Great Thinkers: Simple tools from sixty great thinkers to improve your life today (The School of Life Library)

by The School of Life

A good politician – in Machiavelli’s remarkable view – isn’t one who is kind, friendly and honest; it is someone – however occasionally dark and sly they might be – who knows how to defend, enrich and bring honour to the state. Once we understand this basic requirement, we’ll be less disappointed and clearer about what we want our politicians to be.

Machiavelli was preoccupied by a fundamental problem in politics: is it possible to be a good politician and a good person at the same time? And he has the courage to face the tragic possibility that, given how the world really is, the answer is no.

he gets us to contemplate a darker possibility: that doing rightly and well what a political leader should, and fulfilling the proper duties of political leadership, is at odds with being a good person.

The unscrupulous will always have a major advantage. It will be impossible to win decently. Yet it is necessary to win in order to keep a society safe.

Rather than follow this unfortunate Christian example, Machiavelli suggested that a leader would do well to make judicious use of what he called, in a deliciously paradoxical phrase, ‘criminal virtue’. Machiavelli provided some criteria for what constitutes the right occasion for criminal virtue: it must be necessary for the security of the state, it must be done swiftly (often at night), and it should not be repeated too often, lest a reputation for mindless brutality builds up.

Modern life is, in many ways, founded around the idea of progress: the notion that as we know more (especially about science and technology), and as economies grow larger, we’re bound to end up happier. Particularly in the 18th century, as European societies and their economies became increasingly complex, the conventional view was that mankind was firmly set on a positive trajectory; moving away from savagery and ignorance towards prosperity and civility. But there was at least one 18th-century philosopher who was prepared to vigorously question the ‘Idea of Progress’ – and who continues to have very provocative things to say to our own era. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

Rousseau offered a scathing critique of modern society that challenged the central precepts of Enlightenment thought. His argument was simple: individuals had once been good and happy, but as man had emerged from his pre-social state, he had become plagued by vice and reduced to pauperism.

at the root of his hostility was his claim that the march towards civilisation had awakened in man a form of ‘self-love’ – amour-propre – that was artificial and centred on pride, jealousy and vanity. He argued that this destructive form of self-love had emerged as a consequence of people moving to bigger settlements and cities where they had begun to look to others in order to glean their very sense of self. Civilised people stopped thinking about what they wanted and felt – and merely imitated others, entering into ruinous competitions for status and money.

In an age such as our own, one in which opulence and luxury can be deemed both desirable and exceedingly offensive, Rousseau’s musings continue to reverberate. He encourages us to sidestep jealousy and competition and instead look solely to ourselves in identifying our self-worth. It is only by resisting the evil of comparison, Rousseau would tell us, that we can avoid feelings of misery and inadequacy. Though difficult, Rousseau was confident that this was not impossible, and he thus leaves behind a philosophy of fundamental criticism, but also one of profound optimism. There is a way out of the misery and corruption produced by the mores and institutions of modern civilisation – the hard part is that it involves looking to ourselves and reviving our natural goodness.

Smith remains an invaluable guide to four ideas, which can help us to create a better kind of capitalism: 1. Specialisation When one considers the modern world of work, two facts stand out: · Modern economies produce unprecedented amounts of wealth (for the elite). · Many ordinary people find work rather boring and, a key complaint, meaningless.

there is one huge problem with specialisation: meaning. The more jobs are subdivided, the less likely every job is to feel meaningful, because what we call meaning emerges from a visceral impression that one is engaged in something that is making a difference to someone else’s life.

Consumer capitalism Smith’s age saw the development of what we’d now call consumer capitalism. Manufacturers began turning out luxury goods for a broadening middle class. Shopping arcades sprang up, as did fashion magazines and homeware brands. Some commentators were appalled. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wished to ban ‘luxury’ from his native Geneva and return to a simpler way of life. He was a particular fan of ancient Sparta and argued that his city should copy its austere, martial lifestyle. Disagreeing violently, Smith pointed out to the Swiss philosopher that luxury goods and stupid consumerism in fact had a very serious role to play in a good society – for it was they that provided the surplus wealth that allowed societies to look after their weakest members.

How to treat the rich Then as now, the great question was how to get the rich to behave well towards the rest of society. The Christian answer to this was: make them feel guilty; show them the sufferings of the poor and appeal to their consciences. Meanwhile, the radical, left-wing answer was: raise taxes. But Smith disagreed with both approaches: the hearts of the rich were likely to remain cold and high taxes would simply lead the rich to flee the country.

isn’t money the rich really care about. It is honour and respect. The rich accumulate money not because they are materially greedy, but because they are emotionally needy. They do so primarily in order to be liked and approved of. This vanity provides wise governments with a highly useful tool. Rather than taxing the rich, these governments should learn to give the rich plenty of honour and status – in return for doing all the good things that these narcissists wouldn’t normally bother with, like funding schools and hospitals and paying their workers well.

