“Machines that Cannot Err”
Ethics and Early Industrial Capitalism
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
Our economy in the US is weird right now, and inflation has been one reason why. Rising grocery bills, emptier chip bags, ballooning rents– some of these problems are improving, and some will continue to, but they’re very real, and for many, very painful. Some critics have called this greedflation, leading to an ongoing media cycle asking: is “greed” an accurate description of corporate motives? Is it a useful one?
This raises more fundamental questions: what is greed? How did businesses become ‘greedy’? It’s easy enough to say that businesses are structurally amoral. Certainly it’s accurate too. If executives at Exxon tomorrow announced they wanted to wind down all oil production, and expected shareholders to eat the resulting losses because climate change is worse, I imagine they’d be fired before the first announcement even reached most of our eyeballs.
But arguably this just means we’ve made greed structural rather than personal. The fact that some individuals must– once in a certain position of power anyway– act in a way many of us would call “greedy” doesn’t mean it isn’t greed. So, to think structurally rather than individually then, one more pair of questions: what are the ethics of capitalism? How did we make them? How can we unmake them?
These are questions you write a whole book about– and I am! But it’s not done yet, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the subject here first. I won’t always be posting about the 1700s, but as a labor historian, this is my wheelhouse, and the era provides a useful window into the foundations of capitalism and its philosophy. We can start with the pottery magnate behind the buy-one-get-one free deal: British factory tycoon Josiah Wedgwood.
In 1769, Wedgwood made a confession to his beloved friend and business partner Thomas Bentley: he felt guilty, afraid, and ashamed. Specifically of his behavior in business. Wedgwood was an architect of modern workplace discipline and marketing alike. He transformed pottery from artisan craft to factory labor. Some of his harshest measures protected what we would now call intellectual property– designs, production processes. It was these that Wedgwood regretted: he told Bentley that “there is nothing relating to business I so much wish for as being released from these degrading slavish chains, these mean selfish fears of other people copying my works.” He imagined a future where he released all his designs, processes, and knowledge to any who would like to learn– a future in which he and Bentley could “Glory in . . . all the Artists in Europe working after our models.” If he wanted to maintain his growing business tyrannizing workers into producing vast quantities of china for slave traders and Empresses, Wedgwood had to repress this dream and everything that motivated it.
His solution was a growing body of Enlightenment philosophy– specifically, philosophy of mind and motivation. Wedgwood happened to be a close friend, reader, and promoter of the philosopher Joseph Priestley, which placed him in an intellectual genealogy stretching back to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and forward to Jeremy Bentham and Herbert Spencer. These thinkers reduced the complex human mind to an automatic id pursuing narrow “self-interest” by avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. Moreover, they imagined these pleasures were calculable, which made morality a simple matter of maximizing one and minimizing the other. Together, this pair of ideas justified and indeed necessitated coercion, in the workplace and the nation: if the proles and the potters were always acting in selfish and short-sighted ways, only force threatening pain could realign their actions in favor of a greater good.
These men’s vision of a flat and lifeless mental landscape exerts vast influence today. You can find it in popular economics textbooks. It is plainly visible in decades of attacks on welfare in America and beyond– Priestley in particular echoes in everything from Reagan’s “welfare queens” to recent cuts to food stamps. Perhaps its most corrosive effect has been a pervasive cynicism that kills possibilities simply by rendering them unimaginable and incoherent. In a world of self-interest, ideas and hopes and dreams are all smokescreen cast to cover up behavior always driven by pure id. Belief is for Pixar movies. When real explanations are needed we have to turn to material interest.
The mind early capitalists and their intellectual allies imagined was one without agency, and their political vision was nothing less than a world without will. Because in their view all choices were ultimately selfish, their vision was also a world without justification: no action ever had a real reason other than I wanted to. But ironically, justification was the reason this vision existed in the first place. The proponents of what nineteenth-century philosopher Thomas Brown critiqued as the “Selfish System” were engaged in a desperate attempt to justify capitalist exploitation to the complex, irrational, non-unitary, and social psyche they denied.
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Self-interest in the contemporary sense has its roots in 17th century England. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan begins with a meditation on the political body: “What is the Heart but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strongs; and the Joynts, but so many wheels.” Hobbes was referring not to the literal body but to the political body of society itself, which was in his view a machine– judges its joints, “Reward and Punishment” its nerves. John Locke’s 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding moved to consider the individual mind along the same lines. If humans were machines, the impulses that moved them could not be mysterious morals or will: they had to be something we could discern, understand, and dissect– Hobbes and Locke were both physicians by training.
