It's amusing to think about the potential embarrassment you could generate just by complimenting a pot-smoking hippie on his or her greediness.
After all, when you're busy donating 5% of your tie-dye T-Shirt profits to some banana socialist dictatorship's mud hut research fund, you tend not to associate yourself with those evil, conniving Wall Street types. And it's too bad, really. Repressed greediness is the only virtue some hippies have.
But before we bestow this almighty honor on the hippie pot-smoker, let's answer one question:
What is greed?
Who would know better than a greedy, money-worshipping bunch of bastards like the Merriam-Webster corporation? According to Merriam-Webster, greed is:
"excessive or reprehensible acquisitiveness"
You see, the desire to acquire is ok, but once you start getting "excessive" you might have your invitation to the latest NEA fundraiser rescinded and never get to see that splotch of vomit that couldn't even make it into an IKEA catalog if it were sewn onto a freaking carpet.
But now let's add the unmentionables back into the definition. Namely: who is the benefactor of the acquired goods that are acquired excessively?
If you're greedy, you must be acquiring stuff for yourself. In my experience, no one ever criticizes those annoying little kiss-asses who trick-or-treat with the UNICEF boxes for being "greedy". After all, they're only acquiring stuff for others. Hell, if you're acquiring stuff for others, you can even shoot arrows and shit like Robin Hood or Ted Kennedy and hardly anyone complains.
The essence of greed, therefore, as implied but not made explicit by most dictionaries, is the benefactor of the acquisitiveness. The successful thief and the successful businessman are the same, by this definition, because they both "acquire stuff excessively". What's conspicuously missing from the definition? The means by which they acquire it.
According to the conventional definition of greed, acquiring stuff for one's self, whether by means of a gun and a ski mask, or by planting, harvesting, and selling your own string-bean and/or marijuana crop, is equally bad. The difference between looting from others and producing values by your own abilities is completely lost!
To call an honest working individual "greedy" is to completely blank-out the virtues required by him or her to attain wealth:
"Look at all the money that guy has! That goddamn bastard! Sure, he just helped build and sell 10,000 cars, one of which helps me to travel to see the Jerry Garcia tribute band every weekend, but damn him to hell for building cars that people want to buy!"
If the means of acquiring stuff is blanked-out in the definition of greed, there must be a reason for the evasion. Why doesn't it matter how you acquire stuff?
Because, according to conventional morality, doing anything for yourself "excessively" is evil. What's "excessive"? Anything that ends up in your pocket or stomach that could have been in someone else's. That's right, the altruist diet consists of bread, water, and a healthy supply of Save Medicare brochures and Eat the Rich bumper stickers. Nothing more, nothing more. Just make sure you don't really need the crusts on that Wonder bread. Don't you know the Nike-sneaker-wearing poor are starving to death?
Which brings us to the pot-smoking hippie.
To smoke an occasional joint means, at least at that moment, you want something for yourself. Instead of digging irrigation ditches for some African tribe's lone banana tree (the one currently believed to be inhabited by "banana spirits" and therefore against tribal rules to eat), or protesting against some potential nuclear power plant in the middle of the latest wave of California blackouts, you, the hippie, want to get stoned.
If that's not "excessive acquisitiveness", what is? How dare you want something for yourself? How dare you take a moment out of your day to acknowledge that it is, in fact, your day? How dare you buy into the scheme that pleasure is a desired emotion? How dare you acquire something for yourself?
Good for you, you greedy bastard. Now see if you can try it without the pot.
