Welcome back. It’s been a good month. I took the opportunity to read a lot of new books and I’m excited to be able to keep building on the ideas I started outlining a few months ago.
I’ve thought a lot over the last few weeks about what priorities we adopt and, by extension, where we place the bulk of our focus and efforts.
Over the break I took the chance to read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It’s an interesting book but not a subtle one. Most importantly for this blog, the question of conflicting goals takes a central role in Huxley’s dystopian vision of humanity’s future.
At the climax of the story, the protagonist argues with Mustapha Mond, the World Controller of Western Europe, about whether or not society is better off for having eliminated poverty and conflict at the expense of truth and beauty. Mustapha Mond explains the trade-off they made:
“Our Ford himself [Henry Ford] did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t. . . . One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness as got to be paid for.”
I’ll try to redeem Ford later. But Huxley saw Henry Ford, and American society in general, ushering in a new era where the universal happiness of commercialism would steadily erode people’s ability to appreciate truth and beauty. Henry Ford’s assembly line would develop in society an insatiable appetite for new and appealing, but ultimately cheap and insubtantial, baubles.
Brave New World is no doubt a bit alarmist. But it’s also sadly prophetic. In every choice there is an opportunity cost. Far too many people have chosen self-interest as the focus of their life’s work. Far too many more have been convinced that the business for which they work should have no greater purpose than its own profit. Neal A. Maxwell called it “the demanding cadence called for by the cares of the world[,] . . . maneuverings of materialism [that] would be comedy if they were not tragedy.” And in the process these people have lost the opportunity to make business do more.
This is really at the root of why I called this blog “Better than Capitalism.” It’s not so much that I’m out to prove that there’s some other economic system that will outperform capitalism, I don’t have anywhere near the expertise in economics that I’d need to do that. It’s really about the twin ideas that (1) there are way more important things than self-interest, even in business, and that (2) by making capitalism a means instead of an end—by shifting our focus so that business becomes first a way of lifting each other—we can achieve things even better than capitalism now offers us.
