GREED and ASPIRATION I noticed that many people confuse greed with ambition or aspiration. This is a disastrous conceptual failure. The culprit in part is the conceptual scope of these words which causes a conceptual overlapping between them, hence the confusion. For instance, the Babylon dictionary gives these definitions and synonyms to GREED: 1. excessive desire to acquire or possess more (especially more material wealth) than one needs or deserves. 2. reprehensible acquisitiveness; insatiable desire for wealth. Synonyms: avarice, covetousness, rapacity. And this definition to AMBITION, ASPIRATION: 1. longing, strong desires to achieve and complete something. As we can see the meaning of the word ambition or aspiration is way larger in scope than the word greed. For instance, one can have aspiration but not necessarily greed. I can mention my own example. I always had the aspiration to achieve a deep scientific knowledge of nature, yet getting wealthy was never my priority. In other words, I am ambitious but no greedy. Yet, many people confuse ( maliciously or not ) these two concepts. As result of that, people confuse the drive to fulfill noble objectives like deep knowledge or eliminate human suffering and diseases -with- something evil like getting pathologically rich. Efstratios Filippidis
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 04:05:44 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015