Big corporations feel very evil to us now, the natural targets of blame for low-paying jobs, environmental abuse and sickening ingredients. But Adam Smith knew there was an unexpected, and more important, element responsible for these ills: our taste.

It’s not companies that primarily degrade the world. It is our appetites, which they merely serve.

Adam Smith is on hand to lend us confidence and hope. His work is full of ideas about how human values can be reconciled with the needs of businesses. He deserves our ongoing attention because he was interested in an issue that has become a leading priority of our own times: how to create an economy that is at once profitable and civilised.

Modern work is ‘alienated’ One of Marx’s greatest insights, delivered in an early book known as the Manuscripts of 1844, is that work can be one of the sources of our greatest joys. It is because Marx had such high hopes for work that he was so angry at the miserable work that most of humanity is forced to endure.

Marx also wants to help us find work that is more meaningful. Work becomes meaningful, Marx says, in one of two ways. Either it helps the worker directly to reduce suffering in someone else or else it helps them in a tangible way to increase delight in others. A very few kinds of work, like being a doctor or an opera star, seem to fit this bill perfectly.

2. Modern work is insecure Capitalism makes the human being utterly expendable; just one factor among others in the forces of production and one that can ruthlessly be let go the minute that costs rise or savings can be made through technology. There simply is no job security in capitalism.

We don’t want to be arbitrarily let go; we are terrified of being abandoned. Marx knows we are expendable; it all depends on cost and need. But he has sympathy for the emotional longings of the worker. Communism – emotionally understood – is a promise that we always have a place in the world’s heart, that we will not be cast out. This is deeply poignant.

Marx believes that because we don’t distribute wealth to everyone, nor seek and celebrate unemployment, we are plagued by instability, unhappiness and unrest. ‘Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism,’ he wrote. ‘And why? Because there is too much civilisation … too much industry, too much commerce.’

The idealised bourgeois family was in fact fraught with tension, oppression, and resentment, and stayed together not because of love but for financial reasons. Marx didn’t think the capitalists wanted to live this way. He simply believed that the capitalist system forces everyone to put economic interests at the heart of their lives, so that they can no longer know deep, honest relationships. He called this psychological tendency Warenfetischismus (commodity fetishism) because it makes us value things that have no objective value and encourages us to see our relationships with others primarily in economic terms.

one of the biggest evils of capitalism is not that there are corrupt people at the top – this is true in any human hierarchy – but that capitalist ideas teach all of us to be anxious, competitive, conformist, and politically complacent.

The Communist Manifesto describes a world without private property, without any inherited wealth, with a steeply graduated income tax, centralised control of the banking, communication, and transport industries, and free public education for all children. Marx also expected that communist society would allow people to develop lots of different sides of their natures.

Henry David Thoreau (originally David Thoreau), reminds us about the importance of simplicity, authenticity and downright disobedience.

Thoreau believed that people often ‘miss’ life – they remain so stuck in their ways that they fail to see that other approaches to fulfilment exist: ‘it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.’

he felt that too often we use the company of other people to fill gaps in our inner life that we are afraid to confront ourselves.

What we need to be happy isn’t work or money or technology or even lots of friends, but time.

Despite his time as a hermit, Thoreau teaches us how to approach our frighteningly vast, highly interconnected and morally troubling modern society. He challenges us to be authentic not just by avoiding material life and its distractions, but by engaging with the world, and withdrawing our support for the government when we believe it is acting unjustly. This might make us feel uncomfortable: how many of us want to risk our liberty or possessions on one act of defiance? Yet civil disobedience has become one of the most powerful forms of doing ‘nothing’ (avoiding certain actions) the world has ever seen.

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2. Imagine if you were not you A lot of the reason why societies don’t become fairer is that those who benefit from current injustice are spared the need to think too hard about what it would have been like to be born in different circumstances. They resist change from ingrained bias and prejudice, from a failure of the imagination.

The question that Rawls asks us all to contemplate is: if we knew nothing about where we’d end up, what sort of a society would it feel safe to enter? In what kind of political system would it be rational and sane for us to take root – and accept the challenge laid down by the veil of ignorance? Well, for one thing, certainly not the United States.

To be generous, at least 30 per cent of this vast and beautiful nation has privilege and opportunity. No wonder the system doesn’t change: there are simply too many people, millions of people, who benefit from it. But that’s where the ‘veil of ignorance’ comes in handy: it stops us thinking about all those who have done well and draws our attention to the appalling risks involved in entering US society as if it were a lottery, behind the veil of ignorance – without knowing if you’d wind up the child of an orthodontist in Scottsdale, Arizona, or as the offspring of a black single mother in the rougher bits of eastern Detroit. Would any sane birth-lottery player really want to take the gamble of ending up in the 70 per cent of people who have substandard healthcare, inadequate housing, poor access to a good legal structure and a sloppy system of education? Or would the sane gambler not insist that the rules of the entire game had to be changed to maximise the overall chances of a decent outcome for any single player?

