Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love

Self-Esteem, Amour Propre, Pride

If hubris is so dangerous, it would also seem dangerous to encourage it by protecting and boosting self-esteem. Yet high self-esteem is often presented as desirable, and its opposite, low self-esteem, is widely regarded as a cause for pity and concern. High self-esteem is often vaguely thought of as a psychological warm bath in which some people pleasantly luxuriate all the time. Furthermore, the “self-esteem movement” of the late twentieth century promised unlimited benefits from the provision of this warm bath: almost all human flaws, including educational failure, violence, crime, delinquency, failed relationships, depression, drug dependencies, and eating disorders, were the result of low self-esteem and therefore could be alleviated or cured entirely by sufficient injections of the real thing. The State of California even initiated the Task Force on Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility, hoping both to diminish expensive social problems and to increase its tax take, on the grounds that people with high self-esteem earn more, and therefore pay more tax. One can see why the double benefit of fewer social problems and a higher tax income proved irresistible to so many politicians.

Yet the self-esteem movement has never had a solid empirical basis, and research in the area is bedeviled by many factors. For instance, insofar as measures of self-esteem rely on self-report, they are muddied by the propensity of persons of low self-esteem to report the opposite, and vice versa. And then self-esteem is and presumably ought to be domain specific, so there is no single quality being measured. I might have a relatively high opinion of myself as a professor, but it would be madness for me to have a high opinion of myself as a violinist or golfer.

This introduces an important point about the notion of esteem. The root idea is that of an estimate or valuation, and that reminds us that there are two ways of going wrong: one can value something more than it deserves, or less than it deserves, and in most contexts each kind of mistake can bring its penalties. If I suppose that something is more valuable than it is, I incur various costs, and equally if I undervalue it. The art, then, is normally to value things according to their merits. Why should it be any different when it comes to oneself? If I value myself too highly in some respect, I risk being rebuffed more often than I expected; if I value myself too lowly, I risk passing over as beyond me opportunities from which I could have benefited. Getting it right would seem to be as important here as anywhere else.

So perhaps we should not be surprised that overall increases in self-esteem are of little or no benefit, although it took academic psychology a while to come to terms with this. It took a trawl through an initial haul of around 15,000 academic papers on the subject for psychologists to determine that the only reliable effect that it has is on a subject’s reported happiness. But that is itself hardly surprising, for how well we feel about ourselves is certainly a large component in how well we feel about the way things are going for us, which is pretty nearly synonymous with our state of happiness. We quoted Erasmus saying as much in chapter 3: self-esteem “makes everyone more agreeable and likeable to himself, and this is the main ingredient in happiness.” It is slightly alarming that a mountain of academic effort succeeded only in bringing forth this mouse of a result. Finding that self-esteem is a component of happiness is no more surprising than finding that self-confidence is a component of audacity. Other correlations either work the other way around (for instance, the high self-esteem is a consequence of the high earnings) or may be the joint result of an antecedent cause (a good education may lead both to reasonable self-satisfaction and high earnings).¹ And sometimes high self-esteem increases bad behavior, such as aggression toward out-groups or a propensity to see oneself as having been slighted, with consequent aggression toward the supposed cause. So California’s initiative faltered and died, although its specter haunts innumerable self-help books and educational tracts. Reminding oneself constantly that on every day in every way I am getting better and better is still prescribed as the royal road to worldly success and happiness. Injuring a child’s self-esteem is widely regarded as appallingly cruel, while preserving it in happy consciousness of its own perfection is the duty of every parent and every teacher. It is, perhaps, a rare sign of justice in this world that the parents and teachers have to live with the results.

It is tempting to suppose that psychology’s failed efforts largely derived from a failure to recognize the contextual and evaluative nature of the notion of esteem. Self-esteem is not a single warm bath with a single temperature measure. It is at best an aggregate of a whole different raft of specific valuations of one’s own abilities, achievements, talents, or capacities. This aggregate may be closely related to a general tendency to overconfidence, and we have already met the hubristic leader and his blithe self-certainty. But it is a mistake to see overconfidence always as a vice wholly engendered either by pride or by the fragile or narcissistic self. It can go on without any overt or conscious reference to the self at all. Even Iris Murdoch’s humble saint must have confidence that she can do some things and not do others, and her lack of self-consciousness could perfectly well go along with an overconfidence in her various abilities, or high self-esteem. But overconfidence also belongs to almost all of us, or at least far more of us than ever become victims of hubris or narcissistic personality disorders. Surveys constantly show our disproportionate confidence: in one, 95 percent of British drivers rated themselves above average drivers; in another, 94 percent of college professors rated themselves as better than average college professors. People say they are 100 percent confident of being right on tests on which they are in fact right only 78 percent of the time.2

And this plays havoc in many contexts. Take this last figure, and consider a building contract with penalty clauses for overrunning the time of a job. Any number of things might delay work and trigger the penalties, so let us imagine four of them: bad enough weather, failed deliveries, a workers’ strike, or unforeseen hazards on the site. Suppose that each of these is quite improbable. Sticking with the figure given above, suppose each has a chance of only 22 percent, and that they are independent of one another, meaning that none of them makes any of the others more or less likely. And suppose the contractor, looking at each of them, is not 78 percent certain, but 100 percent certain that it will not happen. With this confidence, he can gaily sign up to quite draconian penalties if the work runs over, since he is sure that it will not. Yet on these figures it is a good deal more probable than not that this will happen—63 percent probable in fact. In other words, the work will be delayed and the penalty will need to be paid in more than three cases out of five. People in all walks of life—not only financial advisers and bankers, but doctors and engineers—have been shown to display frightening inabilities to understand this, and hence frightening degrees of overconfidence. It is as if uncertainty is painful, and we do what we can to suppress it.

