When Bad is Good.

"Greed is Good" said Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street, and to an extent he was right. One of the fundamental lessons of the twentieth century is that in order to increase the wealt of people, people have to be allowed to express their avarice. Capitalism, in which individuals attempt to gather wealth to themselves and those that do it inefficiently cease to have wealth, produces more wealth overall than other systems. Even the poorest become more wealthy in a greed based system than more equitably designed systems. This is because people are greedy. People will only work if they are rewarded in some way for it, and to a large extent the amount of work is related to the amount of reward.
Now, clearly greed can also be very bad. Rich people getting richer while poor people remain in poverty is clearly bad. My big screen tv is clearly less good a purchase than sustainable development material for impoverished farmers. But I still bought it, and so do most others with the opportunity.
So, greed exists, it isn't going away as it is a fundamental part of human nature, but if things are organized well this greed can be utilized to improve the lives of people as a whole.
I think the best solutions to problems are the ones in which the baser instincts of humanity are harnessed to produce enlightened results. The best people to solve global warming are the energy industries, and the method that should be used to get them is to appeal to the vast amounts of greed that those industries portray. The way to solve global warming is to convince energy companies that they can make more money by providing alternative energy sources than by burning fossil fuels. If you look at the advertisements of those companies, they are beginning to get that concept.
There are other areas where ad can be used for good. Think of hate. Hate (in my opinion) is a reaction that stems from disgust, animals' reaction to rotting food, or disease etc.. Hate isn't about fight or flight, it's about wrongness, shunning, avoiding, removing. This seems to be something that we would wish to remove from humanity, but I submit that it is the most effective tool at removing other things that we dislike about humanity. Think of racism. How do we remove racism? Telling people that it is wrong has little effect, people stick with their beliefs. But what has happened over the last few decades is that people have developed and demonstrated increasing levels of disgust and hate for those who are racist. It is now such an insult to be called racist that it is beginning to rival the status of insults used by racists. Hate and disgust has become the primary method by which humans are going about removing a form of hate and disgust.
Think of the massive motivating power of jealousy, or fear. Think of the sheer energy that lust brings to humanity. What power in these essential parts of humanity, hese basic building blocks in the personality of everyone. Huge energy and time has gone ino efforts to eliminate these emotions and feelings. To my understanding generally these efforts have failed miserably. Making drugs, prostitution, adultery illegal have not removed their presence from our lives, or even had a noticeable effect on them. Using people to fight against the nature of humanity simply fails, we cannot beat ourselves.
However, I think what can be done is to harness these feelings in ways that make people happier. We can educate how to fulfill these desires in ways that help humanity. We can redefine what it is cool about wealth, imagine if prestige for the rich was defined largely by their ability to effect the lives of the poor in positive ways. Imagine if CEO's competed with each other in the lavish brilliance of their caritable works? Imagine if lust can be channelled into loving relationships, that instead of guilt and self-disgust resulting from a short term sexual relationship people could feel pride and joy in their ability to make another happy, even for a short time. Would the world be better or worse if it was considered a polite and pleasant thing to do, to have sex with a lonely friend? Imagine if pride, esteem for people, was based on the relative saintliness of that person, rather than their prowess in competition? Instead of celebrity actors we would have celebrity monks.
So, Bad is sometimes Good, and looking for the good possibilities in bad situations is the path to improvement for individuals and societies alike.