Adam Smith's ignorance remains a major danger--at this point, a danger to life as we know it. We will also consider one more gem of Adam Smith's dangerous wisdom: class war. Long before Karl Marx, Smith recognized class war, and tried to warn us. We look at how that relates to the shift from moral statistics to market statistics, and how infection with the capitalistic style of consciousness and thought begins to shape our world. Examples include slavery, Exxon (and the fossil-fuel industry in general), Ford (and other car makers), and more.

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Today, we will consider the dangerous ignorance of Adam Smith—Captain Capitalism himself.

We’ll actually consider a little more of the dangerous wisdom of Adam Smith, but we’ll give some serious attention to a some of his dangerous ignorance. We’ll get at what might be the most dangerous of his dangerous ignorance.

In our last contemplation, we reflected on three interrelated gems of dangerous wisdom we find in the writings of Adam Smith, the name most strongly associated with capitalism:

First, in considering capitalism, Smith says we face a fork in the road, we face a decision between two very different paths: The path of wisdom and virtue on the one hand, and the path of capitalism on the other, which we can characterize as the path of ignorance and vice.

Secondly, Smith says only the path of wisdom and virtue can bring us true happiness and peace. This makes the true wealth of nations a matter of the level of wisdom, love, and beauty in the culture, not gross domestic product or profits.

Thirdly, Smith says the path of capitalism can never bring us true happiness and peace, and that chasing wealth, power, fame, and conventional success amounts to chasing frivolous trinkets.

Frivolous trinkets. So says Captain Capitalism himself.

We find a tragedy in the dangerous ignorance of Adam Smith, because he ends up endorsing a path of life—a path for entire nations of people—that he himself sees as a path of chasing frivolous trinkets that can never secure our fullest happiness and peace.

As we contemplated that last point, I thought of another passage from Smith’s work that makes it even sharper, but we had already considered so many things that it seemed wise to save it for another time. We can consider it now, as a way to both remind ourselves of what we considered, and to carry ourselves forward into fresh insights.

This is a slightly longer passage, and I’ll let you know when we come to the end. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith writes,

“What the favourite of the king of Epirus said to his master, may be applied to men in all the ordinary situations of human life. When the King had recounted to him, in their proper order, all the conquests which he proposed to make, and had come to the last of them; And what does your Majesty propose to do then? said the Favourite. – I propose then, said the King, to enjoy myself with my friends, and endeavour to be good company over a bottle. – And what hinders your Majesty from doing so now? replied the Favourite.

“Examine the records of history, recollect what has happened within the circle of your own experience, consider with attention what has been the conduct of almost all the greatly unfortunate, either in private or public life, whom you may have either read of, or heard of, or remember; and you will find that the misfortunes of by far the greater part of them have arisen from their not knowing when they were well, when it was proper for them to sit still and to be contented. The inscription upon the tomb-stone of the man who had endeavoured to mend a tolerable constitution by taking physic; ‘I was well, I wished to be better; here I am’; may generally be applied with great justness to the distress of disappointed avarice and ambition.” TMS III.3.30-2

Maybe Smith’s unconscious mind put this image forward for us—because Adam Smith comes across as rather incoherent. By that I mean Smith recognized the deep faults of what we call capitalism while still recommending it.

We’re not talking about surface problems or something like a nuanced or paradoxical view. Nor can we credit Smith with transcending the “foolish consistency” that Emerson called “the hobgoblin of little minds.” Smith wasn’t that level of genius, and he most certainly was no sage.

Rather, Adam Smith recognized fundamental problems with taking the road of materialism over the road of wisdom and virtue. And then he recommended doing it anyway. That’s incoherent. Incoherence is a hobgoblin of little intellectuals—a mischievous spirit of their mental household that reveals their lack of deeper wisdom. Socrates made a lot of enemies by conjuring forth the incoherence of his fellow citizens—including the rich and famous.

This story about the king of Epirus, along with other ideas and stories Smith shares, makes it rather clear that following the road of ignorance and vice—the path of materialism, the path of capital, the path of extrinsic, self-enhancing values—can make us unable to see that we’re okay, unable to cultivate the nature and causes of being truly well.

The pattern of insanity we refer to as capitalism cuts us off from the great perfection of life and the great connectedness of life, and it puts peace and happiness somewhere in the future, after we get plenty of material stuff that can’t make us truly okay.