The well-known “base rate fallacy” may itself be a creature of overconfidence. A standard illustration comes from medicine. We imagine a relatively rare disease or condition: say, one in a thousand of a population may suffer from it. We then have a test that is billed as highly reliable. If you have the disease, it says that you have it; if you don’t, it very seldom—in around 1 percent of cases—gives a false positive and says that you do have it. You test, and alas, it shows that you have it. This is bad news, but how bad? Experienced doctors, just as much as laypeople, judge it is very bad, even that you are pretty certain to have the disease. But that is quite wrong: on these figures, your chance of having the problem is approximately one in eleven. You are still way more likely to be free of it (work it out: for a thousand people tested, one will have the disease, and he will test positive. So will around ten others, since we know that there are about 1 percent of false positives. So out of eleven positives, only one is correctly diagnosed). One way of explaining why people are prone to this fallacy is because of overconfidence: doctors inhabit a world of tests, and reliable tests are a good thing; pride in the white-coated, clinical world of evidence-based medicine requires that you recognize that they are good (and it is true—but not that good). But it is plausible to suggest that this confidence or pride deflects attention from the other elephant in the room: the low base rate and corresponding improbability of the diagnosis. People similarly overestimate the efficacy of both orthodox medicines and quack cures, because they forget the other elephant in the room, which is that most illnesses get better of their own accord. It wasn’t the pharmacist’s elixir or an overdose of vitamin C that effected the cure but time.

Overconfidence shows itself as well in illusions of understanding. An experiment that nicely illustrates this is to show people a narrative in which, say, various historical events are played out and various consequences left possible, with roughly equal chances. Reading the narrative cold, this is what experimental subjects conclude. But if they are first told that one particular consequence ensued, they read the narrative as having made this one much more probable than any of the others, stressing whichever bits of the narrative pointed that way and passing over the others. Furthermore, when we know how events turned out, we have highly unreliable memories about how well we predicted them, consistently overestimating our past prophetic powers. Very possibly Tony Blair and George Bush now give themselves full credit for having predicted all along that after their invasion, Iraq would be ungovernable.

This might seem to be another confirmation of our hair-trigger vanity. But interestingly, the same effect can be obtained with third-party judgments. That is, when people watched the same experiment with stooges performing the same task, and were debriefed in the same way, they nevertheless predicted that the stooges who had been “marked” highly would be better at distinguishing real suicide notes in a future real situation. So it was not just self-love that made the debriefing so ineffectual but the astonishingly sticky nature of ideas. Once one has an idea in one’s head, it is profoundly difficult to get rid of it, however decisively it has been exploded.

It is natural to call this tendency irrational and judged purely in terms of aligning our thoughts with the truth, it is so. On the other hand, it may well be adaptive in its own way. Being able to regard some question as closed frees up computational resources. It is a cost to have to keep an open mind, and the stickiness of once-formed opinion is a way of diminishing that cost. We do not revisit everything from the ground up but, fallibly and distortedly perhaps, start from where we take ourselves to have arrived. It is only when we confront the more bizarre consequences of this habit that we become aware of its potential for protecting delusions.

Earlier I quoted Iris Murdoch, who suggested that provided we can stop the vile self from intruding into the way we think about things, the resulting clarity of vision will make for love and truth. Unfortunately, the results we have been considering suggest that her diagnosis must be wrong. Other forces can prevent her desirable outcomes. Our vision may be blurred and our minds addled by past influences, regardless of whether we think in terms of ourselves or not. Just the ghost of a once-held belief may be enough to distort our interpretations and expectations, and the once-held belief need not even have concerned ourselves. But it becomes precious by being our own belief. Other things become precious when they are our own. People are typically unwilling to sell a lottery ticket for what they paid for it; the ticket has become more precious simply by being their very own. They have invested in it, and they are invested in it. Beliefs are like this but worse, since in abandoning a belief we must confess to having been mistaken, whereas in selling a lottery ticket, there is no question of fault. This is why processes of argument and reasoning so seldom succeed in changing anyone’s mind.

