There once was a brilliant, Nobel prize-winning economist who said that the world runs on greed. “Do you know of any society that doesn’t run on greed?” he’d ask.
He would often follow this up by joking: “What is greed, anyway? It’s never us who is greedy. It’s only the other guy who is ever greedy.”
He believed that there were better and worse ways to channel this natural, often unconscious, bias toward our own self-interest.
Better, he thought, to adopt systems that ask us to honestly acknowledge our own interests and those of others. Worse, he thought, to adopt ways that encourage us to hide our own self-interest in order to affect the mere outward appearance of piety.
A generation later, there was a widely celebrated billionaire, who regularly topped the lists of the richest men in the world, and became famous for his gentility and humility.
He thought the world ran on envy; that wanting of a thing merely because someone else has it. He said that so many of our booms and busts were caused, or at least worsened, by all the irrational behavior that comes along with that toxic emotion of envy.
If only people you could encourage people to think more about what things are worth to them personally, he believed, and less about what other people seem to be going crazy over. You could do a lot of good.
Another generation still, and there was an English doctor who spent a good portion of his life working hands-on with the poor, both in Africa and in his own backyard. He came to believe that one of the most dominant emotions which held so many people back from living up to their human potential, was resentment.
If you could help stop people from becoming so resentful of their peers and of unknown people, he thought, you could help them see what they could do, with their own lives and within their own community, to help them rise up out of the conditions that were handed down to them by their parents and their culture.
They were all right to some degree or another. All of their ideas were somewhat unpopular at first. And they all left out parts of the story.
One of them came from poverty, one of them came from wealth, and one of them began somewhere in-between. But they all had at least one thing in common, aside from their great achievements in their own fields: They were all reasonable, and fairly rational, optimists.
Each of them believed that the main problem was not with people, but with culture. And each of them believed that these poisonous emotions, which could never be stamped out entirely, could recognized, accounted for, controlled, and overcome.
They each believed that we are able to create constructive channels to satiate our most destructive drives. And they believed that you can give people ways of celebrating, instead of destroying, their most creative and often, competitive, impulses.
Music can help us do either or both of these things. And in this way, it can make a huge difference in people’s lives.
Or, it can do exactly the opposite. Which is, to be of very little real interest at all.
The choice is yours. You create the culture.