The Slow Burning Fuse || It is often said, usually by those with something to protect, that greed is simply “human nature.” The phrase rolls easily off the tongue, a convenient moral shrug that turns inequality, exploitation, and ecological collapse into unfortunate but inevitable consequences of what it means to be human. “People are just greedy,” we’re told, “and always will be.” Yet if greed were truly an inescapable part of our nature, why do some people not act upon it? Why do countless individuals, movements, and entire societies organise around cooperation, solidarity, and collective well-being instead? If greed were intrinsic, it would be universal, yet it is not.
This contradiction exposes a simple truth: greed is not human nature. It is a human possibility, cultivated under certain conditions and suppressed under others. What we call “human nature” is not a fixed essence, but a capacity for both selfishness and generosity, competition and care, domination and solidarity. Which of these traits becomes dominant depends less on what we are born with than on the systems we are born into. Greed, then, is not a mirror of our biology, it is a symptom of our economy.
To claim that greed is human nature is to offer an ideological defence of the status quo. It transforms moral and political questions into biological ones. Poverty becomes the fault of the poor, inequality becomes the consequence of ambition, and exploitation becomes natural selection in human form. The powerful have always relied on this argument to justify their privilege.
Thomas Hobbes famously described human life in its natural state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” For him, the human being was driven by endless desire and fear, a competitive animal requiring a strong sovereign to restrain its worst instincts. This bleak anthropology continues to haunt modern political thought. Capitalism, after all, requires a worldview in which selfishness is not only tolerated but celebrated as a motor of progress. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” transforms private greed into public good; competition is said to drive innovation; profit-seeking is framed as efficiency.
Yet this narrative is not scientific, it is ideological. It assumes from the start that the world as it is, unequal, and hierarchical, is the world as it must be. It tells us not only that greed exists, but that greed works. What it hides is that greed is useful not to humanity as a whole but to those who profit from human division. By calling greed natural, capitalism naturalises itself.
If greed were truly part of human nature, we would expect to find it everywhere. But anthropology offers a very different picture.
Among hunter-gatherer societies, which represent 95% of human history, cooperation and sharing are the norms. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins observed, so-called “primitive” societies often operated on principles of reciprocity and communal access to resources. The Ju/’hoansi people of the Kalahari share food so widely that personal accumulation is almost impossible. The Māori concept of manaakitanga emphasises generosity and hospitality as measures of status, not wealth. Among Pacific Island societies, the giving of gifts and redistributing of resources through potlatch or fa’alavelave ceremonies reinforces community bonds rather than private accumulation.
Even when hierarchy emerges, it is often tied to obligations of redistribution rather than exploitation. The Trobriand Islanders, studied by Bronisław Malinowski, engage in complex gift exchanges (the Kula ring) that circulate prestige goods across islands, not to hoard them but to strengthen relationships. Wealth, in this sense, is relational, not possessive.
These examples do not romanticise the past; they simply remind us that alternative social arrangements have existed, and still exist, where greed plays no structuring role. It is only under conditions of scarcity, enclosure, and class division that greed begins to flourish as a social virtue.
If greed is not eternal, it must have a history. The modern form of greed, individual accumulation for its own sake, arises with capitalism and the enclosures that preceded it. When common land was stolen from the peasantry in England, people were forced from self-sufficient, communal life into wage labour. The moral economy of mutual obligation was replaced by the cash economy of private survival.
Karl Marx described this process as “primitive accumulation”, the violent precondition for capitalist society. Once people are separated from the means of subsistence, they must sell their labour to live. Under these conditions, competition ceases to be a choice; it becomes a necessity. Greed, ambition, and self-interest are no longer vices but survival strategies.
Capitalism does not merely tolerate greed, it depends on it. The profit motive, the endless pursuit of growth, the fetish of property and accumulation are all institutionalised forms of greed. They shape our values, our education, our sense of self. The result is a culture where worth is measured by ownership, where generosity is sentimentalised but rarely rewarded, and where community exists only insofar as it can be monetised.
The philosopher Erich Fromm called this the shift from the “being” mode of existence to the “having” mode. In pre-capitalist societies, identity was tied to participation and relation; in capitalist society, it is tied to possession. We do not say, “I am loved,” but “I have a partner.” We do not say, “I am nourished,” but “I have food.” This linguistic shift mirrors a deeper ontological one – the reduction of life to property.
Those who defend greed as human nature often invoke biology. Evolution, they claim, rewards selfishness; the survival of the fittest ensures that only the greedy thrive. Yet this is a misreading of both Darwin and modern evolutionary theory.
Darwin himself devoted an entire book (The Descent of Man) to demonstrating that sympathy, cooperation, and moral sentiment are equally products of evolution. Species survive not only by competing but by cooperating. This insight was expanded by the anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin in his 1902 work Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which documented how cooperation within and between species enhances survival. For Kropotkin, mutual aid is not a moral choice but a biological fact, a natural law as fundamental as competition.