I now turn from self-esteem and self-confidence to a more conscious concern for ourselves. The first acute and extended moral and philosophical analysis of this was offered by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He himself was exquisitely sensitive to the opinion of others, believed himself subject to slights of all kinds, and constantly teetered on the edge of full-blown paranoia. He had an excuse, since the France of his day was dominated by the royal court, and, as Smith so wisely said:

In the courts of princes, in the drawing-rooms of the great, where success and preferment depend, not upon the esteem of intelligent and well-informed equals, but upon the fanciful and foolish favour of ignorant, and proud superiors; flattery and falsehood too often prevail over merit and abilities. In such societies the abilities to please are more regarded than the abilities to serve.3

Among other things, Rousseau suffered from the bitterest sense of injustice at his treatment by the establishment of church and state. He wrote that “it is true that in France Socrates would not have drunk the hemlock, but he would have drunk a potion infinitely more bitter, of insult, mockery, and contempt a hundred times worse than death.”⁴ So his writings can be read partly as a self-exorcism, a desire to overcome weaknesses, which he not only saw all around him but also felt in himself. His treatise Émile is an extended analysis of what has to be avoided, couched as an educational tract on how to bring up a young man to be free of all the vices and deficiencies that Rousseau saw as a canker in himself and others.

The distinction that structures his work is that between “amour de soi” and “amour propre.” The former is honest self-interest, issuing in our desire for basic well-being: health, food, shelter, and security. There is nothing regrettable about that, nor about our attempts to turn material circumstances toward ensuring such things (in Milton’s version of paradise, Adam and Eve have to do a good deal of gardening, even before the Fall, while at the end of Voltaire’s novel, Candide and his friends retreat from the horrors of the world into their own garden). Indeed, the early part of Émile’s education is to give him a useful trade, ensuring his ability to meet his needs in sturdy independence. But amour de soi is easily satisfied. It requires little of the world.

Amour propre is a different, more dangerous, and much hungrier beast. It is essentially comparative and relational. It concerns a person’s perception of his or her standing in relation to others. (Although Rousseau has, as it were, commandeered the idea of amour propre, there were, of course, anticipations. Montaigne, for example, had said that “whatever it is, art or nature, that imprints in us this disposition to live with reference to others, it does us much more harm than good … we do not care so much what we are in ourselves and in reality as what we are in the public mind.”5)

So, whereas someone’s ordinary self-interest can be forwarded or frustrated, their amour propre is essentially something that can be gratified or offended, bruised or wounded. It refers to our sensitivity to social standing and comparison. At its worst, it acts like a voice in our ear telling us that we have a right to take our place in front of others, or a right to their deference and humility. If these are not forthcoming, it poisons us with envy and resentment, and even at or near its best, it brings on greed, competition, and the desire for superiority. It may not be wholly bad, for as we shall shortly see, comparison with others is involved with our potential for pride and shame, and even Rousseau never argues that we should be blithely insensitive to our relations to others. But he does think that amour propre gets out of hand, and he devotes large parts of Émile to making sure that in his ideal pupil, it should not do so.

Émile is the ideal male pupil, but we should digress for a moment to consider his female counterpart, Sophy. In a notorious paragraph Rousseau sums up the essential difference between the status, or nature, of men in society and that of women:

Worth alone will not suffice, a woman must be thought worthy; nor beauty, she must be admired; nor virtue, she must be respected. A woman’s honour does not depend on her conduct alone, but on her reputation, and no woman who permits herself to be considered vile is really virtuous. A man has no one but himself to consider and so long as he does right he may defy public opinion; but when a woman does right her task is only half finished, and what people think of her matters as much as what she really is. Hence her education must, in this respect be different from man’s education. “What people will think” is the grave of a man’s virtue and the throne of a woman’s.6

Insofar as Rousseau was simply reporting on the conventional ethics of his time, this may be unexceptionable, even if the implications of that ethics are regrettable. But he also thought there was something inevitable about it, deriving (as Hume also thought) from the asymmetric roles of men and women in relation to their offspring. And if he were right, it might be thought that I was whistling in the wind earlier when I was careful to suggest that the vanity to which L’Oréal appeals can be discussed in a gender-neutral way. However, I see no reason to doubt that any gender-related asymmetries in the vanities of men and women are the result of culture: nurture, not nature.⁷ Be that as it may, it is important to note that Rousseau’s deference to the status quo in his world is not, as it stands, a defense of amour propre in women. For they are not being invited to compare themselves with others but only to present a good face to the world; it is not superiority that they are to worry about, but reputation. In principle, the distinction is clear enough, although in practice it may falter, since Rousseau says that admiration is a component of this reputation, and admiration is usually implicitly comparative. Most human traits excite admiration only when they come in a more or less extraordinary degree, in which case poor Sophy is more or less bound to have her quota of amour propre. And this in turn might lead us to query whether Rousseau has set himself a sensible target in the first place. Perhaps odious comparison is part of the human lot, and especially the female lot. I think this reservation must be noted but does not undermine the general thrust.

