59: The Futility of Greed

59

The Futility of Greed

As we always do when we come out of the theater, we share our impressions about the movie we have just seen, in this case The Big Short that we saw at the Uptown Theater in Barrie, a visceral comic twist on the cataclysmic financial crisis that set off the 2008 recession that caused so much mayhem and misery for so many innocent people, and Penny didn’t hesitate to tell me how she felt: “I couldn’t follow the story at all. I hated it. I give it a zero.”

“A zero?” I said, incredulously.

“Well maybe not a zero, but it was worse than The Master,” she replied, referring to the movie based on the founder of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard’s life, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the troubled lost soul and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the savior Master, which we both hated because it made us feel unclean. “What did you think of it?’

“Intoxicating,” I replied.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Too much reality,” I said, and I knew instantly that my first impressions of The Big Short was my call to write today’s spiritual musing…

Film reviewer Andrew Barker said that the route taken by director Adam MacKay of The Big Short turns “a dense economics lecture into a hyper-caffeinated postmodern farce, a spinach smoothie skillfully disguised as junk food.”

But even as disguised junk food, The Big Short was too much for Penny too swallow, and she just hated the movie; but not so much because she couldn’t follow the esoteric code-speak of the unscrupulous high-powered money brokers, but because of how the storyline was put together into a phantasmagorical pastiche of vicious surreal sequences, which was exactly why I found the movie so intoxicating.

Being a writer, I’m in the truth-telling business no less than any other artist—“The crucial function of art is to find the truth of a situation,” said Harry Gulkin, producer of Lies my Father Told Me—and the truth that the director Adam MacKay wanted to bring to light was the untold back story of the 2008 housing crisis and Wall Street crash that caused so much suffering for so many people; but the heady reality of The Big Short was so intoxicating that it made my head spin at the greed of human nature which went so far beyond willful blindness that we were sucked into a black hole of deliberate, conscious evil.

We didn’t go out for dinner as we usually do after the movie because we had turkey left over from Christmas dinner, and on our drive home from Barrie I tried to draw Penny out on why she felt the way she did about The Big Short, but she reiterated that because she couldn’t follow the story she became exasperated and hated it.

There were parts of the movie that I couldn’t follow either, but it was obvious to me that greed and fraud had caused the collapse of Wall Street that the government had to bail out at the innocent taxpayer’s expense, which would have made me sick to my stomach had I not been cognizant of the morally corrupted shadow side of human nature.

“Greed’s a way of life, sweetheart,” I replied to her confusion, “and there’s not much we can do about it because life’s an individual journey.” But that got me thinking.

Given the limited number of years that we’re all going to live—say eighty, being a good and healthy number which is in keeping with today’s medical science, barring all unforeseeable circumstances—why would a person forfeit their soul for a quick fortune? Are they not aware of what they could be risking for what they’re gaining?

True, life would be good and pleasurable and fun given all of that money—beautiful house, clothes, cars, toys, travel, and luxuries the average person can’t even imagine; but if all of this social mobility is realized by exploiting innocent people, is it really worth it?

That’s the question The Big Short raised for me, and the more I thought about it the more convinced I was that greed makes people stupid, which is exactly why the predatory traders who saw that the housing bubble was going to burst outfoxed the bankers who granted subprime mortgages but were too blinded by greed to see that the housing bubble was going to collapse under the weight of its own insolvency; but when they woke up to the reality that they were going to lose great fortunes, the morally corrupted bankers committed fraud to avoid going down with their sinking ship, and the little taxpayer got left holding the bag when the government had to bail the bankers out of their fiasco to rescue Wall Street.

Greed makes people stupid, but evil can be brilliant; and after serious reflection I came away from The Big Short with the certain feeling that when one chooses evil over doing the right thing they forfeit their soul to their shadow side and live out the remaining few short years of their vacuous life not in what Thoreau called quiet desperation, but in luxurious self-loathing. But Jesus said it best a long time ago: “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” That’s the futility of greed.

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