VII. The Scale of Values

VII

THE SCALEOF VALUES

IN spite of the disclaimer at the end of my last chapter, I am sure to be accused, because of the satiric remarks preceding that disclaimer, of disparaging Ambition, and I may not only be denounced for this, but I shall be told that of all places in which to disparage Ambition, a book purporting to show the way to will-power is the strangest and most unforgivable. But I hasten again to assure the reader that I have not disparaged Ambition at all; I have only disparaged ambitions. I have merely intimated that many of our ambitions are misdirected. We are worshipping false gods. A man in our day who laughs at the idea of taking seriously Zeus and Jupiter is not denounced as irreligious; in fact, he would probably be called irreligious if he did take them seriously. A time will come, I prophecy, when a man who bows down before our present popular conceptions of success will be denounced as lacking in ambition.

But there is a liability to misunderstanding more important that this. Many will derive the idea from some of my past remarks that the only thing I regard of importance is what a man actually does and does not want, and that I am not concerned with what he ought to want. This is a misinterpretation which cannot be allowed to pass. I have not and I cannot dwell at length upon what our ideals and aspirations ought to be; that is a subject for ethics, and I am talking of will-power. But for the sake of clarity, perhaps it were well that I indicate my position on this point.

We have seen that every ambition has its price, and that, before launching yourself formally upon the attainment of any ambition, you must first of all ask yourself whether it is worth its price. But the value of accomplishing an ambition, or the sacrifice involved in securing it, are not objective things. They exist in your own mind and they may be changed in your own mind.

An analogy may make this clearer. Whether or not you decide to pay $100 for an overcoat, depends both upon the value you attach to the overcoat and the value you attach to the $100. The worth you set upon the coat will depend upon whether you are without an overcoat altogether, or whether the one you have was acquired six years ago, or whether you just bought an overcoat last week. The value you attach to the overcoat will also depend upon whether you are enamored with the style of it, or whether you laugh at the style of it; and such things depend quite as much upon your own tastes as they do upon the overcoat. The value you attach to the $100 will depend upon your whole scale of values; your entire gamut of tastes and likes and dislikes; upon how many other uses you can think of for the $100, upon whether you attach more importance, say, to a $100 set of books; upon how much importance you attach to dress generally, and how much to money as a whole. In short, the value of a tangible object, unlike its weight, shape and dimensions, does not inhere in the object itself; it inheres in you. The weight of a long ton of coal will always be exactly the same as the weight of a long ton of bricks; but the value of a ton of coal will not always be $15, either to you or to the community as a whole.

Now what applies to economic values applies with equal force to social and moral values (and I am here speaking of these values as they are, not according to any notions of what they ought to be). These, too, exist not objectively, in the outward world, but in your own soul. When I advise you first to consider the price before setting out after any ambition, the decision you take may still differ from that of your neighbor who takes similar forethought. Imagine two men, each able to foresee perfectly all the consequences of his actions, and each trying to decide whether to make it his ambition to amass a million dollars. The first may enjoy putting forth effort; he may relish competition and strife; he may be satisfied with a narrow and exclusive devotion to his business; and the attainment of a million dollars may seem to him an attainment glorious beyond all other attainments. It is not difficult to see that such a man would go ahead with the struggle for this object. But the second man, equally farsighted, may be by nature more indolent, or, though possessed of equal energy, he may have a wider range of interests; he may like pictures, music, literature, philosophy, travel or women; the ambition for a million dollars may seem to him a ridiculous and childish ambition; he may feel that an income of $7,500 a year suffices for all his needs. It is not difficult to see that for him the price attached to amassing a million dollars would seem prohibitive, and the end not worth the gaining.