For Rousseau the principal element that opposes inflamed amour propre is compassion. Again echoing many other moralists before and since, Rousseau hymns the fundamental role of pity and fellow-feeling. He believes it is the first relation to others that touches the human heart, a natural emotion that takes us beyond ourselves so that “we identify with the suffering animal, by leaving, so to speak, our own nature and taking his.” Rousseau argues that to develop compassion we must ensure that we regard other people as much like ourselves, and see ourselves as vulnerable to whatever misfortunes strike others. This is an exercise of the imagination. Pity, says ancient wisdom, requires knowing that we may suffer in the same way ourselves. Arrogance, by contrast, shuts off compassion. So, for instance, the banker cannot conceive of earning less than millions, and so is indifferent to the fate of those whom he makes into beggars. The thought that “there but for the grace of God go I” is lost upon him. Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco—not unacquainted with misfortune, I am learning to help those who are miserable.8 Rousseau said, “I know nothing so fine, so full of meaning, so touching, so true, as these words.”⁹ An obvious problem with late capitalist society in England and the United States especially, is that those who are catapulted from wealthy backgrounds to jobs in banks, commercial law, politics, and so forth are very much ignara mali. They cannot actually comprehend the position of the others.

The aspects of human nature that shut us off from compassion are above all envy, jealousy, and vanity:

We must develop that heart and open its doors to his fellow-creatures, and there must be as little self-interest as possible mixed up with these impulses; above all, no vanity, no emulation, no boasting, none of those sentiments which force us to compare ourselves with others; for such comparisons are never made without arousing some measure of hatred against those who dispute our claim to the first place, were it only in our own estimation.10

In Rousseau’s picture, much human unhappiness and many of the ills of society derive from the insatiable desires that are inflamed simply by comparison with others. Insatiable, because the kind of invidious distinction at which we aim will seldom be satisfied, and for the majority of people can never be satisfied. Even if one day the mirror on the wall tells us that we are the fairest of them all, still we are uneasy, for at any moment it may reveal someone else to have overtaken us, and as in the fairy tale, this engenders malice and hatred, destroying whatever precarious happiness was built upon the imagined sense of preeminence. Human relationships become structured around envy and spite from below, arrogance and contempt from above.

There is nothing enviable about envy. It is a canker, and a shameful one at that. Smith writes that

as we are always ashamed of our own envy, we often pretend, and sometimes really wish to sympathize with the joy of others, when by that disagreeable sentiment we are disqualified from doing so. We are glad, we say on account of our neighbour’s good fortune, when in our hearts, perhaps, we are really sorry.11

Hypocrisy is here the tribute that vice pays to virtue. We might try a kind of defense, for although envy involves discontent, which is clearly unpleasant, it also has a kind of moral component.¹² It is a reaction to a felt inferiority, but particularly to the idea that the superiority of another is undeserved. It is this that especially galls us, so that envy is more than the wish to occupy the state of another but contains an element of perceived unfairness, and it is this that eats us up, bringing the discontent and malice that belong to it.

We might then think that it is not such a bad thing that we should be on the lookout for unfairness or injustice in the relative situations of persons, so that even if the emotion is self-centered, in that we only feel envy when it is our own worse situation that concerns us, nevertheless, there is a moral concern that is not wholly regrettable. Unfortunately, this glimmer of light is very dim. Envious people do not seem to translate their private emotion into a public, impartial concern for desert and justice. It is their own take on their own relative situation that bothers them, even to the point where it poisons their lives. And we cannot look to envious people for particularly well-tuned senses of injustice. Perhaps there was nothing unjust or undeserved about it at all. Perhaps the better person won, having worked harder and sacrificed more, but envy can still simmer in the breast of the loser. It is very easy to translate the fact that one wanted something into the thought that one deserves it (this is one manifestation of inflamed self-esteem), and thence into the thought that anyone else, who has it when one does not, is a fit object of resentment. A similar dynamic results in our hating those to whom we have behaved badly, thereby excusing our own behavior in our own eyes, a syndrome we already met in the man of hubris, but not unique to him. At any rate, it is a sufficiently common syndrome for Somerset Maugham to comment ironically on its alleged absence in one of his characters:

Most of us when we have done a caddish thing harbour resentment against the person we have done it to, but Roy’s heart, always in the right place, never permitted him such pettiness. He could use a man very shabbily without afterwards bearing him the slightest ill-will.13

Maugham is right to imply that Roy is unusual. La Rochefoucauld said that “we can forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.” It is as if we need to tell ourselves a self-justifying story so that we were not at fault after all. The upside of this is that if we do someone a good turn, we are more likely to think well of them, and do them another. So a recipe for getting someone to help you twice is to get them to help you once.

Hence, as well, the all-too-human pleasure of Schadenfreude, or mild elation at the (small) misfortune of another. Reading that this celebrity has had to replace an overweight breast implant, or that this other one’s toupee blew off at the airport, gives an undeniable frisson of pleasure. This too has a moral component, as if justice is after all reasserting itself. They deserve it that a little rain should fall into their charmed lives, or so we think. If they suffer a real catastrophe, perhaps losing a limb in a car accident, for instance, then in normal people there is no pleasure: nobody deserves to suffer that. We find it amusing if someone superior slips on a banana skin, but not if they fall under a bus. A bad review is a relatively small misfortune, and if a colleague complains of a bad review, our sympathy is all too likely to be mixed with the half-suppressed thought that, well, it was not too surprising, really, rather amusing—he does rather cut corners—whereas when we ourselves get a bad review, an abyss opens in front of us, the frame of the universe is shaken, and the very heavens cry out for justice.

