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Artha is the pursuit of wealth without attachment; without losing your mind and soul in that pursuit. Greed is not the pursuit of wealth, it is another concept entirely. Greed causes you to make mistakes in a trade because you lose perspective.
Wealth is good. Desire and the pursuit of wealth is good. Its the driving motivating force behind many of the amazing achievements of mankind.
Greed is not good.
One of my favorite slogans: "You don't have to fuck people over to survive." This doesn't mean you don't compete or even aggressively compete. Struggle and competition is part of human existence. If you install a market into a small agrarian economy it dramatically increases the wealth. Trading is everywhere, even in art.
But you don't have to destroy somebody else just to obtain slightly better margins. And you certainly don't need to run an economy based on short term margins while setting the stage for massive financial disaster once you move onto your next job. The finance industry naturally attracts lots of people who really don't get that.
And in case you are wondering, the other 3 pursuits in the life of a Hindu:
Kama - desire, especially sexual desire. There is a book called the Kama Sutra. Perhaps you have heard of it. Desire can also get out of control and transform into lust and make you do all kinds of stupid shit. But sex and desire are a strong component in Love, and people ... Love is good.
Dharma - in this context it means religious duty, or the path that you are obligated to follow to transform your life and your world. It also refers to the technology of freeing yourself from attachment.
Moksha - salvation, the cessation of delusion. aka Nirvana. In the classical life of a Hindi you focus on Moksha in your later years; sometimes even taking a vow of poverty (leaving the Artha to your wife and going wandering with a begging bowl). The experiences of wealth and desire teach you why you need to be unattached, why your head and soul need to be clear. In the world of stock trading this means getting your ass burned by your own attachment and stupidity. That is one reason why involvement in the world is necessary during your life. You can not immediately go for nirvana, you have to live a little, get burned a little, get your heart broken a few times and understand how the mechanism of desire works. Only then can you escape it.
Wealth is not an impediment to self-realization, but attachment to wealth is.
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