Locke settled on pain and pleasure as the impulse behind all action. He broke all emotion down into some combination of them for analysis. The moral implications of this vision of the mind were profound. “Good and evil,” Locke wrote, “are nothing but pleasure or pain,” both because there was no other way to define human sensation and because there was no other way to motivate human action. Thus morality had to be “only the conformity or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law” that attached pain or pleasure as a consequence to particular actions– more specifically God’s law, the state’s, and finally social sanction.
Coercion of individuals was in this view necessary not only to produce outcomes, not only because a proper regime created moral results, but because such a regime was morality itself. If even God, in His infinite power, still had to rely on simple punishment and reward, it followed that much weaker human authorities had to do the same. In order to render his selfish psychology compatible with Christian morality, Locke argued that God structured individual human reward and punishment such that they pointed toward collective happiness: He had, “by an inseparable connexion, joined virtue and public happiness together.”
Anglo-Dutch writer Bernard Mandeville further elaborated the implications of this cosmic win-win promise in his 1714 Fable of the Bees, which used a thin bee allegory to argue that private vice was public virtue. When elites acted selfishly, all would prosper through trade! When they did not, moralizing austerity would result in a collapse of society. Thus the rich and their avarice needed to be set free to invigorate the nation and the Earth. Mandeville went beyond Locke– who allowed for some malleability of individual preference, despite the serious contradictions this created with his broader project– but his more pessimistic and determinist vision of virtue was nonetheless based in the earlier philosopher’s ideas of mind.
What did this set of ideas do for those who believed it and those they aimed to persuade? The long eighteenth century was a transition period between aristocratic and bourgeois power. The latter class, as it rose, could not rely on religious authority like the church, nor existing legal-political privileges like nobility. Thus bourgeois elites generated a rationalized and in fact eternal basis– the nature of the mind itself– for their rule over wage workers, enslaved people, and the economic foundations of life itself.
Mandeville’s work in particular must be understood in the context of early eighteenth-century “luxury debates” over the relative morality of agrarian landowning wealth versus imperial commerce. As self-interest justified commercial power, it also delegitimized competing elite classes by undermining tradition and virtue as a basis for morality and power. This is true in more than macro-level functionalist terms. Commerce was the air English elites in this period breathed– quite literally, in the form of tobacco– and the material basis of much of elite life. Reconciling it with religious faith could be as important personally as it was politically.
The things Locke and company sought to repress are as significant as what they wanted to justify. In thankfully unheeded proposals for the English poor laws, John Locke identified rising poverty and blamed a decline in public morals. The real reasons behind growing poverty in 17th century England were complex, but one root cause was mass dispossession via the enclosure of the commons. By instead arguing virtue had declined and proposing discipline as a solution, Locke justified his scheme for a coercive political program of child labor, in which three year olds would need to work for their bread. He also denied for himself and his readers the terrible truth that their incomes and estates were the confiscated surplus value of the very people his poor law plan sought to exploit further.
Bernard Mandeville, meanwhile, justified inequality and immorality by presenting them as necessary evils. He conceded that the justice system unfairly executed the poor to protect “the Rich and Great,” but defended it anyway, including by literally arguing that locksmiths would lose their jobs without it. He observed that “the Indies have been ransack’d” for wealthy landowners’ furniture, but nonetheless insists things must be this way– indeed they should be this way. If society prioritized morals over markets, it would fall apart: when his bees embrace honesty and virtue, their economy collapses and their hive is nearly conquered by their enemies. Ultimately they retire, miserable and diminished, from their hive to an austere hollow tree out of puritan asceticism. Mandeville conceded we might not like slavery, wars for “empty Glory,” and society that was scams all the way down. But in his view there was no alternative, as Margaret Thatcher would later put it.
Both men claimed that what was right was also what was easy for the wealthy, and indeed that God had made it so. The same comforts the prosperity gospel offers today were offered here: what makes you rich will also make you right. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” may be the best-known eighteenth-century version of this idea, but it was Antiguan slaveholder Samuel Martin paraphrasing Locke who most clearly summarized the win-win proposition he offered the powerful: “so bountiful is the Creator, to make that most for our interest, which is most our duty.”
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Samuel Martin, Senior was killed in his plantation house on Christmas Day, 1701. He died by the sword he lived by: as a sugar planter, his business was working enslaved Africans to death. His miserly refusal to even give them Christmas Day off capped what was no doubt a long list of painful grievances. Revolts like Martin’s killing punctured the plantation fantasy, literally forcing enslavers to confront their own cruelty. Unlike absentee planters in England, his son could never really hide from the blood that stained his money.
Instead he worked to justify it. He was not going to be his (dead) father. The earlier quote on the bountiful Creator comes from Samuel Martin Junior, specifically concerning the management of enslaved labor, in his extremely popular 1754 Essay Upon Plantership, a how-to guide for slaveholders. Martin insisted that because enslaved people were “rational beings” in the Lockean sense, enslavers could act with “kindness and good nature” toward them– as a result, “good discipline is by no means inconsistent with humanity.”
This was a lie of course; Martin himself praised Barbadian enslavers, who systematically worked captives to death, as “exact to a nicety in calculations of profit and loss.” But the mechanistic mind made possible moral calculations that could justify anything. Locke himself believed that, because pain and pleasure were calculable, morality could be made “as certain as any demonstration in Euclid,” the ancient Greek father of geometry. In Martin’s hands, Locke’s moral mathematics complemented the planter’s accounting of death.
Enslavers relied on a racialized other for their self-conception and class existence. Rational self-interest provided a comfortingly flat view of this other, promising they could be controlled by turning pain and pleasure knobs. Martin’s assertion that enslaved people were “rational beings” carried conflicting and flexible meanings to this end. It was an admission that his father’s killing made sense. It was also an insistence to himself and the planter class that such killings could be prevented without abandoning slavery itself. Incorporating obedience into “reason” necessarily dismissed all resistance as madness. By legitimizing projects of control, seemingly universal “rationality” thus rhetorically exalted the enslaver and condemned the enslaved.
The idea that working people could be reliably and precisely controlled for a greater good proved as useful for metropolitan manufacturers as it was for colonial enslavers. Josiah Wedgwood befriended Joseph Priestley as his business was beginning to take off in the 1760s– he provided stoneware for Queen Charlotte, which then became a marketing opportunity, and within a few short years he expanded into warehouses, a partnership with Thomas Bentley, and eventually plans for a megafactory known as Etruria, which opened in 1769. Priestley, meanwhile, published a Lockean treatise on government the year before. Wedgwood was a voracious reader, and through his connections with Bentley and Priestley, as well as their acquaintances like Erasmus Darwin and influences like John Locke, found a language of governance he could apply to his work. In 1768, Wedgwood insisted in a letter to Bentley that workers were “capable of feeling pain, or pleasure . . . in the same manner as their masters” like himself. Well, almost– “nearly [emphasis mine] in the same manner as their masters.” The similarity enabled manipulation of workers via happiness, while the difference– the nearly– justified doing so.
A predictable, impulse-driven, mechanistic mind was perfect for men like Wedgwood. Pain in particular was a strong tool he used for motivating workers. He personally smashed pieces that didn’t meet his standards, reportedly with the declaration “this won’t do for Josiah Wedgwood!” When he wasn’t in the factory, he hired managers with precise instructions to control labor, and when he was, his workers were “frighten'd out of their wits when they hear of Mr W. coming to town, & I perceive upon our first meeting they look as if they saw the Devil.” He used pleasure as well– like his contemporary in textiles Richard Arkwright, he had good workers distinguished “by presents or other marks suitable to their age.”
Any workers who hoped to use the one power they had in the labor market– seeking alternative employment with better wages, particularly in America or France– had their hopes thwarted. Wedgwood supported government surveillance over letters, printed pamphlets spreading misinformation about work outside of Britain, and in 1783, personally gave a speech to workers warning them of shipwreck, misery, and legal persecution if they tried to leave. He even banned ball playing in his factories, which is an amusing detail to us now, but speaks to how much work changed with the creation of the “workplace.”
All of these efforts were meant to shape previously independent artisans into pieces of an assembly line, automata suited for mass production and mass profit. His business model depended on uniformity: buyers were eager to purchase the same “Queen’s Ware” that Charlotte had. Producing thousands of pieces of nearly identical stoneware meant sanding down the irregularities, preferences, and capabilities of every worker. Wedgwood atomized pottery into discrete tasks, producing micro-skilled workers who could be replaced easily– his specialist gilders, for instance, lost their jobs as soon as gilding went out of fashion. This new model of worker required a new model of mind, both to justify and to manage. In his own words, he confessed a desire to “make such Machines of the Men as cannot err.”
Wedgwood feared he would have to make himself into a machine as well. In his earlier-cited 1768 letter to Bentley on the “chains” of market selfishness, as he planned to take his business to the next level, he explained he was at a crossroads, and outlined two paths forward. The first was the “narrow, mercenary, selfish trammels” of straightforward business, prioritizing profit, or “money getting,” over all else. Specifically, this meant monopolizing manufacturing and design ideas, concealing every innovation as much as possible from all competitors– a measure which necessarily entailed surveilling, disciplining, and disempowering workers as well. Wedgwood despaired at what this business plan would cost them– at “the coats of mail we are forgeing for our reluctant hearts, to case & hamper them in their journey through life, & prevent all benevolent overflowings for the good of their fellow Citizens.” Market self-interest meant hardening their own hearts against their misdeeds, and locking away their generosity, turning themselves into hollowed-out tin men operating only according to the dictates of the market– only according to material self-interest. He had talked about this with Bentley on the road from Liverpool one day, and had not forgotten “how our hearts burned within us” as they did. To become what we would now call homo economicus– and to become the boss– Wedgwood felt he would have to repress his own virtues.
The other future he imagined was (what we would now call) an open-source dream, sharing designs and processes throughout Europe for the good of all. Notably, this also would have inevitably granted greater power to workers, since the employer’s monopoly on manufacturing knowledge and design was a key asset against workers. His heart sang at the prospect: Wedgwood believed that his own creativity would flourish if he were free of the profit motive, that he had “always wish’d to be released from it & was I now free I am persuaded it would do me much good in body, more in mind.”
This was no mere personal generosity– Wedgwood’s desire to share rather than hoard knowledge reflects the ethics of the traditional Staffordshire pottery community he hailed from. One of his own relatives had become a local hero by stealing trade secrets from Dutch managers decades earlier. He would have grown up hearing stories of this and other struggles over control of knowledge, like Ralph Shaw’s patent case in the 1730s, during which an assembled courthouse crowd erupted with joy upon hearing Shaw’s attempt to patent community knowledge was rejected.
As he outlined his two different plans, Wedgwood apologized to Bentley for contradicting himself, and asked his friend to “consider them as coming from two distinct beings,” the “outward, & inward man.” Contrary to the unitary, self-interested, individual psyche Locke described, Wedgwood identified his own self as a mass of conflicting impulses, crisscrossing pleasures and pains, belief and desire and fear. How did he transform himself from a creator into a boss? I think the answer lies in the idea- not the reality- of economic necessity. Traditional business was easier, “safer, more prudent,” while his alternative vision was characterized instead by “risque & honor.” The flat self that Wedgwood encountered reading Locke and Priestley was the same that he applied to and forced on his workers. This self was ultimately deterministic: it would do what it wanted. It was precisely this property, this erasure of will itself, that made such a vision of the self so appealing to eighteenth-century elites.
Self-interest on the individual level produced and justified restricted choices on the level of society. In what was increasingly becoming Mandeville’s world, market viability determined what could and could not happen. In describing his dream, Wedgwood expressed hopes that buyers would prefer the honorable manufacturer, but he could never be certain– and both experience and philosophy likely suggested otherwise. Thus his business would give everything and gain nothing: competitors would take every idea he had, hoard their own, and drive him into the ground. Wedgwood therefore had access to the perennial excuse of the manager, landlord, and bureaucrat: I’m sorry, these are the economics, I have no choice. This excuse is a lie whenever it is offered, but it was especially false coming from Wedgwood and Bentley, who personally helped lay the groundwork for much of modern work discipline and marketing. Precisely because they had a choice, Wedgwood needed justifications for making the one he did.
By turning his back on the artisan camaraderie of his home, Wedgwood got everything he wanted, except the freedom he claimed he had always wanted. Even the management historian Neil McKendrick, who openly admired Wedgwood, wrote that his “generosity had faded over the years, as the drain of his discoveries, his models, and his workmen increased.” But it looks less like his generosity faded and more like he chose to kill it. Unwilling to accept or act on his desires for a life beyond profit, Wedgwood acted out its opposite, becoming a “Devil” who smashed workers’ dreams as readily as their wares. To alienate workers from their labor, he alienated himself from his hopes and home.
Whether or not autocratic management served this psychic function for Wedgwood individually, it certainly met parallel purposes as a social process. Early capitalism could not tolerate the desires of the workers it exploited. Managerial cruelty flatly prohibited even the airing of those desires. Wedgwood’s commercial rise coincided and connected with growing legal repression in Britain, particularly anti-Jacobin terror and the Combination Acts in the 1790s. State persecution and economic coercion helped force the nation and the world more broadly to choose as Wedgwood had. There was perhaps no better emblem of this than the Panopticon, devised in the same age and with similar influences.
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The infamous all-seeing prison was a workplace before it was a prison. It has its roots not in Jeremy Bentham’s desire to reform the mind, but his younger brother Samuel’s desire to remake the worker– specifically, the shipbuilder, whose trade Samuel learned through an apprenticeship at the Royal Dockyards. Working there in the 1770s, he found himself deeply frustrated by the traditions of dockyard workers, which he felt were neither rational nor efficient. His counter-vision was a scientific understanding of shipbuilding, and with it a scientific understanding of management. In the same period, Jeremy Bentham was growing frustrated with the irrationalities of his trade, law. English law in this period was wildly complicated and hideously unjust, but Jeremy was equally dissatisfied with the rising notion of natural rights, which he felt were inconsistent and incoherent. As an alternative, he proposed a mathematical morality as the basis of all law and policy: a rational cost-benefit analysis based on pain and pleasure would be the yardstick for all state action.
Both brothers’ visions of a rational world were deeply grounded in the philosophy of self-interest. Jeremy met Locke’s call for a Euclidean morality with ideas from Joseph Priestley, the Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria, and the French philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvetius, whom Jeremy especially admired. Helvetius’s vision of self-interest was so extreme that in his landmark De l’esprit, he argued mothers of dead children weep only for their lost investment of time and energy. In 1775, Jeremy encouraged Samuel to visit the tomb of “the divine Helvetius” and “kiss his tomb.” They regularly exchanged letters and book recommendations, and Jeremy was a kind of surrogate father to Samuel, preferable to the stern real one.
Their shared vision was as much grounded in natural philosophy as moral philosophy– Jeremy followed Helvetius’s call to make morality a “science of universal utility.” Jeremy set out to write a comprehensive ideal legal code that could replace the irrational tradition of existing law, while Samuel undertook similar efforts to reimagine shipbuilding. But Britain was not fertile ground for such a task. Reformers but explicitly anti-revolutionaries, hostile to both existing hierarchy and commoner challenges to it, they traveled to imperial Russia in the early 1780s, believing “enlightened” absolutism offered a chance to start from zero and remake law and labor alike.
Samuel went first, and soon set about devising his ideal shipyard in Krichev under the patronage of Grigory Potemkin. Early attempts to simply import English workers failed miserably: they brought with them the same traditions and culture of work Samuel despised. In order to control English workers, corrupt foremen, and Russian serf and convict laborers, he devised the “central inspection principle”: workers should be watched constantly and literally centrally, from “a building so contrived as that the whole of the operations carried on in it should be under observation from its centre.” Samuel set about creating the institutional and physical architecture to make this possible.
When Jeremy came to Russia in 1786, he immediately began collaborating with Samuel on this labor control scheme. Jeremy’s legal reform dreams stalled, and he instead put his energy into what became the Panopticon. Most often remembered via the work of Michel Foucault as a prison meant to precisely recalibrate minds, rendering the “soul the prison of the body,” the Panopticon was a blunter instrument with more specific goals, particularly in its original design. It was a labor control system before, and while, it was a prison– Jeremy even suggested workshops for free laborers could follow its principles. So could hospitals and schools. In whatever form it took, Jeremy emphasized sophisticated coercion. Moral reform is barely present in Jeremy’s Panopticon, or The Inspection House, and this should be unsurprising given the ideas the Benthams were working with. Individuals are driven by self-interest. Good is only conformity to authority.
Self-interest was the core of the Panopticon. It was to be a private prison, run by contract. The contractor’s right to the profits of prison labor, along with a fine for dead prisoners, would align his interest with the public’s. Using machine tools developed by Samuel and meant to replace worker skills, Jeremy insisted he could make productive cogs of even the least experienced and least willing prisoner: “Dexterity and Good Will” he wrote in a 1793 letter, could be “rendered equally unnecessary by my brother’s mechanical contrivances.” To force prisoners to behave, and above all work, Jeremy armed his hypothetical warden with powerful weapons: while he could not lay a hand on prisoners, he could simplify their diet down to bread, or plunge their cells into darkness by moving a shade. He might not need to anyway. Prisoners were confined “without a soul to speak to,” and so their work would be the only reprieve from the unspeakable psychological horrors wrought by solitude. Capitalism’s new elite, the boss, did not want workers to think or feel, and in the Panopticon, workers themselves wouldn’t want to either.
The Benthams’ Panopticon was never really built, much to Jeremy’s frustration, but the ideas behind it have exerted influence down to the present. Jeremy himself built similar principles into London’s first public police force, the Thames River Police, in 1800, and his intellectual descendants employed his ideas in the Victorian Poor Law. He devised an entire philosophical framework, utilitarianism, out of the principles Locke and those he influenced spun out over a century. It is telling that his concept of the good is termed utility. This was a philosophy for the new capitalist human– what is useful is good. The simplified machine mind was both its goal for workers and its justification for pursuing it.
Utilitarianism’s most infamous logical conclusion is the “utility monster.” Imagine a being that gains more happiness from doing harm than its victims lose. Say, an alien that derives more pleasure from eating a human being than the person eaten suffers for it. The utility monster does not exist. But it is real in an important sense: the market-dependent society that utilitarianism endorses makes these kinds of decisions every day. Austerity’s demands for razing public services in order to satisfy creditors have caused economic and political chaos across the globe. COP28 is about to fail, as even a resolution for a “phase-out” of fossil fuels over decades proves too expensive for the oil industry. We give central banks the authority to cause recessions, deciding exactly how many livelihoods to feed to the utility monster in order to keep grocery prices down and stock prices up, rather than reconsider the foundations of our economy. In a past that traded life for sugar, and a present where market mathematics mean life or death, stability or precarity, peace or war, for billions, utilitarianism’s cruel calculations were and are no hypothetical. They are our reality.
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The “selfish system” is ideology in the most derisive Marxist sense possible: hegemonic ideas that legitimize an unequal social order. It is at the heart of orthodox economics– whether rational self-interest or, more recently in behavioral economics, with an allowance for irrationalism but the same commitment to individualism and selfishness. Now as in the past, self-interest justifies coercion. On May 30 of last year, then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy spoke of the same need Locke had identified to force children to work, saying of a proposed tightening of work requirements for welfare programs that, “We might have a child that has no job, no dependents but sitting on the couch, we’re going to encourage that person to get a job and have to go to work, which gives them worth and value.” To be good is to be useful, and empty stomachs make good motivators toward utility. The flattened view of the mind that makes this possible is pervasive too; Apple announced the same year that its watches can now record your mental health with a slider ranging from “very unpleasant” to “very pleasant.”
A kind of folk Mandevilleanism serves as the ethical and psychological foundation of what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism.” To the passionate Marxist and the well-meaning left-liberal it scoffs, deep down you are just like me, rendering anticapitalist futures unimaginable. Many a supervillain sounds Benthamite for a reason: when you need to justify killing half of the cosmos with a finger snap, only the I told you so of utilitarian nihilism can do it.
But these ideas have taken off not simply because they serve the individual self interest of a cynical elite– they provide comfort to a cruel but no less psychically complicated ruling class, who need to believe in their morality, and to the rest of us as well. Every day, we are barraged with scam emails, exploited by our employers, lied to by the state. Believing in some way that this is necessary, this is how it has to be, that the world we live in is defined simply by the emergent properties of iron laws of avarice, at least makes it easier not to think about all of this. We confront these harms as individuals, but we cannot change them that way. This is why the individual in individual self-interest is as important as the other half. Jeremy’s Panopticon was meant to render prisoners, “to the keeper, a multitude, though not a crowd; to themselves, they are solitary and sequestered individuals.” Writ large, this vision of the individual citizen and worker undergirds our political economy.
We can do better than this. A reparative rather than repressive project is possible, and its foundations are already here– indeed, they never left us. The political left has kept alive alternative visions, but they remain alive in mass culture as well, in places ranging from religious morality to the movies. Alternatives to self-interest can sound like fairytale platitudes: we aren’t isolated individuals, but mosaics of each other! We should follow our hearts instead of our wallets! But if challenging self-interest means sometimes sounding like Winnie the Pooh, it’s because a better account of our complicated selves and potential for good survives in the stories we tell our children so that they will believe in themselves than in the fictions we often tell ourselves so that we don’t have to.