This example may remind us that from the earliest times, philosophers have been aware that we are typically envious of those with whom we most easily compare ourselves and with whom we compete: “potter is furious with potter and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar is envious of beggar and singer of singer.”14 This is usually explained in the case of envy by the fact that in our imaginations we put ourselves in the other’s place, and it is easier to imagine being in the place of those close to us than those far away from us, on whatever scale of comparison we are using. In the case of Schadenfreude, it is easy to imagine ourselves in our colleague’s place, and to appreciate the mortification they must be feeling, yet any compassion we may therefore feel seems not to diminish the tincture of pleasure. Or perhaps it does diminish it for a moment, if our imagination is sufficiently vivid. Alas, though, and shamefully, it may still return, and we may feel doubly corrupt, albeit quite pleasurably, if we find that the very thought that we should not be amused or elated actually increases our amusement or elation: the cycle that often engenders uncontrollable giggling among children.

The closeness of what is imagined also chimes in with the well-known result of much research on happiness, which suggests a very widespread tendency to think that just an extra 15 percent would make all the difference to one’s life, and this wherever on the economic graph one happens to be. One can so easily imagine the arrival of that extra 15 percent, and the joy that the little differences would provide. The reverse effect also exists: if we just miss a train—a bad traffic light, a slow ticket clerk—we are much more annoyed than if we missed it by a mile.15 Again, however, research also suggests that when people gain their extra 15 percent, while it makes a difference for a while, their level of happiness rapidly returns pretty much to where it was before. The joy is fleeting. In fact, happiness is the response to a change rather than a continuous measure of an absolute level at which we are sited. Spinoza emphasized this: “we live in a state of perpetual variation, and, according as we are changed for the better or the worse, we are called happy or unhappy.”¹⁶ A letter from the tax authorities, demanding a barely noticeable sum, can plunge the rich recipient into gloom for a day; a day at the races winning, another barely noticeable sum brings a burst of elation. Many people spend some of their happiest days climbing cold, uncomfortable, rather fearful mountains because doing so gives a continuous drip of hard tasks executed and ground grimly gained.

This is one reason why there is a “paradox of hedonism” that can be put in terms of either happiness or pleasure. It is the thought that the least efficient way of finding either happiness or pleasure is to pursue them. Put in terms of happiness, we can see it like this: To be happy you must quite literally “lose yourself.” You must lose yourself in some pursuit; you need to forget your own happiness and find other goals and projects, other objects of concern that might include the welfare of some other people, or the cure of the disease, or simply in the variety of everyday activities with their little successes and setbacks. When Apollo pursues Daphne, he will be made happier by closing the gap, more miserable as it opens up. The happiness comes or goes because he has an independent measure of success. And so it is if we pursue some independent goal ourselves. I try to climb a mountain or to pursue philosophical understanding, and am made happy insofar as I perceive progress in that direction, miserable insofar as I feel the reverse. But if I have no independent goal, but simply try to pursue happiness itself, what is the measure of acceleration or deceleration? Sitting around is not accelerating one toward anything, except perhaps the grave. Indolence is a happy state after sufficient activity, but rapidly cloys, so that without a new goal boredom sets in and, according to Schopenhauer, is the next worse thing to pain: “If, over and above freedom from pain, there is also an absence of boredom, the essential conditions of earthly happiness are attained; for all else is chimerical.” We might be reminded of the desolation of Maria von Herbert, touched upon earlier.

The pursuit of happiness rapidly turns into the pursuit of wealth, which soon becomes a vast, limitless end in itself. To introduce this topic, it is good to have a term from zoology at hand. Seagoing birds that dive for fish, such as the gannets of the Hebrides or the boobies of the Galapagos Islands, provide one of nature’s most wonderful spectacles. Circling at a great height, they spot fish underwater and launch themselves downward at extraordinary speed, cleaving the water like javelins before coming up triumphantly with their prey. Unfortunately, other birds await them. The great skua or bonxie will attack and harass the gannet until it disgorges its meal, which the skua then makes off with; frigate birds do the same to boobies.

Zoologists call this way of living kleptoparasitism. It is found among human beings as well, and it is only too easy to select representative statistics out of the huge number that document its recent ascendancy. Here is a recent description of changes in the US economy:

The path that the division of corporate value added has taken since 1980 is reflected in data on productivity, pay, and income shares. From 1947 to 1979, productivity rose 119%, average compensation of production and non-supervisory workers (who constitute more than four-fifths of the private-sector labor force) grew 100%, and the share of national income received by the top 1 percent of earners (which would include most of top corporate management) ranged from 9 to 13%. From 1979 to 2009, in contrast productivity rose 80%, worker compensation rose 8%, and the top 1 percent of earners increased their share of national income to more than 23%.17

