This is Stephen Fry's Seven Deadly Sills.

Episode 3.

Averis.

Averis.

Agreed.

As we recall it today, now there's a proper vice.

One week and all, surely identify with claim and confess to.

I was all ready to dive into greed, own it and rub it all over me like suncream.

When the thought flashed across my mind that another of the Seven Deadly Sills is rather similar.

Perhaps in my excitement to acknowledge and engage with greed, I'd really been thinking all along of gluttony.

For when I hear the word greedy, I think first of food and drink.

I think of greedy guts and greedy pigs whose eyes are bigger than their tummies.

But all those surely belong more to the fat warthog gluttony than to hard-eyed, averis and greed.

Gluttony, after all, is a physical desire seen not just in gormondizing,

but in all kinds of addictive behaviors, whereas greed comes not from the body, but from the mind.

Averis is therefore, I think, a better word to describe.

Our altogether darker, meaner kind of owning, hoarding, grabbing, collecting, acquiring, winning impulse.

So when we talk of greed, we'll forget food and wine and concentrate on avericious greed.

This greed is the grasping of the money-grubbing miser, the skin-flint cold-heartedness of a scrooge,

the unquenchable territorial ambition of an empire builder, the venal capacity of the corrupt official,

and the voracious TV evangelist, the limitless need for more and more and more

that drives the repine and monopolistic instincts of the acquisitive hedge funder,

...