Greed vs Hope

 

Greed vs Hope

Ana Sofia Hernandez Gomez

Troy High School

12 English AP

1/17/2025

Greed vs Hope

The rich donate to ‘give back’ but realistically they only donate to get tax breaks. A man gives up his jacket for his date, but only in hopes of undressing her later. A woman graciously supports her lover’s journey and sacrifices her immediate desire in order to gain the single thing she craved the most: becoming a true desert woman. Are all human decisions based on greed and gratification? Is it naive to have faith in humanity and believe selfless decisions can be made? If selfless decisions are rare, can they be enough to restore faith in humanity?

            There is nothing humans won’t do to get what they think they deserve, and they are wired to crave the risk of losing everything for the possibility of winning it all. This is portrayed in The Alchemist and Squid Games, where a common theme of conveying the intermingling of greed and hurtful decisions manifests through the gambling of lives. In The Alchemist, materialism and relative dissatisfaction led Santiago to leave his old life as a Shepherd to find his hidden treasure, along with inspiration from a strange man who knew a suspicious amount of information about his life (Coelho, 1993). In Squid Games, shame and necessity led Gi-hun-and the other 455 players-to participate in vague games and risk their lives, along with inspiration from a bizarre man who knew a dubious amount of information about his life (Hwang & Kim, 2021-2024). Catch that? Put side by side, a Spanish shepard and a Korean man in debt are not so different, and share a definite underlying link: the brain’s reward system. “Gambling activates the brain’s reward system, which is powered by dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter inside the brain that reinforces sensations of pleasure and connects those sensations to certain behaviors or actions” (Champion, 2021, para 6). So when both characters became convinced there was something missing in their lives, they turned to their inherited human instinct to search for the dopamine they craved and began gambling their lives for it. When asked to sacrifice his sheep, Santiago’s greed surpassed his love and sense of responsibility for his sheep (Coelho, 1993), and when asked to abandon his family, Gi-hun chose to satisfy his gluttony rather than think of other solutions to his debts, (like not gambling and working extra hours), (Hwang & Kim, 2021-2024). Both characters are given multiple opportunities to choose satisfaction, but they repeatedly choose to risk it all regardless of the personal consequences and sacrifices it causes others to make. Santiago chose to leave his career as a shepherd and risk his success, to leave the diamond shop and risk his safety, and to leave Fatima and risk his love and riches, all for a reoccurring dream (Coelho, 1993). Gi-hun chose to leave his sick, elderly mom alone twice over the span of the show risking her safety only to come back to her already dead and abandoned his daughter three times risking any remaining bond he had with her for the possibility of winning money (Hwang & Kim, 2021-2024). If these two distinct characters prove one thing, it is that when given the option between selflessness and satisfaction, humans make decisions based on greed and gratification. Gambling reveals the ultimate truth; all decisions are a glorified chase for dopamine. At the end of the day, all we crave from life is fulfillment. Having said that, why are humans this way? I mean, why are we constantly chasing dopamine, never truly satisfied?        

            According to Pubmed Central personal relative deprivation is the state of “believing oneself to be materially worse off than one’s peers-that is, than people who are “like you”-with attendant feelings of resentment and the belief that the world is not fair” (Skylark, W.J., & Callan, M. J, 2021, para 3). Santiago believed he had reached a stagnant point of his life where he was no longer traveling the world as he had set out to do, and he had failed to gain great riches regardless of his tireless work and efforts (Coelho, 1993). Gi-hun feels indignant that he has ended up with a large sum of debt from a sinless pastime, (gambling on horse racing), (Hwang & Kim, 2021-2024), when others around him are finding success in their paths. Both begin to believe that that thing they were missing was something they deserved, and this gave them the dignity to feel confident in prioritizing their satisfaction above others since they believed it would make the world a fairer place. 