In fact, the very, very rich, the top .1 percent of Americans, take more than 12 percent of America’s pretax income. Greed is good; there is no such thing as society; and the only duty a company owes is to its owners. Since few people born since 1980 or so will be familiar with the extraordinary change in the philosophical climate that happened then, or can even imagine that once the moral climate was entirely different, it is important to stress that this is actually a very recent creed. In 1981 the American Business Round-table could still claim that “corporations have a responsibility, first of all, to make available to the public quality goods and services at fair prices … the long-term viability of a corporation depends upon its responsibility to the society of which it is a part.” How quaint! By 1997 the same organization proclaimed that “the principal objective of a business enterprise is to generate economic returns to its owners ….”¹⁸

Thatcher, Reagan, and Milton Friedman had taken over, and their absolute command of the spirit of the age continues, in spite of the visible damage to their people. To continue, 1 percent of Americans own 30 percent of the country’s personal wealth; the funds of the wealthiest three people in America would pay off the total deficit of all the States of the Union. Four hundred people control the same amount of wealth as the poorer half of the nation. To put this last figure in perspective: each of those 400 has wealth equivalent to that of nearly 400,000 fellow citizens: enough to fill five of the largest football stadiums. Talk of a social contract, in the face of these figures, sounds like what it is—a hollow mockery.

With the rare exceptions of the happiest countries in the world (especially the Scandinavians), inequality has accelerated world-wide for the last forty years, since the lurch to the right in the last decades of the twentieth century. But we can compare a different figure: directors of the top 500 British companies awarded themselves on average a 49 percent pay rise in 2010–11, a year in which the economy stagnated and the rest of the population saw their incomes fall substantially. In the United States, with the same stagnant economy, CEOs were uncharacteristically restrained, and contented themselves with a 40 percent rise. In the United States during the first two years of the faltering recovery of 2009 to 2011, average family income grew by a modest 1.7 percent, “but the gains were very uneven. Top 1 percent incomes grew by 11.2 percent while bottom 99 percent incomes shrunk by 0.4 percent.”19 It becomes a habit: according to a report on National Public Radio, in 2012 the wealth of the top 1 percent again increased by 20 percent, while that of the average worker increased by only 1 percent.

The horrified reaction of anyone with a tincture of civic sense is to ask how they can do it? How can they look themselves in the mirror, walk down the street? Have they no sense of decency, let alone fellow-feeling with the rest, whom they have robbed and continue to rob? Are they no better than the kleptocracies of the third world with their paranoid dictators and their grisly apparatus of repression? It is one thing to be a kleptoparasite, but how can anyone be a kleptoparasite without shame? Perhaps they forget to wonder how they appear to others: it is as if, not knowing Hume’s dictum that the minds of men are mirrors to one another, they walk around with “stinking breath” but without any self-consciousness about it (see chapter 1).

We have already seen part of the answer in the self-attribution fallacy. Otherwise reasonable people, surrounded by courtiers, need to believe, and therefore find it easy to believe, that they are worth it because of their exceptional abilities, judgment, and intelligence. Anything less than, say, 400 times the average income of workers in their companies would be unjust, a simple failure to reward their astonishing gifts adequately. This belief can grip even reasonable people, but then, we have already talked of the prevalence of psychopathic personality types at the top of the business heap, so very often these are not reasonable people. A man (it is usually men) on the board of a bank may convince himself that it requires extraordinary genius to offer those who lend money to the bank (customers) 1 percent interest, but only lend to borrowers at 16.5 percent interest, and to pocket as much of the difference as he can get away with.²⁰

The fact that any high-school student could do the sums does not seem to impinge on this colossal self-deception. Of course, there are in any industry people of real merit who may command something more than the average. But it is much easier to believe you belong to this class than to do so, and the belief is unlikely to be shaken if the craft skill is, as one banker is supposed to have boasted, “that of playing Russian roulette with other people’s heads.”

As important as hoarding all the credit to oneself is the inability to comprehend the position of the other 99 percent or even 99.9 percent: secure in their smoke-tinted limousines and gated communities, the kleptoparasites are literally ignara mali. As Rousseau went on to say:

Why have kings no pity on their people? Because they never expect to be ordinary men. Why are the rich so hard on the poor? Because they have no fear of becoming poor. Why do the nobles look down upon the people? Because a nobleman will never be one of the lower classes….

So another aspect of greed is that the fat cats fence themselves off, maintaining as far as possible their ignorance of ill. Sometimes the results would be laughable were they not so harmful. In their book Unjust Rewards, Polly Toynbee and David Walker give results of a 2007 survey of the top 1 percent of earners in the City of London. These hugely high-flying executives, lawyers, and bankers had completely fantastical views about the country they lived in and allegedly “ran”:

But if myopia is a common condition, the high earners of Canary Wharf turned out to be as blind as bats. They knew less about earnings than the general public and were less accurate than the top 10% of earners in the BSA survey. Our bankers and lawyers were all comfortably in the top 1% of earners, many in the top 0.1%, yet here they were saying that 6% of earners were better off than them. They earned £150,000 [about $290,000] plus, yet placed themselves on the scale below those actually earning £50,000 [about $98,000] (pre-tax). One even placed himself plum in the middle, imagining 50% earned more than him—when the middle or median earnings, the halfway point at which half of full-time earners in the UK get paid more and half less, were £23,764 [about $47,000] pre-tax in April 2007. They wanted to compare themselves with richer people, inventing a society in which they are a step or two down from the top. Comparing themselves upwards not downwards, they considered themselves normal, when they were anything but.