What a tragic situation: We go down a road thinking it will make us happy, but it is precisely that road which will cover over our happiness and put us out of touch with happiness and peace. We may find that humanity’s tombstone will read, “We were well, we had no idea how to be better; here we are.”

None of this means people can’t find relative pleasure and relative contentment. People can project meaning into their lives, and can feel self-satisfied. And when we have enough of money, it can insulate us from a lot of catastrophes that would otherwise cause suffering for us. So there’s a way in which we can use materialism to make our lives rather comfortable—in a relative sense.

But the wisdom traditions are very clear about this, and Smith agrees with them: We can’t get true happiness and peace outside of wisdom, love, and beauty. And those do not come from the marketplace.

We could see this as one of the strangest features of the capitalist marketplace we have made so central to our culture: That it will never give us what we most need and value.

However, we all exist in a complex medium of propaganda and indoctrination that seduces us (or programs us) into thinking that, whatever good has happened over the past 200+ years, we have to credit that good to capitalism. Catastrophes happen either by acts of God or because of socialism.

And we’re going to call that out a little bit for the b.s. that it is. As we already pointed out, we can’t even eat the fish in our rivers and lakes without risking our health. If you live in the United States and you go fishing at a lake, eating that fish might be equivalent to drinking contaminated water for a month.

The unconscious begins to erupt in relation to these sorts of things. We end up projecting the shadows of capitalism and our materialist culture. So many of the things people in the dominant culture get reactive about relate to the problems with capitalism we all have some awareness of onto other people and groups.

Who and what do we think poisoned these fish? Was it the crazy liberals? Was it the tree huggers? Was it somebody on welfare? Was it a bunch of socialists?

No, it was DuPont, 3M, and other corporations. And they did that because their goal is not the health of our waterways. Their goal is to make money, and if making money means that our rivers and lakes get poisoned, well then, they’re gonna get poisoned. That’s just the logic of this system.

Because of this, we find an incredible irony whenever people start yelling about “big government”. From a certain perspective, I agree. I don’t want “big government” either.

Capitalists and their political servants always say we need to get big government” off our backs. They say “big government” is interfering with innovation. That’s a lie. A huge lie.

What’s interfering with real innovation?

Again, I don’t want “big government,” but big business is a far bigger threat to us all. Big business is on our back like a radioactive gorilla, and it constrains us in a thousand ways.

Maybe we shouldn’t even say big business is on our back. Maybe we should say big business functions like an imperial commander that has its jack boot to our throat, and we don’t fully realize that we can barely breathe, because we’re so used to it.

This issue relates to one of the most important elements of dangerous wisdom we touched on in our last contemplation. It didn’t come from Adam Smith. Rather, Adam Smith tried to avoid and evade it.

The dangerous wisdom we brought into focus has to do with our shared ecological and spiritual commons. We share values and ecological relationships that go directly against the capitalist framework. And capitalism functions by means of fragmentation and disconnection.

The economic regime that dominates our lives falsely assumes we don’t have to act collectively. This arises as a symptom of the fragmentation at its heart. The system treats us as atomized individuals, and encourages self-centered thought.

We get seduced into a distaste for collective action, and we suffer a loss of skill in thinking, debating, and creating together. We need to recover the skills necessary for sitting in council together, and thinking by means of wise and creative dialogue, dreaming, singing, storytelling, and more.

Recovering the commons means recovering relationality, and recovering a participatory orientation toward both Nature and culture. We need to liberate our basic goodness.

One of the problems with capitalism comes down to this: Our basic goodness cannot be put to the ends of goodness itself. Whatever good is in us, the capitalist system will restrain that good. It restrains it every way it can.

The only end that our intelligence and creativity can be put to in the capitalist system is making products and profits. We cannot put our creative intelligence to use in increasing the level of wisdom, love and beauty in the world, increasing the vitality of the world, making the rivers and lakes healthy, making the forests and oceans abundant.

Of course, now the greenwashing of capitalism tells us that we can clean up the rivers and lakes—but only if we can find a profit in that. But the rivers and lakes were healthy before we started trying to make money doing things that degraded them.

It’s almost insulting to have ruined the rivers and lakes, and then to come around and say, “Well, if we can find a way to make money cleaning them up, then we’ll clean them up.” Why on Earth should we trust the same process that ruined them to clean them up?