The bread or lottery ticket problem in the second season of Squid Games and the robbery that took place in The Alchemist are examples of personal relative deprivation and its role in people gambling what little they have. First, in the bread or lottery ticket dilemma, homeless people are faced with the option of risk or safety (Hwang & Kim, 2024, 0:36:03). What seems to be a simple choice quickly becomes overridden by their own greed; most choose the lottery ticket, likely due to the common misconception that they are ‘due for a win’. This misconception can be traced to an unhealthy coping mechanism through means of using gambling as a justice-seeking function which can stem from personal relative deprivation, as stated in an article in the journal of Society for Personality and Social Psychology, where “gambling might offer a means to pursuing desirable outcomes that people feel they deserve but might be unable or unwilling to attain through conventional means” (Callan, M. J., Ellard, J.H., Shead, N.W., & Hodgins, D.C., 2008, para 1). This feeling of being in an unjust position and their belief that they deserve a win drives their choice and future decisions. The weight of their decision in this scenario, which is representative of the weight of their decisions throughout life, is that the bread is destroyed. So while the homeless people are resentful of the man for wasting bread, they fail to realize the opportunity to win was lost when they acted with greed. It is nature for them to think they are entitled to the bread, (or entitled to a win), after choosing something else because they do not understand the weight of their gambling. The bread was just a visual representation of showing them there is no way to take back the selfish decisions they have made and will make in the future. This shows how decisions based on greed often lead to regret and realization of missed opportunities or wasted success, however it illustrates how the cycle of personal relative deprivation makes it difficult for decisions to be made outside of greed stemming from resentment. In The Alchemist, personal relative deprivation takes form by stemming from both a regret of engaging in gambling and betrayal. Santiago’s naive nature that led him to place his trust in someone who offered to take him to the mountains in exchange for money led to him pointlessly losing all the money he was given that would serve to both move forward in his journey or go back home (Coelho, 1993, pp. 41–42). At this point Santiago has fallen into a dark pit of despair against humanity and becomes bitter from the unfairness in his life and regretful of his decision regardless of the fact that he wanted to risk his old life and jump into the unknown for the thrill and excitement of something new. As a result of the robbery, Santiago turned to personal relative deprivation, claiming he would “hate those who have found their treasure because I never found mine” (Coelho, 1993, p. 42). Exhibiting this cycle of personal relative deprivation and decisions made from greed, Santiago fails to learn his lesson and is driven by the feeling that he has earned the right to find his treasure, to gamble his riches and security once again and travel into the desert to look for his treasure (Coelho, 1993, p. 120). When humans feel they have the right to something, they choose to make decisions out of greed and when things don’t work out, they turn to making even greedier decisions at the cost of themselves and those around them, like voting to stay in the games after seeing people die (Hwang & Kim, 2024, 0:40:50) or choosing to leave their lover behind (Coelho, 1993, pp.126-127). Additionally, people often feel there is someone to blame for their misfortune, like Santiago and the robber, which leads them to believe they have a right to be equally corrupt, further feeding the cycle since it creates more people that will make other people resentful. At this point in both stories, it is difficult to believe there is any faith in humanity where selfless decisions can be made when we are all easily doomed to personal relative deprivation in an unfair world. After all, it only takes one selfish decision or foul person to make us lose our faith in humanity but multiple selfless efforts to restore that faith.

            If we are to believe there is faith in humanity after all, there is one thing left to tackle: what about that one percent? That belief that is echoed in The Alchemist that “when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too” (Coelho, 1993, p. 155). Or the last bet of season one in squid games: will anyone help the drunk man freezing to death at the intersection-even if there is no reward (Hwang & Kim, 2021, 0:25:27)? Those sparing selfless moments in Squid games where Ji-yeong sacrificed her marbles so Sae-byeok could help her brother even though she knew she would die (Hwang & Kim, 2021, 0:49:10), or in The Alchemist where the jeweler helped Santiago realize he had to continue following his dream even though he knew he would lose his helper (Coelho, 1993, p. 61). Maybe those moments are enough to contradict the greed driven decisions that are much more common in the stories. It is possible, however, that the point in either of these stories wasn’t to fight for or against humanity. On the contrary, it is far more likely that Gi-hun is truly just an absurd hero who will never beat capitalism or prove that the ones he cares for the most won’t betray him no matter how hard he tries to believe so. In the end the reasoning for Santiago’s actions is unimportant. Perhaps, the point of these stories is to highlight how ridiculous and pointless it is to form an opinion about mankind since it is uncontrollable and unpredictable. Is it best, in this scenario, to just leave the unpredictable as it is and realize it is futile to weep or rejoice based on the actions of a massive collective you can’t control?

            A fight for humanity does seem ludicrous, and it is hard to believe absurd heroes like Gi-hun or Santiago can prove there is anything but greed in our society. Nevertheless, after taking into account personal relative deprivation, it is reasonable to deduce that mankind is rather unexpectedly predictable. The bread and lottery ticket dilemma or the robbery show how most human decisions can be boiled down to predictable behaviors based on insecurities that create greed. Those who are prone to making selfless decisions, like Ji-yeong and the jeweler, aren’t exempt from this foreseeable greedy appetite. It is important to keep in mind that Ji-yeong ended up in the same games as Gi-hun where she risked her life due to a lust for money (Hwang & Kim, 2021-2024) and the jeweler exploited Santiago’s misfortune for his own benefit by using his ideas to increase success in his shop (Coelho, 1993). The difference in this one percent is that they found a way to release their insecurities and use what they learned from picking the lottery ticket over the bread to be better people. In other words, they broke out of the cycle. So, although the actions of a massive collective are beyond one person’s control, the belief that humanity is not bound to a future of greed and selfishness is not naive as long as those who break out of the cycle remain and inspire those around them to improve as well. Maybe the hope echoed by Paul Coelho was right after all.

References

Callan, M. J., Ellard, J. H., Shead, N. W., & Hodgins, D. C. (2008). Gambling as a search for justice: Examining the role of personal relative deprivation in gambling urges and gambling behavior. Society for Personality and Social Psychology. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167208322956

Callan, M. J., Shead, W. N., & Olson, J. M. (2011). Personal relative deprivation, delay discounting, and gambling. American Psychological Association. https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2011-18817-001

Champion, C. (2021, December 28). Gambling addiction can cause psychological, psychological health challenges. UCLA Health. Retrieved January 9, 2025, from https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/gambling-addiction-can-cause-psychological-physiological-health-challenges#:~:text=Like%20addictive%20drugs%20such%20as,to%20certain%20behaviors%20or%20actions.

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