A high income in 2007 was £39,825 [about $78,000], the sum it took to put an earner into the top tax band. Some 90% of the UK’s 31.6 million taxpayers earned less than that, a fiscal fact our group found hard to believe. They over-estimated by four times what it takes to enter that top 10% bracket of earners in the UK: they thought it was £162,000 [about $317,000].21

Similarly, in the 2012 presidential race, Mitt Romney suggested that a “middle income” family in America would earn about $250,000, whereas in fact the median income for a family of four was just one-quarter of that sum. This might be merely comical, except that it undoubtedly helped all those incredibly brilliant financiers and analysts to grossly misvalue everything else in their hands, precipitating the crisis in 2008 that led to the current recession in the Western world.

One might think that this simply shows that top CEOs, lawyers, bankers, and politicians are ignorant and unimaginative, on top of the other personality disorders we have already described. But of course their imaginations are intact enough in one direction. For there is one kind of person that fully engages the fat cat’s imagination: fatter cats. Envy fuels the kleptoparasitic leapfrog, accelerated by transparency requirements that pretty much make earnings public knowledge. Remuneration committees, made up by people either earning comparable amounts to those whose pay they determine or employed by people who themselves do so, and who therefore would not welcome anything that rocked the boat, report that the constant refrain is that the people in some other companies earn more—everyone compares themselves with the top quartile of directors’ pay—so that it is actually unjust that I, every bit as deserving as he, should be paid only millions whereas he is paid tens of millions. In case this seems overstated, shed a tear for poor, suffering Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, deemed in 2013 to have a fortune of $20 billion by Forbes magazine, who was so upset at not being placed in the world’s top ten—but rather merely listed as the richest person in Saudi Arabia—that he has been driven to sue the publisher for defamation. And so it goes, with envy for those above and indifference to those below, vanity, psychopathy, culpable ignorance, self-deception, and lack of imagination all contributing richly to cocktail hour in the City.

In case it is thought unlikely that envy and the corresponding desire to excite envy should motivate these rational, economic men, we might remember the old story about the man who is offered by a fairy any gift he wishes—provided only that his neighbor will also receive twice what he requests. After some thought, he asks to lose one eye.

Perhaps, fortunately, the diminishing marginal utility of money rapidly irons out any advantage in terms of happiness that these astronomical incomes bring about. The difference in ability to live a decent life between a poor Somali woman struggling to feed her dying children and an ordinary middle-class worker who earns, say, $60,000 each year, is incomparably greater than that between the worker’s life and the life of the CEO who earns $6,000,000 a year. So one might think that the huge and increasing inequalities are of little real significance. However, after the 2008 collapse, the bank bailouts and continued predations of the rich transferred huge amounts of private debt onto the government books, leaving most governments with little option, as they saw it, than to cut social welfare, thereby pushing as many of their citizens as possible toward the plight of the Somali woman.22

The ancient Greeks had another myth, that of Midas, the king of Phrygia or Western Turkey. Although already rich, when he was offered the chance of getting whatever he wished for, the best he could imagine was that everything he touched should turn to gold. This wish was granted, and the result was highly pleasing—for a short while. But it turned into a nightmare as his food turned to gold, and then his daughter when he kissed her. In no time he was begging to be released from the curse, and, unusually for someone with a fatal flaw in Greek dramas, this was eventually granted him. As with the myth of Narcissus, the moral is wider than we might think. It is difficult for rich people to be friends with poor people, and difficult for the very rich to have satisfying human relations with anybody or anything. The worm of fear sees to that. The plutocrat needs a gated community and bodyguards whom he hopes he can trust, but may fear he cannot. His business associates will be out to cheat him, or so he will fear. Any chance of friendship is likely to be poisoned by the fear that the friend is only in it for gain; families themselves are wrecked by envy and bitterness, boredom and desolation, all of which follow on the heels of excess money. Lottery winners tend to have grotesquely distorted lives, where tawdry opulence is paid for by forfeiting any chance of more ordinary, greater pleasures. And yet the spell is hard to break. Few seem able to resist the lure of more, and then more, far beyond the point where the marginal utility curve begins to slope downward.

Perhaps the most horrifying examples of those at the top maintaining willful blindness to the rest arise in military history from the gulf between generals and men. Military historian Basil Liddell Hart says, on the battle of Passchendaele during the 1914–18 war:

Perhaps the most damning comment on the plan which plunged the British Army in this bath of mud and blood is contained in an incidental revelation of the remorse of one who was largely responsible for it [the chief of staff of the overall commander, General Haig]. This highly placed officer from G.H.Q. was on his first visit to the battle front—at the end of four months’ battle. Growing increasingly uneasy as the car approached the swamplike edges of the battle area, he eventually burst into tears, crying “Good God did we really send men to fight in that?” To which his companion replied that the ground was far worse ahead. If the exclamation was a credit to his heart it revealed on what a foundation of delusion and inexcusable ignorance his indomitable “offensiveness” had been based.23

Here another observation from philosophers has been confirmed by experience with law courts and psychological experiments alike. This is that individual stories and individual experiences matter in a way that generalities do not. The top brass needed to see for themselves.