How could we possibly trust that process? It’s not only the very same process that poisoned the water. It’s also the same process that gives us cigarettes, junk food, and genetically modified crops; the same process that gives us social media, predatory loans, and mass surveillance; the same process that gives us cancer, heart disease, and dementia; the same process that gives us anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

This all has to do with the countless ways big business is on our backs. Big business messes up our rivers and lakes. Big business pollutes our air. Big business lies to us and tells us what to do.

We can see this in the struggle over working from home, or the things we read about Twitter. Imagine what it must be like to work for Elon Musk.

All of this reminds us that big business tries to control where we go, how we dress, whom with talk to and for how long. In many places, big business regulates when employees can eat, when they can go to the bathroom, and more. Big business also has the power to falsely and oppressively declare that we are NOT official employees, but just independent contractors. This forces us to pay to work.

Big business villainizes unions, and unleashes task forces to stop our attempts to organize ourselves as workers. They feed us a buffet of lies about unions, even though unions have done so much good for humanity. And if, against all their dirty tricks, we succeed in setting up a union, big business will close the place down rather than deal with workers who collaborate.

Adam Smith recognized the nature of this tension between capitalism and human welfare, and the imbalance between capitalists and workers. He recognized that free markets are not truly free, because workers cannot last long without jobs, while capitalists have enough wealth to go without employees if they have to.

Under the regime of capitalism, big business does all it can to disempower us, and we lose control of our lives, because big business violates spiritual and ecological realities.

If we pay attention, we may notice that big business gives us a lot more trouble than big government, and if we look even closer we see how big business and big government go together, and how former employees of big business get positions and influence in big government on a regular basis.

Again, I’m no fan of big government. I don’t want anybody on our backs. And we don’t have autonomy in the system that has us all in its grips right now. We just do the bidding of that system, in many cases without fully realizing it.

And one question we might ask is, How do we intelligently and creatively rebel against this? How do we recover our sanity? How do we recover our own basic goodness?

Because a lot of traditions see us as basically good. We find a range of views in the wisdom traditions, but many of them see us as basically good. And it seems to me we have proof of this in our ongoing struggle against the ignorance and vice capitalism makes us prone to.

And this has been extremely valuable because it has allowed us so far to prevent the total destruction of the ecologies we all depend on.

Capitalism itself, big business itself, restricts us from putting our creativity and intelligence into anything else but making products and profits. Profit is the goal. That’s it.

But because people really have a lot of goodness in them, they basically keep trying to fight against that. And so we’ve been really lucky that we’ve gotten a lot of good things because people keep trying to do the good.

In the capitalist system, we are not incentivized for doing good. That’s not the goal. That’s not what the system does. Smith was clear about that, and we need to be clear too.

The system only pursues wealth, power, fame, and pleasure. It’s a path of ignorance and vice. It does not have wisdom, love, and beauty as its aim. And so it constantly holds those in check.

It’s not wise, loving, or beautiful to poison the rivers and lakes that we all depend on,

but that’s what capitalism is willing to do if it can make money in the process.

As we just noted, many wisdom traditions see us as basically good. Even the Christian tradition, which has a notion of original sin, also has a deeper and more primordial notion of original goodness, because we were made in the very image of the divine. That leaves us with a primordial goodness that may certainly become obscured, but it still remains in us, and our practice of life can remove obscurations from it, and allow it to manifest itself with increasing clarity.

Many other traditions share this kind of view or some variation on it. And no venerable tradition writes us off as unredeemable.

As part of the sacred common ground of the wisdom traditions of the world, we find them standing in agreement that the level of goodness we manifest depends on our holistic practice of life. If we refrain from evil and we practice much good, we will presence wisdom, love, and beauty with increasing skill and grace in our every though, word, and deed.

That’s precisely what makes Adam Smith’s recommendation of the road to perdition so dangerous. Because capitalism infects us in such a way that it can perpetuate or even deepn the obscuration of our basic goodness, and it makes it harder for us to liberate that basic goodness.

We’re going to consider some clear examples of how capitalism infects our thinking, facilitating our rationalization of actions out of attunement with our own basic goodness and the teachings of our revered spiritual, religious, and philosophical traditions.

