Do you believe greed can precede the downfall of a civilization?

Question

If so, please give some examples.

Answer 1

Greed is one of many characteristics of the downfall of a civilization. There are historical conditions that preceed each downfall. Natural reasources, economic decline, war, natural disasters ( volcanos, earthquakes, ? meteorite ) along with you question of greed.
Greed comes in many forms. The obvious is greed of money or wealth. But how about thinking about greed of resources! Water, Wood, Food, even your people. Each and every decline of a civilization has it's own course to take...but as you have realized there are common denominators and greed is one....

Answer 2

Greed for wealth is a substantial cause of decline of civilization, when the greedy people do not look at the big picture. There is certianly the global warming, pollution, and resource depletion that is caused in part by the greed of the oil company executives and the politicians on their payroll, most of all George W Bush.

There is more than just greed for wealth, though. There is also the greed for happiness. Most americans, even those that do not care so much for wealth, would rather talk on their cell phones and watch reality television shows than prevent the building disaster that has already begun with the indefinitely-increasing oil prices, and the heat wave and the powerful hurricanes that were both caused by global warming.

However, it is wrong to blame the problem on greed, because greed is only one factor that must work in combination with other factors in order to truly cause socially-destructive behavior.

Greed alone might actually HELP the human race, as survival is in our best interest. It is not so much greed, but wrongful intent, that causes the downfall of civilization. The type of wrongful intent that causes the most general wide-ranging damage is cheerfulness, which is the desire to ignore all problems with the intent to perpetuate them, and to compel others to do the same. I don't believe that the human species will actually go EXTINCT, but what I think will happen is that we will irreversibly degrade into a virtual cesspool, never to return to the success that we have today. That transformation will largely come about due to the avoidance of problems caused by cheerfulness. We will smile our species into muck.

Answer 3

Yes. There are only two choices: Money or God.

Money: Military- Industrial- Pharmaceutical- Informatics- etc. industrial complex.

God: Love.

P.S. Always make sure your hyphenation on Yahoo Answers also includes a space, or else sentences get truncated.

P.P.S. With the level of greed we now see, you could replace "the downfall of civilization" in this very good question with a single word: "extinction".

Answer 4

Depends what kind of greed you're talking about. If it is corruption, that can eat away at the effecient functioning of an economy, ultimately weakening a civilization to the point that it can be destroyed easier by an outside power (roman empire).

Capitalism is powered by human greed.

The american dream, work hard and you can have anything you want. It's incentive to work hard. If you have a whole country of people working hard (because they are greedy), you are more likely have an efficient country. People can see hard work rewarded, too, unlike communism (work hard, and your country will be great, but you don't see any direct benefit).

Answer 5

If you look at the various empires that have preceded us they all fell because of greed. But I think greed is most often proceeded by the seeemingly harmless act of introducing currency. You start atrrbuting values to various skills and obviously some skills are given greater value than others and those who have the skills valued most restrict entry into those skills to make them more valuable and thus create economic classes. And those who have no skills at all become either lawyers, consultants or politicians.

Answer 6

Greed seems to be human nature and is not really associated strongly with what you would call civilization. I don't expect that it precedes or follows civilizations any more than any other vice or vittue does.

I cannot give examples for something that doesn't exist.

Answer 7

Off course, oneday the time will come.....Al Qur'an has said so implicitly and explicitly about some other civilization but not only greed you know,.......youshould know the discovery of ancient civilization, root from the downfall

Answer 8

Yes. Ours. The Bible says greed is the root of all evil and I believe that. Not because the Bible says it, but think about it. How many bad things in life are caused by selfishness and greed?

Answer 9

if you look at life in another view, greed has caused many a downfall:
the trojans. for helen of troy
the sodomites and gamorrites in the bible, for sexual lust
mayans by the spanish for gold and religion
if you think about it, every war is almost based on the greed for power, land, money or just plain infamy

Answer 10

Definitely the answer is yes. One good example is Hitler. He wanted and the land, after coquering half of Europe, he still wanted more, and persued to invade Russia