The veil of ignorance forces observers to accept that the country they’d really want to be born randomly into would be a version of Switzerland or Denmark – that is to say, a country where things are pretty good wherever you end up, where the local transport system, schools, hospitals and political systems are decent and fair whether you’re at the top or bottom.

The first noble truth is the realisation that prompted the Buddha’s journey – that there is suffering and constant dissatisfaction in the world: ‘Life is difficult and brief and bound up with suffering.’ The second is that this suffering is caused by our desires, and thus ‘attachment is the root of all suffering.’ The third truth is that we can transcend suffering by removing or managing all of our attachments. The Buddha thus made the remarkable claim that we must change our outlook, not our circumstances. We are unhappy not because we don’t have a raise or a lover or enough followers, but because we are greedy, vain and insecure. By reorienting our mind, we can grow to be content. The fourth and final noble truth the Buddha uncovered is that we can learn to move beyond suffering through what he termed ‘the eightfold path’.

The Buddha travelled widely throughout northern India and southern Nepal, teaching meditation and ethical behaviour. He spoke very little about divinity or the afterlife. Instead, he regarded the state of living as the most sacred issue of all.

For a time, Buddhism was particularly uncommon in India itself, and only a few quiet groups of yellow-clad monks and nuns roamed the countryside, meditating quietly in nature. But then, in the 3rd century BC, an Indian king named Ashoka grew troubled by the wars he had fought and converted to Buddhism. He sent monks and nuns far and wide to spread the practice.

the Buddha’s teachings remind us of the importance of facing suffering directly. We must do our best to liberate ourselves from our own tyrannous desires, and recognise suffering as our common connection with others, spurring us to compassion and gentleness.

Little is truly known about the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (sometimes also known as Laozi or Lao Tze), who is a guiding figure in Daoism (also translated as Taoism), a still popular spiritual practice.

Daoism is deeply intertwined with other branches of thought like Confucianism and Buddhism. Confucius is often believed to have been a student of Lao Tzu. Similarly, some believe that when Lao Tzu disappeared, he travelled to India and Nepal and either taught or became the Buddha. Confucianist practices to this day not only respect Lao Tzu as a great philosopher but also try to follow many of his teachings.

There is a story about the three great Asian spiritual leaders (Lao Tzu, Confucius, and Buddha). All were meant to have tasted vinegar. Confucius found it sour, much like he found the world full of degenerate people, and Buddha found it bitter, much like he found the world to be full of suffering. But Lao Tzu found the taste sweet. This is telling, because Lao Tzu’s philosophy tends to look at the apparent discord in the world and see an underlying harmony guided by something called the ‘Dao’.

In order to follow the Dao, we need to go beyond simply reading and thinking about it. Instead we must learn wu wei (‘flowing’ or ‘effortless action’), a sort of purposeful acceptance of the way of the Dao, and live in harmony with it. This

First, we ought to take more time for stillness. ‘To the mind that is still,’ Lao Tzu said, ‘the whole universe surrenders.’

We spend so much time rushing from one place to the next in life, but Lao Tzu reminds us ‘nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.’

When we are still and patient, we also need to be open. ‘The usefulness of a pot comes from its emptiness,’ Lao Tzu said. ‘Empty yourself of everything. Let your mind become still.’ If we are too busy, too preoccupied with anxiety or ambition, we will miss a thousand moments of the human experience that are our natural inheritance.

This is another key point of Lao Tzu’s writing: we need to be in touch with our real selves. We spend a great deal of time worrying about who we ought to become, but we should instead take time to be who we already are at heart. We might rediscover a generous impulse, or a playful side we had forgotten. Our ego is often in the way of our true self, which must be found by being receptive to the outside world rather than focusing on some critical, too-ambitious internal image. ‘When I let go of what I am,’ Lao Tzu wrote, ‘I become what I might be.’

Daoism advises us to look to trees as case studies in graceful endurance. They are constantly tormented by the elements, and yet because they are an ideal mixture of the supple and the resilient, they respond without some of our customary rigidity and defensiveness and therefore survive and thrive in ways we often don’t. Trees are an image of patience too, for they sit out long days and nights without complaint, adjusting themselves to the slow shift of the seasons – showing no ill temper in a storm, no desire to wander from their spot for an impetuous journey; they are content to keep their many slender fingers deep in the clammy soil, metres from their central stems and far from the tallest leaves, which hold the rainwater in their palms.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Do not resist them. That only causes sorrow.

Confucius insisted on the importance of rituals. The reason he loved ceremonies more than sheep is that he believed in the value of li: etiquette, tradition and ritual. This might seem very outdated and conservative at first glance. But in fact many of us long for particular rituals – that meal mum cooked for us whenever we were sick, for example, or the yearly birthday outing, or our wedding vows. We understand that certain premeditated, deliberate and precise gestures stir our emotions deeply. Rituals make our intentions clear, and they help us understand how to behave.