This is what makes it so important to correct Smith’s dangerous ignorance. We humans have a potential to do both good and evil. But our basic goodness makes evil far more difficult without rationalization. And if we live in a context rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty, evil becomes increasingly difficult, and goodness becomes increasingly likely and increasingly effortless.

But if we live in a context that facilitates rationalization, a context that facilitates the forgetting of our basic goodness, and a context that seduces us into values that stand in opposition to our basic goodness, then various manifestations of evil become increasingly likely—at various levels of intensity, from the ethically questionable to the shockingly immoral.

To get a feel for how capitalism as a style of consciousness and a style of thinking can begin to infect us, we’ll consider a little of the history of how we measure the wealth of nations.

In his doctoral dissertation on American history called, The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life, Eli Cook writes about how we transitioned into thinking more and more about the wealth of nations in material terms rather than in ethical terms.

The idea of moral statistics is that, if you want to know about the health of a nation, you should check on things like education, crime levels, suicide, poverty, and so on. That idea transferred to the U.S.

Alexander Hamilton, who seems more aligned with some of Adam Smith’s ignorance, tried to create what we might call a protype of Gross Domestic Product, but he failed, in large part because so many Americans just didn’t think of their lives in terms of money.

In the interest of a fuller picture, we should acknowledge that Hamilton disagreed with Smith in some key areas, including the establishment of protectionist tariffs. But he certainly agreed with Smith that the wealth of nations has to do with what we now think of as gross domestic product. But, again, the Americans of Hamilton’s time didn’t really agree.

For a farmer of that time, the land wasn’t a matter of capital, but rather a foundation of freedom. The farmers grew food for their own families. If they had more beyond that, they might trade with it. If they had more beyond that, they might sell a bit to have some money. But money wasn’t the top priority. So, when Hamilton tried to get people to tell him how much their farm was worth, they had no idea and no interest in thinking about it.

But people did understand the idea of moral statistics, and people used them to think through important issues. For instance, as the Civil War approached, arguments about slavery initially hinged on moral issues, and the North tried to show its general superiority to the South by citing moral statistics that included a greater number of schools and colleges, lower poverty, and so on.

But, as Eli Cook tells it, these arguments began to shift from moral statistics to what we might call market statistics, or materialistic statistics. He gives the example of a southerner named Elwood Fisher.

Fisher used market based statistics which he called “landmarks of progress” to make a case that the South was more advanced than the North—because of slavery. Isn’t that astonishing?

Fisher accepted the path Smith endorses, and he claims that, “the first object of civilized life is to accumulate wealth.” That’s the very reason we would use market statistics and reject moral statistics. If the point of life were the cultivation of wisdom, love, and beauty, then we would have to figure out how to track that. But Smith puts us on the road of being more concerned about money and material gain.

So Fisher used statistics to show that the average white man in Maryland had about $531 worth of wealth, while the average white man in Massachusetts had only $406 of wealth. The average white man in Virginia had $758 of wealth, whereas the average white man in New York had a mere $260 in wealth.

We find a variety of incredible problems with this sort of analysis, not least of which that it treats slaves as capital rather than as human beings, and that it offers itself as a justification or legitimization of slavery.

We may try to write that off as an aberration. The fact is, slavery kept going only while it remained profitable. As Eric Williams and other scholars have demonstrated, the profits from slavery were essential for early capitalism, and only as it became less profitable did it go away.

We may try to credit the moralists of the time, but it seems they had less to do with abolition than we may like to believe. Declining profits drove the shift away from slavery, because Smith did nothing to put us on a road to wisdom and virtue, and instead encouraged us along the road to perdition, the road of profit, self-interest, and extrinsic rewards.

And far from being an aberration, this is how the system works, how its style of thought and style of consciousness work. We sometimes fail to notice it until something goes wrong, and then we may repress or suppress our awareness that this is just how a consciousness infected with this kind of ignorance tends to behave.

This is an example from the early emergence of capitalism. It gives us a sense of how capitalism can infect our thinking. More recent examples are just as important.

We can site countless such examples, from Big Tobacco and Big Oil to Big Pharma and Big Chemical companies like 3M and DuPont.

With Big Oil, we have seen a deliberate and shockingly unethical denial of climate catastrophe. It’s mind-blowing. And here’s a rather remarkable part of their shockingly unethical conduct: It doesn’t matter if we have sipped their koolaide or not, their breech of wisdom and virtue remains.

