4. Greed is Good

Throughout history the most popular stories writers ever produced have included a righteous hero verses a greedy and powerful villain. The villain has ambitious goal and will do anything to achieve that. Hero defeats the villain and stops him from achieving his evil goals. Good wins against evil and morals against greed. Environmentalists accuse human greed for overuse of natural resources. In many religions also, greed in its forms like usury are considered sinful. Since childhood we are taught that greed is wrong and sinful. However as I ponder about this issue I conclude we were wrongly taught. The problem is that greed is highly misunderstood by people.

“The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind”

Greed is a rather useful property of human beings or for that matter any living being. It is Greed is rational, and what is rational is predictable, and the predictable is understandable, and what we can understand is good. People don’t realise but it is the foundation stone of our modern society. Greed by the rich leads to investment which in turn leads to more job creation for the poor; it leads to more risky investments in startups like Facebook, Amazon, Flipkart and in research and development of technology.

You might argue that gambling is bad, yes you are right because that is not being greedy rather it is foolishness as expectation of return is less than or equal to 0, if its greater than 0 then it is not gambling it is a free lunch. Same goes for investment in stock market, all your investment is also gambling unless you sure that expectation of return is greater than inflation. The difference between traditional meaning of greed and my meaning is that in mine you also have calculated the expectation of a profit , if not it is plain foolishness.  “I don't throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things. Read Sun-tzu, The Art of War. Every battle is won before it is ever fought.”-Gordon Gekko 

3. Making Sense Of It

The fact revealed to me by studying the replication of DNA was that all life on earth is there only for one purpose, reproduce and we certainly are no bit different, yes we certainly aren’t any different from the chimpanzees or even plants for that matter except for the level of ‘sophistication’ of process of Natural Selection which we have developed given our intelligent understanding of everything we come across into an Economic Selection in the Free Enterprise system I mentioned earlier.

    The Capitalist/ Market/ Free enterprise system is an awesome analogue to Natural Selection even though it is synergic as we all work with and for each other and being ‘selfish’ at the same time. Producers need to convince consumers that their product is very much needed by them so as to extract maximum price out of it. The laws of supply-demand kicks in and you know the rest is economics.

     The money an individual earns is proportional to the utility he is giving the world or simply what value his work is to us.A laborer works for a full day and does not even earn 100 bucks for that because there are many who are willing to work for the same amount. Whereas Larry Page & Sergey Brin have written Google’s Page Rank Algorithm with about 5 million lines of code which has made internet search so efficient, probably nobody has been able to write a better algorithm and hence the remuneration is proportional to the value of work they do. The person with more wealth is selected for (lives a luxurious life ) and the one with less wealth is selected against (poor one suffers). This motivates people to start working hard and produce more valued goods 'n' services, better research 'n' development of technologies for which world has more need or utility or value

Now I can answer many of the questions in the first post:

Q1. What is our significance in a universe that is 14 billion light years in radius (assuming spherical 3D model for simplification)?

A1. Nothing, seriously nothing.

Q2. What is the purpose of my life? Why am I supposed to do things that I’m doing right now? Why do I need to study things which probably I will never see or experience in my life?

A2. Since we are living beings, we must do what all living beings do –live healthy- reproduce-die. However to increase the probability that we live healthy, comfortably and so does our off springs, we must earn as much wealth as we can. To do so we must learn ways to provide maximum utility we can to other fellow beings. Hence by studying various sciences / engineering / commerce we increase the value of the work that we do.

        

2. BITS Made Us Do Biology!

I could relate these questions to what is written in prescribed syllabi textbooks of Biology , Maths, Physics and even Economics though I could never use them for fruitful academic purposes (like getting marks), but they did help me with developing an overall understanding of life and its purpose . After all we all living beings are originated from the DNA molecule, the only molecule that can replicate and 'preserve' itself. The property of all livings organisms to reproduce which is also the sole purpose of all living, to preserve its DNA by replication. In the cycle of life- reproduction and death the individual dies but the DNA is preserved by passing it to the offspring, which again does the same thing. Every DNA molecule so produced tries to preserve ‘only’ itself. Over time this caused explosion of new types of DNA molecules (species) but the resources the earth provide are limited  hence competition forced the less ‘survivable’ species to die (natural selection) with every new species trying to survive or in other words every new DNA molecule trying to 'preserve' itself. In such a world where the only rule being Natural Selection a primate was born whose jaw muscles were exceptionally weak due to mutation. This disadvantageous development could not allow it to eat hard nuts but had one more consequence, weak and small jaw muscles occupied less space and it allowed more space for cranium and the brain to grow! That primate was our ancestor who later evolved after a series of other species like Homo erectus (cavemen who discovered fire) into Us!

We Homo sapiens even in this 21st century follow same rule of Natural Selection and compete with each other and try to acquire more wealth. This in our context is not called Natural Selection but Modern Capitalist System.  

1. Many Questions

Unlike many of my peers who have exceptional talents in computer programming, web designing, Counter strike and even in music and literature who got into various talent nurturing clubs of BITS, Pilani, unfortunately I didn’t have any talent. What I had was possible answers to questions which made me wonder all my life. The “Search for Truth“ (along with IITJEE) has given me many sleepless nights, unanswered questions like What is our significance in a universe that is 14 billion light years in radius (assuming spherical 3D model for simplification) ? What is the purpose of my life? Why am I supposed to do things that I’m doing right now? Why do I need to study things which probably I will never see or experience in my life? Why should I work so hard so as to compete in a race with 7 billion other people on earth for food, shelter, comfort? Some people say if I don’t compete, I won’t ‘survive’ but why do I need to put so much effort for mere existence that makes no difference to the large universe mentioned earlier. Many wise pundits reply with words like God, religion and suggest that it is our karma, the purpose we are brought to this world. Many of my fellow bloggers reply with words like “Love” and “Happiness” and suggest that in life we should do what we love, what makes us happy. They tell us to “Keep faith”, ”Love yourself “,”blah-blah , etc.”. But they fail to answer my above questions with logical consistency.   

WELCOME

If you are reading this and don’t know me then I won’t write an introduction about me because they lead to preconceived notions about the blog which might be difficult to remove.  Just consider me a hermit in a Desert with a Laptop and internet.