiday. Naturally, when you are on holiday you can get up whenever you want, although most people don’t in case they miss something.

Perhaps the most significant effect on our waking hours, or our hours of sleep, since the invention of the cow has been that of the electric light and television. This sinister combination means that evening hours have been effectively extended from sunset to midnight or later for some people. And if you have to get up at 6 a.m., this gives you the average sleep requirement of a sheep. So now we have phenomena like ‘micro-sleep’, which basically means nodding off for a few seconds several times a day in a desperate subconscious effort to make up the lost hours of what is now known as ‘sleep debt’. This was not something that we needed 25,000 years ago.

Not content with robbing us of our sleep, modern life has complicated matters even further by insisting that the clocks be turned forwards and backwards by one hour every year. The practical reason given for this is that we can then make better use of the daylight but really it’s just to annoy people. I mean, do you think it makes any difference to people living in the north of Norway? In summer it’s light there 24/7 and in the winter it’s dark for most of the day. So messing about with the clocks makes no difference at all.

In some countries, there are still people who have successfully resisted this steady erosion of our sleep. They continue the tradition of the siesta. However, even here there are marks of ‘progress’, due, as if we didn’t know it, to the dominance of the protestant work ethic. People who go to sleep in the afternoon are lazy, which means of course most inhabitants of South America, China, India and the Mediterranean countries. In the west, we have not only lost the art of napping; we even regard it as sinful.

Sleep: basic equipment.

And yet, like it or not, human beings need their sleep. Reducing it from the average 8 hours to the 6 hours or less ‘enjoyed’ by most working adults in the western world has a serious effect on health, both mental and physical. Moreover, and I really hate to say it, lack of sleep has an enormous impact on productivity. People who sleep well, and nap, tend to be far more productive than those who don’t. Ask Winston Churchill or Thomas Edison. Well, actually you can’t. They’re dead. But not through lack of sleep.

To conclude, I think that if we are to compare modern man of today with the modern man of 25,000 years ago on the question of sleep, the cavemen win it hands down.

No.