A Return to Rational Self-Interest

Issue No. 32 : The rediscovery of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy

The fall is the best time for surfing in Southern California: swells are growing, winds are turning offshore, and the water is warm. Photo: Per Håkansson.

In 1776 Adam Smith published his opus An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations which gave him the epitaph “father of economics”. It was one of the first books that described how a nation’s wealth is built and has since become the Bible for capitalism and consumption.

But what most people forget is that our honorable Scotsman was first and foremost a moral philosopher and wrote Wealth of Nations from the perspective of rational self-interest as opposed to mercantilism (which is what the current US government is re-implementing) that had been up until then the guiding light.

In his first book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published seventeen years earlier, he argued the importance of rational self-interest but also the importance of finding the balance between what we really need and what the world offers:

“In some deep sense then there’s a discord between what our world wants us to want and what our beings in fact need. Living our lives well requires that we figure out a productive way to navigate this divide between what the world says is good and what is in fact genuinely good for us.”

Adam Smith realized that if we only followed what society wants us to be, do, and buy we’d be surely lost. What he is doing in his lesser known work is to argue for fewer better things, to let your true needs and purpose guide your self-interest.

Like so often in life, we grab the story that supports our view and beliefs and leave the rest on the table. In the case of Adam Smith, we have dropped the word rational, kept self-interest, and changed its meaning to everything is good.

It’s easy to believe that the idea behind Fewer Better Things is somewhat anti-capitalism but that would be a mistake. It’s actually very supportive of classical capitalism where our rational self-interest can lead to a lot of good in the world if we actually made rational decisions that were good for us. But we often don’t.

I’ve previously written about mimetic desire and how our environment is shaping our decisions through social competition and comparison. We simply want what other people have simply because we regard them as our role models. And that’s why social media is so profitable and why we now live in an influencer culture.

What I’m exploring with Fewer Better Things is how to create a thriving modern lifestyle that is mostly – hard to avoid all influences and we probably shouldn’t – based on rational self-interest.

So let’s go through the current experiments and take a look: