This is a very short essay from Montaigne, and it makes a point that business transactions are a zero sum game. No one attains wealth, according to Montaigne, unless someone else is losing it.
Economists would disagree with Montaigne’s assessment, in part because it turns economics into something entirely dismal, filled with winners and losers at every turn. Looking at life from the same perspective can seem oppressive as well—you cannot attain what you want in life without depriving someone else of the same desire. It turns life into a brutal contest of survival.
Montaigne wrote:
Let each man sound himself within, and he will find that our private wishes are for the most part born and nourished at the expense of others.
This is true. But consider something more interesting and dramatic, such as the classic Hollywood love triangle. I am going to contend in this essay that the drive to sustainability is actually captured in the heart of these types of stories and that we do not need to create new virtues to make people focus on sustainability, we just need to better attune our hearts to our actual desires.
At some point in every love triangle film, the person in the middle has to make a choice. And that usually involves a crisis where the protagonist realizes that the triangle is untenable, that both parties will be hurt if it continues. But the more interesting part of any love triangle is when the person in the middle tries to hold it together.
The stated reason why the non-chooser tries to hold it together is always affection, not wanting to hurt anyone. But this is false goodwill. Actually what that character is experiencing in the moment is a form of greed, a desire to hold on to both. Why ever make a choice when you can attach to the most positive features of both and compensate for the weaker aspects of one with another?
These plots are timeless in Hollywood for good reason, they mirror our everyday experience with consumer capitalism. This is the rational consumerist response to any situation, why not have both? It’s almost inevitable that people living in this time in history would take a somewhat consumerist approach to people, especially those most central to their lives, and it is very common for men and women to use multiple people to get what they want out of a central partner. If there’s a delusion in the middle of this equation, a genuine Hollywood myth, it’s probably the belief that any one person can fulfill all of the psychic needs of an individual at any point in time, never mind across a lifetime. Romance is the fantasy, the love triangle is cold, hard capitalism working as expected.
Consumerism is all about layering over the inadequacies of some aspect of your life with something more. Montaigne was writing from the vantage point of a feudal economy. His home city of Bordeaux was a major trading hub in Europe, and his family fortune was made through trading as well. His judgmental attitude towards trade was influenced also by his position on the Bordeaux parlement, which wasn’t so much a legal body as a trade board, a place where political influence was weighed with law to mitigate commercial disputes.
Modern economists believe that a rising tide can lift all boats and not everything needs to be turned into a contest of gladiators. But it requires heightened greed to overcome the no-win choices. If we’re in a system where everyone is pursuing gain at all times, the 50/50 choices disappear. We end up in a world of endless choosing and endless disposing. And that is where our Hollywood story comes up against an ethical problem, the type that never arises in a script. Making people disposable, in Kantian ethics, is morally wrong, We should not make people a means to an ends. And so, if we’re going to avoid that fate, we need to apply a similar interpersonal ethos to the economic concept of sustainability.
It might be possible to honestly settle that third act crisis in the love triangle without a black and white choice. Casablanca is a classic example. Elsa does not have to choose, Rick chooses for her and tells her to get on that plane for the sake of the free world. But most movies contrive a situation so that the dynamic has to end. It has to be brought to a proper conclusion.
An ethical conclusion is not a very satisfying one in Hollywood terms. It likely requires sensible weighing of options and also new understanding that neither of the two people are perfect partners, that there is no happily ever after when the choice is made. It will be a compromise. It will probably be sad. And the new very un-Hollywood attitude requires an acknowledgment that neither person will magically become perfect nor will a perfect third option arise, who combines the best of both.
And this is where the traditional Hollywood plot line, recast in modern terms, actually gets interesting. Because when the three people are engaged in that perfect utopian moment where the protagonist doesn’t want to choose, the type of greed that person is experiencing is also a form of sustainability. From that point of view, it is actually highly ethical. The non-choosing protagonist does not want to throw either person away. They, in essence, want to break out of the plot.
What is that plot? It’s the standard human story of replaceability, of the need to trade in, trade up, move on. It is constantly driven by chatter that you must act or else terrible things can result:
The merchant can only thrive by tempting youth to extravagance; the husbandman, by the high price of grain; the architect, by the collapse of buildings; legal officials, by lawsuits and quarrels between men; the very honorariums and the fees of the clergy are drawn from our deaths and our vices.
Turn this back now to economics. Economic growth would no doubt be higher, for example, if we repealed all health and safety regulations and eliminated the Environmental Protection Agency. We could allow lead in gasoline, put flurocarbons back in aerosol cans. We’d create massive social problems with the lead poisoning and we’d destroy the ozone layer we worked so hard to restore, but yeah, we’d probably make some people richer in the process.
We could also repeal all MPG requirements for automobiles sold, and boost the auto industry. We’d pay a massive price soon enough due to the increased emissions, but if you’re all-in on the “climate change is fake news” bandwagon, might as well go all out.
It is always possible to sell out values in the short term and to find good excuses to never make the hard value judgments. We can elect Donald Trump and put out another sequel to the big oil economic bonanza. And who knows, maybe it can even touch off four years of prosperity. There is another way, however, and we feel that utopian tug within our own greed. It does not require us to develop new virtues. Human beings greedily want to hang on to the good. We just aren’t so great at valuing the existing and continuing over the new.
But here is where Montaigne’s headline, anachronistic as it may seem for modern economics, comes roaring back to life. Profit today is loss tomorrow. Is that a worthwhile trade off? Every sequel is worse than the last. When we destroy in hope of action and clarity, we often wreck the thing we actually valued most.
Montaigne sees it this way:
For when anything is changed and sallies forth from its confines, it is at once the death of something which previously existed.
If we aren’t careful, that dead thing will be everything about our current way of life that we hold dear.
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