What I mean is that a lot of people got seduced or programed into the dogma from Big Oil, and they think of the climate catastrophe as a liberal hoax or something we can dismiss. But even if we hold such a view, we now know the fossil fuel industry itself has believed in climate change for the better part of a century. So, whatever your crazy uncle or your Q-Annon yoga teacher believes about the climate catastrophe, the point remains that the oil and gas industry believe in it, and have believed in it for decades—all while they lied to the rest of us.

You may have heard about a recent study in the prestigious journal Science which shows that Exxon scientists had very accurate climate models predicting climate change as a result of human activity.

The researchers write,

So all of these industries knew we would see “dramatic environmental effects.”

The behavior of the fossil fuel industry is so incredible that we will devote a separate contemplation to how well they illustrate Adam Smith’s understanding of class war. Remember: Adam Smith recognized class war long before Karl Marx. And the fossil fuel industry stands out as a perfect example of what Adam Smith described.

We’ll save that for another time.

For now, we can also cite the famous Ford Pinto case. It’s on a much smaller scale, and in some ways it contains a degree of ambiguity. Nevertheless, it created one of the most famous documents of capitalism, namely the cost-benefit analysis Ford provided to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

There they laid out that the cost for producing vehicles with a reduced fire safety risk was $137 million. They estimated that these design changes would save 180 lives each year and avoid another 180 serious injuries—like maybe having a massive burn scar for the rest of your life. They calculated the benefit to society at $49.5 million. We don’t do math like that unless we have allowed our culture and our mind to become infected with a kind of insanity.

That estimate on the cost to change the design was for the entire auto industry. Ford alone was making enough in profits that it could have covered the bill for the whole industry.

But that would require the Ford Motor Company to exist in a culture that thought the wealth of nations had to do with the well-being of everyone, rather than with profit. Ford rejected making the improvements because, in the words of their report, the cost would have been more than three times the benefit—because, once capitalism has infected our thought, we can weigh lives against profits.

Again, we may want to rationalize the implications of making money a measure of wealth of nations and individuals, but it includes not only the kind of corporate behavior all of us can agree to consider unethical. It also includes the ways we allow this to infect our view of ourselves.

An astonishing example of this emerged recently. Grant Cardone is a self-help guru of the entrepreneurial variety. He seems like a nice enough guy, and he has apparently made a significant amount of money.

Cardone wrote a book called The 10X Rule. In the book, he refers to the 10X rule as “the Holy Grail for those who desire success. Seriously, if there is an end all, be all—then this is it!”

Oddly enough, he claims his rule applies to spiritual life as well, which means the teachings of the great sages have nothing on Grant Cardone. He has the end all, be all—the alpha and the omega, we might say.

He claims, “The 10X Rule is the one thing that will guarantee that you will get what you want in amounts greater than you ever thought imaginable.”

He makes some confusing claims as well. For instance, he says, “It takes the same amount of energy to have a great marriage as it does an average one, just as it takes the same amount of energy and effort to make $10 million as it does $10,000.”

This makes little sense, since part of the 10X rule is that we have to put in ten times the effort we think necessary. He calls this “massive action”.

As he himself puts it in the book:

“As I look back over my life, I see that the one thing that was most consistent with any success I’ve achieved was that I always put forth 10 times the amount of activity that others did. For every sales presentation, phone call, or appointment others made, I was making 10 of each. When I started buying real estate, I looked at 10 times more properties than I could buy . . .”

The message definitely seems to be more effort in order to make more money. He makes space for the 10X rule to apply to things like family and spirituality, but the vast majority of material I saw from Cardone focuses on business and making money.

Cardone has a YouTube channel with 2.31 million subscribers. In one of his videos, we see him giving a presentation. During that presentation he acts out a conversation between him and his mother. Here’s what he says:

“Mamma, I made $10 million in one deal.”

“That’s great. But, son, I love you just the way you are.”

I’m like, “Shit, I don’t love me just the way I am.”

He says that last bit like it’s a good thing, as if, because he doesn’t love himself the way he is, then he can put in ten times the effort to make ten times the money. He can’t love himself if he only made ten million dollars in a single deal, because he knows he could have made 100 million.

This is a confusing point. It fits with the other incoherent things Cardone says or writes.