But we must pass from this consideration of what men do and do not want, to the question of what they ought or ought not to want. Of two men, that man who has the more ambition, who is prepared to make the greater sacrifices, must be admitted to have the more will-power; but he is not necessarily the more admirable character. I am all for ambition and success, but what I remonstrate against is the particular kind of ambition and success which is usually held up to the young man of today to emulate. It is usually narrow and material, and nearly always selfish. A man ought to set himself a high goal and he ought to attach a high value to that goal. Further, he ought not to attach too much importance to obstacles and sacrifices; he should welcome these as challenges to test his mettle. But the goal must be great enough to make the obstacles and sacrifices worth while; and it may be questioned whether a purely material and selfish goal does that.

What ought a man’s goal to be? Stated in the most abstract terms, it ought to be (beyond the mere duty of making himself happy) to increase social well-being to confer the greatest benefits he can upon humanity. But instead of this, what do nine-tenths of the Success writers exhort us to do? They point to the great material successes, the men who have gathered in more engraved paper than other men, the men who have attained fame; and they tell us to ape such as these. It is true that a very large number of Successful Men, in the process of attaining money and fame, have incidentally conferred benefits upon mankind. That is one of the ways of acquiring money and fame. In order to “get ahead,” you may work harder than the man at the desk beside you; you may study at home, you may be more efficient, you may devise plans for saving the firm money; you may patent an invention. And by these methods, adopted primarily that you yourself may get ahead, you are adding to your productivity; you are increasing the world’s supply of goods and services; you are conferring benefits upon mankind. Though your end is selfish, you are compelled to help others in order to attain it. In order to persuade people to give you a lot of money, you are obliged to confer equivalent benefits upon them.

“But if the pursuit of what you call material and narrow and selfish ends leads to all these beneficial results,” some one may ask, “what objections can you possibly have to them?” My objections, my dear sir, is simply this. So long as fame and money are the ends sought, the benefits conferred upon humanity are mere by-products; whereas, in any civilization worthy of the name, the ends sought by individuals ought to be social well-being, and fame and money the by-products. When money is the end sought, and social well-being merely the bi-product, we produce more money than we need and not enough well-being. We over-eat and over-dress and turn out mountains of silly luxuries; we seek to outdo our neighbors in material display; while the enrichment of the mind and the elevation of the soul are ignored, or occupy us only in moments when we have nothing else to do.

Material wealth is all very well in its way; a certain amount of it is an indispensable preliminary to any culture of the spirit whatever; unless a man has enough to eat, his brain will not for very long be able to function. But after we have acquired enough wealth to live in comfort (which does not include silly competitive display), we ought to turn to higher and better things. I feel like shouting; For God’s sake, man, can’t you see that the acquisition of wealth is a means and not an end?

It is further and finally to be said that the man whose sole ambition is to accumulate wealth (and even to do so honestly), must give people what they want and not necessarily what is good for them. A theatrical manager can gather a fortune by staging salacious plays. There is a moving picture actor with an irresistibly funny way of wiggling his feet. He acquires hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for making people laugh; while college professors starve for trying to make people think.

Yet after all this, there is something to be said for the ordinary selfish ambition. It is vastly better than no ambition at all. Though the benefits it confers on others may be incidental, it does confer them; and those benefits; even if they are usually material, are often vast. The world would be a very meager place if we lost our selfish ambitions without acquiring altruistic ambitions in their stead. And from the standpoint of will-power, which is, after all, our present subject, there is a very great deal to be said for selfish ambitions. Huxley, in his lecture on Scientific Education, happens to have said this so well that I cannot do better than quote his words:

I do not wish it to be supposed that, because I happen to be devoted to more or less abstract and “unpractical” pursuits, I am insensible to the weight which ought to be attached to that which has been said to be the English conception of Paradise; namely, “getting on.” I look upon it that “getting on” is a very important matter indeed. I do not mean merely for the sake of the coarse and tangible results of success, but because humanity is so constituted that a vast number of us would never be impelled to those stretches of exertion which make us wiser and more capable men, if it were not for the absolute necessity of putting on our faculties all the strain they will bear, for the purpose of “getting on” in the most practical sense.