Sources of Greed

What's the real source of greed? I am thinking about this recently. While it might seem obvious that greed comes from having too many desires and wanting too many things. But I think an alternate explanation might be that greed arises from a mentality of scarcity, due to a contracted sense of the self. In order to desire "a lot" for myself, there has to be a sense that things are perpetually moving away from me. This is the curse of Tantalus, who is condemned in the Greek classical underworld to not being able to reach food due to an overweening flood of water.
    I suspect that greed comes from an insecurity that is fed through a spirituality of scarcity. If people believe that there is no abundance that is already theirs, they will steel themselves to try to scrimp for whatever they can. A sense of security comes from the belief that I can have something "all my own", but this grasping mentality is actually the source of suffering itself. It comes from the idea that the world is perpetually spinning out of "my" grasp, which also entails a separate "I" as opposed to the world. It is like I am trying to grab crumbs falling from a table because I don't see the source of those crumbs. I treasure and value them as though they were the only food bits I could ever have, not knowing that the source is always renewing itself in some way or another. In essence, greed always stems from a partial view-not realizing that what we see is a piece in a greater whole.
    People might think that the answer to "greed" is to be happy with "less", but even this "less" is illusory because it, again, entails that the self is separate and isolated. It doesn't account for all the ways in which people are given many things and continue to be gifted with abundance. So I think that the answer to the question of how to curb greed is not "accept your lot in life", but rather, "open up to the abundance that already is life". I can only be as generous as I am able to see the universe as generous.