Never being satisfied is what characterizes the desire for superfluous goods and is what gives way to a disease very well diagnosed for 2,500 years, which bears the strange name of pleonexía.
Pleonexía is therefore the insatiable appetite for things of a material nature… Pleonectic (some will say pleonexic) is one who considers that he still does not have enough, because he ignores that his spirit cannot calm itself or be satisfied with material things.
This definition makes anyone's hair stand on end, since it is showing us a profile of the human being without awareness of having a spirit. That is, men-matter, men-mass. Matter, mass but not living entities.
However, Carlos Llano Cifuentes, 1 author of "Journey to the Center of Man" tells us: "… there is a great difference between the pleonexia of 2,500 years ago and the one suffered today. For Plato it was a disease; for us it is a sign of success »Plato himself tells us that in reality, the issue is radically different and much more complex: pleonexy is a permanent desire for expansion, a constant state of dissatisfaction that pushes the desire to go beyond what is immediately given. two
What was yesterday a disease, was turned in the second half of the 20th century by the gurus of the international financial world, especially those of Wall Street, the global business community and the inspired authors of the illogical theory of unlimited growth, a virtuous sign of success.
With fatal results such as the recent world economic crisis, where not just a "little money" was lost. It was NOT a bad decision by the market leaders, not a consequence of the demand contraction, nothing of the kind.
It was a deliberate act whose medium was the exaltation of how easy it finally became a global fraud and deception. This is at least the verifiable consequence of the full validity of pleonexy in our 21st century.
A qualified source to understand the above is the report published by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) of the United States 3 that reveals the astronomical salaries of some executives in the financial and corporate world in that country.
According to this report, managers of large venture capital firms and hedge funds earned every ten minutes, the equivalent of the average annual pay of a worker.
The median annual income for a North American family estimated by the authors of the report was about $ 48,000. According to the IPS report, the 20 highest paid executives on Wall Street earned an average of $ 657 million a year. In this way, their income exceeded 13,680 times the money that reaches the bosom of each North American family. 4
"The salary bubble for American executives," says IPS analyst Sarah Anderson, "remains unpunctured." Congress and the White House should prod it, note Anderson and the other authors of the report, John Canagh, Chuck Collins and whoever writes this 5.
In our countries these wage "gaps" exist, they are a reality that economics and administration science scholars do not question, or have not been able to see, while we seek opportunities because they are countries with cheap labor that, in addition to workers, today includes the new generations of young people with a university degree.
Some called the 1950s model of "doing more and more and more" greed, then there was talk of doing "less" and some authors at the time of the Japanese miracle of permanent improvement and total quality control said "instead of, instead of "… when it was already known in the 80s that there was excess supply despite the fact that the world population was growing, the economy was not doing it in the same way.
The reason for all this? It was a terrifying issue, since the population that was increasing in size was born with practically no purchasing power, which could not forecast a growing global demand and also was creating a social problem whose impact on the economy seems not to be understood until today. The only thing we know is that all countries the population in a state of poverty is increasing.
And here came the great moment to convert Plato's illness (pleonexia) into a contemporary and futuristic virtue.
For this, schizophrenic prizes were established for the "ingenuity" of the manufacturers of a frenzy of expansion, who created a constant state of dissatisfaction that led them to go beyond what was established and accepted as valid, from the formulation of both Keynes' economic theory 6 of the market drivers like Milton Friedman. 7
A new paradigm was created that killed intelligence and ethics, to exalt the anti-value of collective deception, as the new symbol of the success of the business world.
We have succumbed to the aggressive advertising that made us fill ourselves with objects with a technology whose common objective was and continues to be to prevent the person from being young or old, rich or poor, from thinking because if they do so, they will ruin the business. In the houses we see so many modern, recent things, with incomprehensible technology but that serve to "live without thinking", that is why books no longer exist, we have students without textbooks and reading is done with a click that uses a finger and not the brain.
Today the world walks on its knees and when it wants to join the ghost of the tragic, it is called Greece and its made-up foreign debt, or Toyota and its mistakes that the founder's grandson cries.
What is happening to us? Worse yet, what could happen to all of us in the near future?
The first question can be answered with the popular wisdom of "no chocolate, no cocoa", for the second is an old sentence from the Castilian proverb that reminds us of the cycle in life "Of a laborer father, a gentleman son, and a beggar grandson."
It is time to go back and understand that nothing can be infinite in the work of man. We live signs that show us what we have destroyed or risked the stability of the planet, precisely because of pleonexies, a term that we probably did not review when, in our days as primary and secondary students, we had the opportunity to study the now forgotten and even considered obsolete and unnecessary "Greek and Latin roots".
It is serious not knowing what the pleonexy of today means in our lives, because it is not a recognition of the value of our dreams and ambitions as intended, but a harmful stimulus for our own self-destruction.
The excess of material things that we have been buying makes us see, without looking in detail, hear; but never listen, and we are pushed to waste.
Finally, by not thinking, we accept irregularity as the norm of life, which is the most serious mistake to walk in the Millennium and to form a family that is the sociological basis of the State.
Let's volunteer at this point in our lives and understand the sophistry of unlimited growth, observing the development of our own body and the limits that nature itself has established within the wise order of Creation.
References:
1. Carlos Llano Cifuentes Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Navarra, Founding President of the Pan-American Institute of Senior Business Management (IPADE, Mexico City) and professor of the Human Factor area. Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Universidad Panamericana. Author of more than 20 philosophical titles on anthropology and business.
2. (This profile of pleonexia is the one that Plato brings to light in The Republic 586b1). The Republic, Plato / Daímon. Philosophy Magazine, nº 45, 2008).
3. IPS Executive Excess 2009.
4. Aleardo F. Laría, Lawyer, Journalist. And Argentine political scientist.
5. Sam Pizzigati. Editor of Too Much.
6. John Maynard Keynes, first Baron Keynes, (Cambridge, June 5, 1883 - Firle, April 21, 1946) was a British economist, whose ideas had a strong impact on modern economic and political theories, as well as on the fiscal policies of many governments. Keynesian economics, or Keynesianism, economic theory based on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, as reflected in his book General Theory about Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936 in response to the Great Depression in the 1930s.
7. Milton Friedman (New York, July 31, 1912 - San Francisco, November 16, 2006) was a prominent Hungarian-born American economist and intellectual. Defender of the free market and exponent of neoclassical monetarism from the Chicago School of Economics. In 1976, Nobel Prize in Economics for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, history and monetary theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.
