Though the evidence of the dead end of Father Greed is found everywhere in history books and is all around us now, greed with us at present is not a sin. With us, it cannot rise, like abortion and racial insensitivity, to the boiling point of public disfavor because it is the old-fashioned kind of sin that gathers us together. Though it clearly is destroying both our land and our people, we don’t notice it because all of us are guilty of it, whether directly or by proxies given to other people to be greedy on our behalf, and our guilt looks merely normal. To most people of religious faith, as to the materialists, greed is normal, altogether acceptable as an economic motive. We don’t at present grant much standing to sins so unsparingly democratic.
Wendell Berry, The Need To Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, 168-169.
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