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 the case of a person choosing between two. This person could be struck by fear of doing harm to one or the other by making a choice, but may not be considering that harm is being done to both by making no choice and keeping them in suspended animation, whether they know they are in that state or not. In essence, the non-chooser isn’t pursuing non-choice out of kindness, but greed, attempting 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?
We shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the greedy response either, it is at the core of the modern economy. 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. That coin flip choice between two people is just another in a long series of choices filled with disposals and replacements, one new option after another. If one person is ultimately chosen in the coin flip, that person’s inadequacies will eventually lead to another person who layers over the remaining deficiencies.
So, much of this essay does seem dated. But Montaigne’s anachronistic view of trade brings up some of the most interesting cultural contradictions of late capitalism:
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.
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.
Montaigne closes this very short essay with a thought from Lucretius that could easily be embraced by a modern organization like Greenpeace:
For when anything is changed and sallies forth from its confines, it is at once the death of something which previously existed.
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