Let’s be clear: Cardone writes things that touch on spiritual truths. Life demands passionate effort.

A major question we all have to answer is what we will direct our passionate effort toward. Cardone clearly directs more of his effort toward material things than spiritual ones.

But here’s one of the most interesting things he says in this particular YouTube video. I’m quoting him here, and you might want to prepare yourself for a strange suggestion. Again, Cardone is giving a presentation to what seems like a group of business people, and he says to them,

“If I made $400 grand a year, I would be embarrassed with myself as a husband, a father— basically as a human being.”

That quote deserves a full stop. But he does continue. He says, “$400 grand. How do you make sense of $35,000/month? You guys haven’t done the math. You have not done the math because you cannot live on $400 grand a year.”

That might come as a surprise to many of us. But Cardone then claims that he can’t even live on $2.7 million a year because his private jet “eats $2.7 million a year.”

Cardone claims to be one of the top social media influencers, and, as we noted, his YouTube channel alone has 2.31 million subscribers. So this is the kind of message he can send out to large numbers of people, influencing them to think this way—not because he invented this way of thinking himself, but because capitalism infected his mind.

I’m not a Grant Cardone scholar. He may have written and said a thousand insightful things. And naturally he may want to say that some of this is rhetorical. But it’s not ironically so. In other words, it’s not like Cardone is saying no one should be ashamed of themselves for making $400,000 a year, because that’s too small an amount.

Rather, in some way, he does seem to mean it. But the suggestion that a person earning $400,000 dollars a year would or should be embarrassed as a human being because of the poverty of that sum of money seems absurd.

In some cultures, a person couldn’t have that thought at all. In some cultures, a person couldn’t ever think that their lack of money should make them ashamed of themselves.

In some cultures, only a lack of wisdom and virtue could bring genuine shame. Only doing something ignorant or unethical should bring shame.

We naturally experience shame when we do unethical things. It’s appropriate. But we should never feel ashamed because $400,000 a year isn’t enough money to make us a good human being or a good parent. This sort of insanity can only happen in a rather desperately ignorant culture.

Adam Smith himself might find this development shocking and disappointing, if he could see it. At the same time, he knew very well that this possibility existed in the road he recommended for us.

Part of his dangerous wisdom includes two general things: His recognition that money corrupts us and cannot make us happy, and his analysis of class war. Both of those bits of wisdom sound like Karl Marx.

But, as we keep reminding ourselves, Adam Smith called out the class war and the evils of capitalism long before Marx. We have to remind ourselves of these things because the dominant culture likes to keep us from thinking about them with clarity.

Among other things, Smith worried about our tendency to identify with the rich. Not every culture has rich and poor, so Smith is talking about the dominant culture here. Here’s what he writes:

“[The] disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition . . . is . . . the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.”

Elsewhere he writes that, “The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness.”

That puts a sharp point on the matter: When he calls us “disinterested admirers and worshippers,” he means we behave like objective admirers and worshippers, as if we admire and worship the rich and powerful on the basis reality itself, rather than on the basis of our fear, craving, and ignorance. What a subtle form of self-deception!

We act as if people like Grant Cardone, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs are, objectively speaking, truly great and visionary human beings whom we naturally should admire. But Smith sees through this, and senses how it corrupts our ethical sensibilities.

Oddly enough, in another moment of incoherence, Smith actually says in that same passage that this “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition,” is actually “necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society”!

So the very thing he refers to as, “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments,” he also accepts so that we can preserve class structure. It’s like he lost his mind.

And instead of helping to resolve this “complaint of moralists in all ages,” Smith shrugs his shoulders and says, “Let’s just follow the path of materialism.”

We’ll return to that in a moment, but let’s also consider another moment of dangerous wisdom from Adam Smith.

Smith argued that are “three different orders of people”. This is where he lays out his sense of class warfare. The three great orders of people are, “those who live by rent, to those who live by wages, and to those who live by profit.”

Smith says the interests of “those who live by wages, is . . . strictly connected with the interest of the society . . .” But not so for those who live by profit.

Smith thus recognizes that profit is not, strictly speaking, an inherent social good—not the way wisdom and virtue are inherent social goods.

Note the irony: Why would we preference the pursuit of goals that have no inherent social good, rather than pursuing inherently positive ends?