In general, it may be affirmed, that there is no such passion in human minds, as the love of mankind, merely as such, independent of personal qualities, of services, or of relation to ourself. It is true, there is no human, and indeed no sensible, creature, whose happiness or misery does not, in some measure, affect us when brought near to us, and represented in lively colours: But this proceeds merely from sympathy, and is no proof of such an universal affection to mankind ….²⁴

Or, as Joseph Stalin is reported to have said, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” If nothing rubs your nose in the tragedy of an individual, the economic or social policy that engenders millions of such tragedies fails to engage us either. The famous phrase that provides the measure of value according to utilitarianism, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” picks out an abstraction of no imaginative substance. It is fine as a label but will not motivate us or upset us in the same way as a close engagement with a single unhappy soul. And by averting his eyes from individuals, the king, rich man, or nobleman can avoid any potential murmurings from his conscience.

A confirmation of this in the law courts is that companies whose doings impact unfavorably on whole towns or populations are fined less in punitive damages than those who affect a very few. The few have faces and stories that can engage the sympathy of judge and jury, but the many do not. There is, however, an upside to this, which is the power of the individual story. As engaged novelists like Dickens or Harriet Beecher Stowe well understood, and as charities show every day, an individual narrative or a single picture of an individual suffering is of more use to the campaigner or reformer than some abstract statistic about social ills or deprivation.

The reverse side of the coin to envy is arrogance or contempt. Here the superior, again in whichever scale is in play, looks down on the position of the inferior and plumes himself on his relative standing. In real life this is probably as ubiquitous as Schadenfreude, but although we know that others feel it, it remains unpardonable for them to express it. The person who lets you understand his sense of superiority, and his pride in his own self and relative contempt of yours, is about as odious as can be. This may seem odd, given that it is the habitual stance of the idol in the advertisement or on the catwalk, as we have already seen. Yet in real company, away from our imaginings in front of the advertising poster, modesty, when we feel ourselves rather better than others, is a virtue when it comes naturally, and a duty if it does not.

The distortions in human affairs caused by greed and envy are all around us. For thirty years or more, and particularly since the triumph of capitalism over the old communist orders, market enthusiasts have preached that greed is good, and that the finest aim in human life is to claw oneself to the top of the riches ladder. But greed is not good. The claim that it is so was originally satirical and put in the mouth of the appalling financial hotshot Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie Wall Street:

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. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.

But it is dangerous to satirize the spirit of the age. Reality has a way of catching up with the satire, and certainly did so in this case. Greed is, as we have described, the inordinate desire for the envy of others, or the desire that others think less well of themselves than they do of you. As Smith said, the other advantages of wealth over decent sufficiency are largely chimerical, but this is the one that fuels the boardroom race.

One of the nicest passages in which an author laments the nature of these passions occurs in the constitutional theory of the second president of the United States, John Adams, who argued that a proper constitution for a country must take account of the infirmities of the people who make it up:

The passions are all unlimited; nature has left them so: if they could be bounded, they would be extinct; and there is no doubt they are of indispensable importance in the present system. They certainly increase too, by exercise, like the body. The love of gold grows faster than the heap of acquisition: the love of praise increases by every gratification, till it stings like an adder, and bites like a serpent; till the man is miserable every moment when he does not snuff the incense: ambition strengthens at every advance, and at last takes possession of the whole soul so absolutely, that the man sees nothing in the world of importance to others, or himself, but in his object. The subtlety of these three passions, which have been selected from all the others because they are aristocratical passions, in subduing all others, and even the understanding itself, if not the conscience too, until they become absolute and imperious masters of the whole mind, is a curious speculation. The cunning with which they hide themselves from others, and from the man himself too; the patience with which they wait for opportunities; the torments they voluntarily suffer for a time, to secure a full enjoyment at length; the inventions, the discoveries, the contrivances they suggest to the understanding, sometimes in the dullest dunces in the world, if they could be described in writing, would pass for great genius.25

Evidently, John Adams would not have been surprised by results like those of Polly Toynbee and David Walker.

It might seem as if the only escape from this treadmill of unhappiness and disappointment would be to live the life of a solitary, alone on a desert island. But Rousseau does not think that: he knows that men have to live among men. The real defense begins, as we have seen, with compassion. But compassion involves an imaginative displacement into the state of another, and it is this imaginative power, more evenly directed, that is the key to a better social world. We have amour propre, in that we do need recognition and respect from other people; we can, after all, be insulted, affronted, demeaned, and humiliated. But a fully developed imagination enables us to appreciate that just as we have our amour propre, so too do other people. It is therefore unreasonable to ask them to give more to you than you give to them. It is an offense against equality and reciprocity. These entail demanding only such recognition and respect from other people as they can justly demand from you. In this dimension, there are no pedestals. In other words, if you ever think “because I am worth it,” you must also think, “because every individual is worth it.”