Modern research supports this view. Neuroscience shows that altruism activates the brain’s reward centres; evolutionary psychology recognises the role of reciprocal cooperation; and even game theory demonstrates that strategies of trust and fairness outperform selfishness over time. Greed, far from being an evolutionary necessity, often undermines collective survival, as climate collapse makes brutally clear.
If greed is not biological, it must be social. It is produced through institutions, reinforced by ideology, and rewarded by systems of power. Children are not born grasping, they learn to grasp. They learn it through competition for grades, through advertising that equates happiness with ownership, through work cultures that reward profit over care, and through political systems that protect property over people.
In capitalist societies, greed is framed as aspiration. The language of “success” disguises the morality of accumulation. To want more is to be motivated; to accept enough is to lack ambition. Even compassion is commodified, charitable giving becomes brand identity, and philanthropy is often a tax write-off for those who created the need for charity in the first place.
Religions and moral traditions have long warned against greed, the Bible, the Qur’an, the Buddha, and Indigenous wisdom alike condemn avarice, but in a capitalist world, these teachings are hollowed out, moralised without structural challenge. We are told to be kind individuals while living in an economy that punishes kindness.
To say that greed is learned is not to deny personal responsibility; it is to locate responsibility where it belongs, within systems that teach, reward, and normalise greed as the only path to security. When the world tells us we must compete to survive, the surprise is not that some become greedy, but that others resist.
Throughout history, the oppressed have created spaces of mutual aid as acts of survival and resistance. The workers’ cooperatives of 19th-century Europe, the Black Panther Party’s community breakfast programmes, the anarchist collectives of Spain in 1936, and countless acts of everyday solidarity are not exceptions to human nature but expressions of its social potential.
Anarchism, at its core, rests on faith in this potential. It assumes not that humans are perfect, but that they are capable of self-organisation, cooperation, and care when freed from coercive hierarchies. Where Hobbes saw chaos without authority, anarchists see community without domination. It recognises that our well-being is bound up with others’. In crises, earthquakes, pandemics, floods, people instinctively turn to one another, not because it is profitable but because it is natural.
The problem with greed is not only moral but existential. A society built on accumulation empties life of meaning. When every human relationship is reduced to exchange value, people become alienated from one another and from themselves. Marx called this commodity fetishism – the inversion whereby objects acquire human value and humans become objectified. Under this spell, we pursue possessions as if they could fill the void that the loss of community created. Yet greed can never be satisfied, because it feeds on scarcity, real or imagined. The more we have, the more we fear losing it.
Psychologically, greed functions as a defence against insecurity. It is the anxious grasp of a species that has forgotten abundance. We hoard because we do not trust. We do not trust because our systems reward betrayal. Thus greed is both cause and consequence of alienation.
Overcoming greed, therefore, is not simply a moral choice but a project of rehumanisation. It requires reconstructing our relations with each other, with the land, and with ourselves, around care rather than control. This is not utopian it is survival. A planet cannot sustain infinite greed, but it can sustain infinite cooperation.
The most effective way to destroy greed is to remove the conditions that produce it: inequality, insecurity, and enforced competition. When people’s basic needs are met, when housing, healthcare, food, and education are guaranteed, the motive for hoarding diminishes. Greed thrives on scarcity; it withers in abundance.
Anarcho-communism envisions precisely this – a society organised around the principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” Such a principle is not naïve, rather it reflects the way humans have lived for most of our existence. Only under capitalism does it appear impossible, because capitalism depends on its impossibility.
Technology, if freed from the profit motive, could make abundance a social reality. The problem is not production but distribution. The world already produces enough for all, but the logic of greed demands artificial scarcity to maintain value. We destroy food to keep prices high, privatise water to create markets, and patent medicine to profit from sickness. Greed is not an excess of desire but a failure of imagination.
If greed is not natural, we can refuse it. Refusal begins with recognising how deeply greed shapes our everyday lives, not only in the rich, but in all of us who internalise the logic of self-interest. Refusal is the quiet rebellion of those who share rather than sell, who care rather than compete, who measure success not by accumulation but by connection.
Anarchism calls this the politics of prefiguration: living the world we wish to create. When we build cooperatives, share resources, or simply resist the compulsion to consume, we are not acting against our nature but affirming it.
To reject greed is not to reject desire; it is to reclaim it. Desire should not be for objects but for life and for freedom, community, creativity, joy. The abolition of greed is not the abolition of individuality; it is the rediscovery of individuality through solidarity.
If some people display greed and others don’t, greed cannot be human nature. It can only be a human choice, shaped by circumstance. To call it nature is to surrender to it; to see it as conditional is to open the possibility of change.
Human nature is not a cage but a canvas. Within it lie countless potentials for love and cruelty, for domination and cooperation. What emerges depends on how we organise our world. Capitalism cultivates greed because greed sustains capitalism. Anarchism cultivates co-operation because co-operation sustains life.
We are not doomed by our nature; we are betrayed by our systems. The question, then, is not whether humans are greedy, but why we live in a world that rewards greed and punishes generosity. The answer lies not in the human heart but in the human order and it is there that transformation must begin.
Greed, finally, is not who we are. It is what we have been taught to become. To unlearn it is not to go against nature it is to reclaim it.
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