And here’s what Marx—I mean Adam Smith . . . he just sounds like Marx here—here’s what Adam Smith says about this class warfare:

He says the interests of those who live by labor and wages align with the interests of society as a whole. But those who live by wages often lack the time, the resources, the influence, and the access to information and to those in power to understand what’s in their own interest, and to then make it happen.

As working-class people, we don’t always have the time and energy to read up on everything we might need to know in order to cultivate our best interests and the best interests of our society. Moreover, we might not even know where to get the information we need. And even if we did get the information we need, and even if we did have time to digest it, we wouldn’t have the kind of access and influence to reliably get good things to happen.

None of this has to do with the character or intelligence of people who live by labor. It’s about our whole lifestyle and livelihood in the dominant culture.

Smith says the capitalists—those who live by profit—they accumulate so much wealth that those who have power have to listen to them. We see this so clearly in our time. In the United States, we basically have a form of legalized bribery.

Someone who writes a check big enough to a politician or political action group will have the kind of access to politicians that ordinary citizens will never have. And a large donation effectively serves as a down payment on future legislation.

If the law went in their favor—as it eventually did—the bankers stood to make roughly $35 billion, and so they happily spent $600 million in lobbying efforts to get things to go their way, not to mention campaign contributions. You aren’t going to get legislators to take a direct call from you unless you have the money and influence to help them get in power and stay in power.

We can cite the oil industry here again, and the embarrassing case of Keith McCoy – Senior Director of Federal Relations at ExxonMobil. “Senior Director of Federal Relations” is corporate speak for a powerful lobbyist.

McCoy spoke quite candidly to a person he thought was interviewing him for a potential job. In fact, he was being interviewed by Greenpeace.

He went on to say, “We need Congressman so-and-so to introduce this bill, we need him to make a floor statement, we need him to send a letter . . . you name it, we’ve asked for everything.”

The oil companies spend millions and millions of dollars on lobbying. And it’s worth it. A recent study shows that the oil and gas industry have managed an average of $2.8bn a day in profits for the last 50 years.

No one calls this influence bribery, even though an objective examination reveals it as such. Even stranger, we all know that this is how things work, and yet we refuse to take a stand against it.

Worse yet, the CEO of Exxon can deny that this is how they do business, and we say nothing, as if tacitly accepting that we can take such a denial seriously. It’s almost as if we can’t face up to the reality of our situation. Instead, we blame our problems on everything but their real cause.

Smith realized this. And he said that the capitalists not only have wealth that gets the attention of those in power, but they also know their own interests better than those who live by labor and wages.

That makes a lot of sense, because Smith realized the capitalist as capitalist has only material interest. They only want to know one thing: How can I make more money?

And Smith recognized that this singular interest has no necessary connection with the true well-being of individuals or their society. Indeed, in so many cases, the interests of the capitalists are diametrically opposed to the interests of society—their wealth is our illth.

But the interests of those who live by labor and wages do overlap with the interests of society. And the problem is, those interests are varied and complex. Money is uniform and simple in comparison.

It’s a lot easier to make money than it is to become truly wise, compassionate, and graceful. It’s a lot easier to make a corporation profitable than it is to make a culture and its citizens vibrant and healthy.

Smith saw the same thing we see today: That the capitalists will influence legislation in ways that benefit them. And that’s a problem. Here’s what he wrote . . . prepare yourself for his rather Marxist analysis:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [the capitalists] ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

That sounds like some sort of Marxist critique. Adam Smith, Captain Capitalism himself, observes a class war. He says the interests of the capitalist is never exactly the same as the interests of ordinary citizens.

And he says that, as a class—not necessarily each individual—but as a class, the capitalist will lie and use oppression to get what they want. We see this with abundant clarity in the examples we’ve considered.

And if you want further evidence, look up the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This lobbying group helps those with wealth and power actually write model legislation that gets used all over the U.S., at both the state and national level.

Corporations have a hand in writing our laws, and by means of the revolving door between government and the private sector, former corporate overlords become part of the government, and former government employees become part of the private sector—all with the goal of doing exactly what Smith described: Lying and oppressing in order to further the interests of capital.

Let’s be clear: This has nothing to do with villainizing capitalists or hating the rich and powerful. Quite the contrary. It’s about having compassion for both capitalists and workers. Indeed, it’s about recovering wisdom, compassion, and grace, all of which capitalism tries to strip from us.

