Charlie is a 98-year-old wise man at the end of his life. There are some things I agree with him and some things I disagree with. He talked about a quote from Warren Buffett, “It is not greed that drives the world but envy.” In my view, in some cases, there are people motivated by envy, and there are other examples where greed is the motivator.
Buffett also said, “As an investor, you get something out of all the deadly sins—except for envy. Being envious of someone else is pretty stupid. Wishing them badly, or wishing you did as well as they did—all it does is ruin your day.”
You’ll find all of the human behaviors, and characteristic traits, which is just a division of language of different social expressions throughout humanity. For example, competition can be for greed, envy, or the inspiration (joy) of it. It is difficult to define who we are just as much as it is to describe the physical world. There’s no simple equation to explain social beings. The only thing the humanities can mostly rely on is based on history (i.e. historical patterns), some research, and basic experiments. Political division (tension), mixed with economic hardship like inflation, a rising challenging power, and so on is a recipe that may enable a demagogue like Adolf Hitler to rise to power or an empire to collapse. It does NOT necessarily mean it is an inevitability and de-facto truth, but merely a possibility. Just like the dollar going to zero is not inevitable but probable to thinkers like Voltaire who said, “Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value, zero.” People may point to experiments like the Stanford Prison experiment, or the Milgram experiment to correlate that with what occurred in Germany. Now, I don’t discredit these experiments entirely. However, it is not enough to explain human nature because when others tried to rerun these often unethical experiments such as the prison experiment, they were not able to replicate it. That is to say, we can’t clearly make conclusions without concrete evidence.
Making big claims is something I’ve seen done over and over with speakers like Dr. Jordan Peterson who I don’t dislike, but he gets some of his conclusions wrong and he states them as being a fact. An amazing professor by the name of Wes Cecil made this point clear, and perhaps by coincidence or synchronicity, he observed the same thing I did when I came across his videos. Sometimes one cannot make such big claims without extraordinary evidence, it has to be left with mere speculations and left open with more questions and deeper investigation to say for a fact this is the answer. There’s no doubt making big claims is necessary in some ways to push one’s thinking or move their field further. It can be viewed as being brave when you are trying to answer a phenomenon. One just has to be more careful about what they claim from their or others’ research.
Social Scholarly 