Long ago, deep in a cold forest, there lived three bears. One morning, the bears left their home to pick berries and let their porridge cool. Not long after, a cloaked figure slipped from the road. In some versions of the story this figure is a beggar; in others, a thief. Seeing the empty cottage, she tried the door. It was unlocked.
Inside, the smell of food. Without a thought she tasted the largest bowl but it was too hot to eat directly. The next was too cold and who can be bothered….. The smallest she could gulp down straight away and so she ate every last bite. Growing bolder, she tested the chairs. The first held firm. The second sagged. The third shattered beneath her weight.
Upstairs, she tried the beds. The first was hard as wood. The second was soft but stifling. The third was all there was left and so she helped herself and fell asleep.
When the bears returned, they smelled her immediately. Someone had been in their home. They found the empty bowl. The broken chair. And then, following the muddy trail upstairs, they found her sprawled across Baby Bear’s bed still wearing her shoes.
In the oldest tellings of this fairy story Goldilocks does not escape.
Some say the bears dragged her into the forest and she was never seen again. Others say she leapt from the window in terror and broke her neck on the rocks below. In a few less polite versions, the bears killed her outright for violating their home — not out of cruelty, but because in the wild, trespass means danger.
The tale ends not with happy ever after, but with a warning:
Do not enter what is not yours.
Do not take what you did not earn.
Do not assume the world is gentle simply because it looks quiet.
I once dated a woman who was very hard to please. But I was determined and did everything I could to make her happy. Nothing satisfied. Eventually, like Putin at Petrovsk, I poured all my considerable resources into one final push. I thought that if I rolled all her favourite things into one grand gesture I could finally win her heart. So, I made a list of all the things she loved: medieval architecture, summer skies, picnic baskets with green olives, Prosecco and parma ham, sunsets and country vistas. On the appointed day, I drove us out to the site of an ancient chapel atop a hill on Dartmoor in late August with a hamper full of Crisp apple strudels and Schnitzel with noodles. It was perfect.
The sun was setting. The sky was aglow with reds and pinks. The ancient chapel oozed romance and chivalry. The hamper spilled with tasty snacks. We sat down on the soft grass of the churchyard and took in the breathtaking views across golden valleys and bubbling streams. She looked out at it all with childlike wonder and exclaimed,’its beautiful…’
..’but’, and her brow darkened, her eyes narrowed and her jaw set, ‘why haven’t you bought me here before?’
Of course the ingratitude on her part and the despair on mine rode rough shod over being able to see the unutterable poverty of her inner world which nothing could satisfy. Greed is something which so snags our moral sensibilities it is difficult to see past it to the gnawing pit of ravenous hunger it is so furiously unable to fill.
Hunger becomes greed at the point when we give up on the hope of ever receiving what we need. If I cannot receive I have to take. If taking won’t fill, as it rarely does, then the good thing must be spoiled so you can’t have it either. Even if you are willing to share. The agony of greed is not only that the world must be experienced as withholding and impoverished but that good things must quickly be refused even when they are available because the person’s attention has shifted away from hope and sharing to confirmation that the world and everything in it has no value. Sense of self has become coalesced around inner poverty which then requires the emptiness to be maintained for the sake of a stable self structure. Plenty is threatening to a core identity adapted to the absence of love/nurture and so the person finds themselves in the awful bind of having to negate and dismiss what is most needed even when it is at hand.
This is tragic for the individual. It’s catastrophic when it becomes collective, when it begins to determine international policy. Allies must be denigrated, resources plundered, homes invaded, people snatched. Not only is there never enough but whatever is available must be repudiated for the sake of consistency. It is enough to make anyone want to destructively lash out .. and bigly. Greed has a deathly quality. It does not just want something for itself. It wants the good in the other to be destroyed so it doesn’t feel inferior or dependent. Greed wants to annihilate the source of good, not just acquire it.
This leads to the kind of corrosive complacency which takes no thought for consequences or tomorrow. Goldilocks doesn’t concern herself with what might happen if she remains in the home she has invaded. She’s unable to reflect on the result of either her theft of the porridge or the damage done to the chair. She just falls asleep and buries her head until she is overtaken by events.
Greed can’t use what it takes, so good things must be devalued and friends humiliated. Trump’s recent Davos speech confused Greenland with Iceland four times, so little did he care about what was so important only days or hours before. But the kicker was the astonishing denial of the role of America’s allies during WW11 and more particularly the denial of England’s 457 fallen heroes in Afghanistan. He’s not just wrong or misinformed. More importantly, it’s that contempt for others and the need to be hated by them have come to replace the unmourned loss of absent love and nurture. He needs to be controversial. He wants your outrage. Identity must be rooted in at least something and in the absence of love and respect, hate and vilification will do.
If only Trump were an anomaly. Unfortunately he is only the most recent iteration of a long standing tradition, enabled by an emotionally starved collective still telling ourselves that we are the avatars of civilisation, cramming ourselves with stuff we don’t need whilst others starve. Let’s at least not deceive ourselves. The underbelly of our vaunted sophistication is sophistry; the clever use of lies and deception. Nothing will change much until we face the honest shame of our collective responsibility in allowing such a scumbag to succeed, until we face the fact that the long line of despots and tyrants in our culture are the logical conclusion of two thousand years or more of vengeful male Gods with all the emotional intelligence and relatedness of the average tape worm.
In the original story of Goldilocks she doesn’t get tired of winning. The bears have her, not because they are violent but because her waste, destructiveness and insatiability are dangerous to all the other animals in the woods who understand that what befalls one of them becomes the fate of all.
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