I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”
Gordon Gekko in ‘Wall Street’ (1987)
Gekko’s speech in ‘Wall Street’ (1987) is as unsettling as it is convincing. Speaking to a crowded room, he professes the value of ‘greed’, describing it as a force ‘for life’ and the ‘upward surge’ of mankind, to thunderous applause. But Gekko’s words must be considered in context. They are given as a speech, as an act of rhetoric, not truth. He uses persuasive, obfuscating language in order to legitimise his argument. By creating a narrative that is simple and appeals to ‘natural order’, he hides his underlying selfishness and dishonesty.
Gekko uses rhetorical devices to collapse meaning, allowing him to present his selfish and destructive position as natural and ‘good’. The tone of his words immediately asserts his power and social position. He opens with a dramatic exclamation, saying ‘I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them!’, that positions Gekko as god-like, able to raise or destroy businesses at will. There is also an echo of Oppenheimer words after the testing of the first nuclear bomb, ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds’. Beginning a speech with this technique, called apostrophe, was frequently used in classical rhetoric: from Homer and Aristotle to Shakespeare. This works by canonising Gekko’s words and make his declaration more authoritative. Gekko is performing an act of re-definition and hiding it behind grandeur bordering on the absurd. The lines that follow are full of repetition, driving the speech forward and conveying a sense of momentum and power. There is the anaphora (repetition at the beginning of a phrase) of the word ‘greed’ at the beginning of successive phrases and the guttural consonance of the ‘g’ sound which transitions into the sharp ‘/k/’ of ‘clarifies’, ‘cuts’, and ‘captures’. Gekko leaves his sentences dangling, unfinished and undefined. ‘Good’ for what? ‘Right’ for who? This forces the audience to believe these statements as truth; it presents no space for argument, let alone disagreement. He is using the instability of language for maximum impact, a fact he all but admits to when he says ‘for lack of a better word’. Finally, Gekko solidifies the unimpeachability of his position with a call to ‘the natural order.’ He ends by stating biological evolution and capitalism are governed by the same system and therefore cannot be questioned.
Gekko’s speech is both simple and sophisticated. Through his use of rhetorical language and his dramatic, scientific position he hides his true intentions, creating an argument that is convincing and difficult to refute. He is, in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, demonstrating ‘one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy…the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness’. But why does Gekko’s argument, with all of its incompleteness and unjustified assumptions, convince his audience? The speech’s success lies in its ability to exploit a characteristic of the human mind. Humans, on a neurological level, want – or need – to fill in gaps in their knowledge, and when we lack the knowledge the brain will invisibly ‘fill in’ the gaps with created ideas. The extent of the human mind’s ability to fill in gaps is evident from Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga’s ‘split-brain’ experiments. In the experiment, in an individual whose connections between the two sides of the brain had been broken, the right-brain was shown instructions that the left-brain had to carry out. When the left brain acted and completed the task, without the information from the right-brain, it made up stories to explain its actions. For example, after telling the right-brain to pick up a glass of water, when the left-brain performs the action, absent of information, the left-brain will make up a reason that the person wholly believes, for instance saying and believing they were thirsty. Gekko can exploit this feature of the human mind because there is an element of truth in his argument, even if the final conclusion is faulty. He relies on the mind to fill the logical gap with a coherent story. In this speech the element of truth that he is exploiting is that competition (not ‘greed’) is valuable as a driver of productivity and economic growth. Competition drives productivity in three main ways: first, within firms, competition places pressure on the managers to increase efficiency. Secondly, competition for limited resources ensures that more productive firms are able to increase their market share, while the less productive are forced out. Thirdly, as Joseph Schumpeter argued, competition incentivises firms to innovate, developing products and processes which can lead to step-changes in efficiency. This can be ‘good’ for businesses, shareholders and consumers. However, Gekko’s argument is incomplete and unjustified and based on unproven assumptions. His argument draws on Herbert Spencer ideas of ‘social darwinism’; that the market works in the same way as evolution and has the same outcomes. Just as evolution is based on competition and uses natural selection to ‘choose’ a particular species as ‘the fittest’, then ‘social Darwinism’ argues that capitalist systems based on competition will inevitably produce the same results – the survival of the fittest companies and entrepreneurs.
While there is an apparent logic to this argument, it relies on two misunderstandings: of biological evolution and of economics. As Dave Speijer says, biological ‘evolution can be understood as a multi-level, highly intricate, interplay between two forces: chance and selection’. It is not a conscious competitive game. ‘Even evolutionary scientists themselves run the risk of overemphasising selection, while (unconsciously) downplaying the chance/luck component’. Furthermore, it is incorrect to assume that because evolution involves competition, only the most competitive organisms survive. As Lynn Margulis argues, ‘there are other forces in play in evolutionary biology, cooperation and, in particular, symbiosis. The ‘survival of the fittest’ mindset fails to recognise that ‘evolution gives rise to, amongst others, symbiosis, cooperation, altruism, and empathy’. Social Darwinism is also based on an incomplete understanding of economics. Irwin G. Wyllie observed that ‘the problem of success was not that of grinding down one’s competitors, but of elevating one’s self—and the two were not equivalent’. In addition, competition has proved to be a poor mechanism for improving productivity in multiple areas: markets where there is imperfect information, with the provision of public goods or where high levels of externalities exist, and instances where cooperative systems (the ‘Commons’) are better. Just as in biological systems cooperation and symbiosis is beneficial, so too in economic systems. Sharing can range from physical products, the exchange of materials, with waste to energy plants to collaborating to create intellectual property as in Boston’s life science cluster.
Gekko’s speech, although compelling to his audience, is based on faulty logic and is potentially dangerous; distorting knowledge for self gain. This is the dilemma of rhetoric. Rhetoric is powerful, as Plato stated, ‘it is the art of ruling the minds of men’. But this power comes with risks. As Martha Nussbaum argues, ‘fear…is easily manipulated by rhetoric. It needs to be moderated by informed debate’. John F. Kennedy recognised this, saying that ‘without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive’. Therefore, to counter the risks of rhetoric we must be able to identify linguistic devices and challenge unsubstantiated claims. This requires a recommitment to informed public debate. Through debate comes counter-arguments, the need to explain positions, increased flow of information and the opportunity to hear multiple perspectives. The importance of informed debate is exemplified by the role of the US postal service. In 1791, Washington stressed the importance of “diffusing a knowledge of the laws and proceedings” and as a result in 1792, Congress passed a law that guaranteed mailing newspapers was reliable and affordable. This was done deliberately to ensure all citizens were informed and able to debate the issues of the day.
The impact of rhetoric and debate is the result of the complex and sophisticated nature of speech and our own limited understanding of how speech works. This idea, termed ‘Idiot Wizard Paradox’ reminds us of the importance of understanding the nature of language and the mediums we use to communicate.
Explore more on ‘narratives’ from TAFT:
- Individual level to justify selfish behaviour, in ‘Narratives of Disempowerment: when ‘good men’ do nothing’,
- When organisations use the device as a semi-conscious defensive act, in ‘A Question of Form: system alignment in problem-solving’.
The Archive of Free Thinking 
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