For example, it is not indigenous to the soul to live by means of lying, aggression, oppression, and greed. We should see it as a tragic loss that people get seduced into such behavior, because those very people have the same capacity for wisdom, love, and beauty that anyone else has, and something in them wants their energies directed in that way. Smith openly recognizes that our soul sees right through the money game. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Another issue here comes to arriving at a more accurate diagnosis of our situation. We tend to see the capitalist as a visionary, and as a determined, disciplined person who makes money by means of intelligence and force of will.

In fact, the capitalist is a pawn of capitalism, a mere instrument. They make money because the apparatus of capitalism moves through them, which means they make money by means of a combination of ignorance, cleverness, and luck.

For instance, what on Earth did Elon Musk do to become, for a moment, the richest person on Earth? The pandemic hit, and Elon Musk got rich. He didn’t do anything valuable to anyone’s well-being, but he got richer off of an international crisis.

Less than a thousand people made almost two trillion dollars—because we had a global health crisis. That makes no sense. Why would such profits arise on the basis of a health crisis?

Moreover, we know that people with that level of wealth have great skill in avoiding taxes. They may pay an effective tax rate of less than one percent in some cases.

As an aside, we can note that the investments of the wealthiest people produce incredible amounts of pollution. A report by Oxfam demonstrated that, “the investments of 125 of the world’s richest billionaires” emit “3 million tonnes [of carbon] a year,” which amounts to “more than a million times the average for someone in the bottom 90%” of income earners on the planet.

While huge profits went into the hands of a small number of elite capitalists, people applauded the booming stock market. But once relief money got into the hands of working people, inflation crept in.

That’s a complex event, but it seems awfully suspicious that things break down once those who live by labor get a little more money, and we know that in at least some cases of rising prices, those prices went up explicitly to increase profit, and not because of increased costs. The whole thing seems to fit with Smith’s general notion that what is in the interest of the capitalist never fits properly with the interests of the workers or society as a whole.

We have to get clearer on how catastrophic this is. This may seem innocent, or it may seem like what we refer to as a pragmatic solution—a phrase that insults the philosophy of pragmatism.

The idea is that Smith made the only rational choice. This not only makes zero sense, since it declares choosing ignorance and immorality over wisdom and virtue, but it also fails to acknowledge the catastrophe this entails.

In endorsing capitalism, Smith effectively tells us we should organize our culture on the basis of ignorance and a lack of virtue. He tells us to organize our culture on the basis of a system that commands us all to focus on making products rather than making people, and making profit rather than making a better world. That’s not merely a counterintuitive suggestion—it’s rather plainly illogical and unethical, and thus stands in contrast to the teachings of the wisdom traditions.

We see clearly that Adam Smith was not a sage, but just another intellectual. In endorsing capitalism, Smith endorses a system that can never, and will never, provide true happiness, true peace, true well-being, true virtue, and the fulfillment of our highest potential.

In fact, the system has to do the opposite. The system can’t survive if we become truly happy, truly at peace, truly wise and virtuous—because Smith already pointed out that such people have no interest in the things capitalists need to do to make money. Capitalism depends on a constant manufacture of needs and desires. It exists by fueling fear, craving, distraction, and general ignorance.

Our true happiness is antithetical to the capitalist framework. And so the operation of this massive machinery that we call capitalism must keep wisdom, love, and beauty at bay. That’s why we see such a marginalization of philosophy, Nature, and art.

We have touched on some of the ways we see the system working that go against wisdom, love, and beauty, and we can briefly mention a few more general patterns. For instance, a natural disaster increases Gross Domestic Product (as do man-made disasters, such as blowing a mountain up to extract “resources”), a war means massive profits, and divorces result in more revenue. A system oriented toward our genuine well-being wouldn’t profit from disaster, war, the breakdown of relationships, and other forms of suffering.

If we set up our culture according to what we think is right—if we organize ourselves on the basis of wisdom, love, and beauty, rather than giving up because we don’t quite know how to do that—then we would consider peace far more valuable than war, we would consider harmony with our ecologies far more valuable than disasters and extractions, and we would consider healthy, resilient relationships far more valuable than struggling or failing ones.

We’ve done a lot of good work here, and I think it would be wise to pause before bringing our contemplation of the dangerous wisdom of Adam Smith to a conclusion.