Adam Smith is not everyone’s cup of tea. The elites of the philosophical world were somewhat irritated by his lack of ‘depth’ (or, possibly, turbidity). Schumpeter complained that Smith disliked what went beyond plain common sense. Maybe that is why it appealed to me.
Most people, if they know who Adam Smith was at all, have heard of “THE WEALTH OF NATIONS” (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations) and may know that it provides the foundation for philosophers as far apart as Marx and the supporters of free markets (the invisible hand). Very few people know the earlier book, THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS. Those who do know it… some think it quite in conflict with WEALTH, which is centered on self-interest, whereas MORAL SENTIMENT has as a basic principle the concept of empathy. Both are true, but I do not personally find them to be in conflict.
So: why this in a writing blog? Having waded through both as a young idiot, both books shaped my views on humanity, and on writing about them. Of course, I am probably wrong, but this is what I got out of it. Smith wrote in MORAL SENTIMENT that it is the ability of humans to imagine themselves in the position of another, even of something that they had never experienced that was the foundation of (for want of a better way of putting it) being able to feel ‘sympathy’ for them, and that that was foundational to their moral judgements. He also introduced the concept of ‘Society’s Mirror’ which as I read it, was on the ‘self-interest’ side — people care what society finds acceptable, and society finds acceptable what people set as the standard. Smith held that there were some limits past which this could not be pushed. I am less sure. I’d like him to be right.
As writers we spend a lot of time translating the fictional situation of others into something we and our readers can imagine themselves in. Shaping moral sentiment, in a way. This is one of the reasons IMO why such determination has existed to capture the entire publishing field for one end of the political spectrum. Firstly, they can create sympathy/empathy for those they want to get it — and secondly remove the same from those they consider their foes (dehumanizing them).
It goes a bit further in that if you can control (the media, the internet… and books) the image that people have of what society holds to be acceptable, society will mirror that. If you don’t agree, you will keep such views quiet, because, to a greater or lesser extent, almost all humans need some social acceptance. Of course – if the mirror shows that, well, actually, people’s approval/disapproval is not what the political group wants (say, multiculturalism in Britain, or Sharia Law in Afghanistan), society’s acceptance shifts, despite them. Much of enforcing a code of behavior rests on individuals self-policing – because if few regard something as wrong, and they know most other people don’t, unless you have a cop right there, they’ll do it – and possibly something nasty to the cop too, if he tries to stop them.
Thus, controlling the mirror becomes very, very important, especially when your group’s desire for a society is quite different to the mass of that society. Censorship, deplatforming become vital – or people could just find out that the attitude they have to whatever issue… is not just them, but hundreds of thousands or millions of others, and there goes the self-policing. That, rather than anything else, is at the root of the fury and hatred for Elon Musk and X, at the fury and persecution of writers who will not bend the knee, but instead write stories which elicit sympathy for the kind of character who they want portrayed as sub-human or at least inferior.
I might well not like what I see in society’s mirror. But I want to be as big and ‘true’ a mirror as possible.
So: as a guy who thinks humanity needs some Adam Smith level common sense — your writing is not just writing. It is a mirror of your society, which shapes how people want to be seen. I’d like them to want to see themselves as heroes, as a species of battlers, where their actions (not their group, sex or any other superficial detail) and efforts define their standing in society and with themselves. I can dream, I suppose. I try to live by it.
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “Society’s Mirror”
“…society finds acceptable what people set as the standard.”
Your thoughts on “controlling the mirror” are timely, Mr. Dave sir. All we see out there right now is idiots frantically trying to control the mirror, by brute force in some cases.
But, as we know from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, China etc. even with overwhelming force you can only control the mirror for so long.
IMHO, Adam Smith was right. There do appear to be limits. Socialism is hitting those limits hard right now, trying to pretend that “diversity is our strength” when it obviously isn’t, or “gender is a social construct” when it obviously isn’t. [I can hear the teeth gnashing already. ~:D ]
In the Kingdom of Lies, the second most dangerous man is the one who points and laughs. That’s why there’s no comedy right now, except on the interwebz.
Interesting. Did not know Adam Smith wrote a book on morals. I’ll have to go read that.
have a sample!
“The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with moderating, what he often cannot annihilate without great violence. When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear. The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder”
“In the Kingdom of Lies, the second most dangerous man is the one who points and laughs.” — Indeed, and that is why the PTB are so frantic to silence and lock up dissenters.
I have a fondness for Adam Smith. One of my Martha’s Sons characters (the intellectual brother), read him while forced to stay in the city.
But the one you can really have fun with when writing a lost colony descending into collectivism/feudalism is, of course, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.
The mirror they desire is the one the devils made in The Snow Queen.
I think one limit on mutability of human behavior is the process of training one’s own thinking.
I have not yet proven to myself that it is impossible for me to train myself to think perfectly in every useful way, and to effortlessly and accurately switch between modes of thought. I can still probably make some really synergistic combinations of slight improvements, and up my game in some way. Yet, while I cannot prove it, it would be wise to expect that the things I’ve tried many times before will not suddenly have a result better than anything I have ever seen.
Thinking takes time, and energy. Training thinking, takes time and energy. Switching between different frames of mind? I do not always do so easily, or effortlessly, or to the appropriate approach for the problem that I ‘should’ be solving.
Some of the more extremely useful ways of thinking about machines are a very different frame of mind than some of the examples of thinking about people. To some extent, this is fine, because humans and widgets are quite different things, and confusing them is actually a bit dangerous. However, certain approaches to understanding human behavior do seem like it should be impossible for someone in the grip of them to understand a machine as anything but a magic box.
If theory A about machines, and theory B about persons have wildly different ways of sourcing and evaluating claims, and testing theory, than training in both is likely to result in practices that are not entirely consistent.
So it feels to me that this might be pointing my way to a soft proof about mutability of human behavior, but I cannot see it this moment, and I also think my track record of proving things about behavior is a bit weak.
As for politics, I have been feeling a lot of ‘why do you care’, and ‘what did you think was going to happen?’ about certain politicians and their intellectual fellow travelers. It smells to me an awful lot like some of the people academics trained in behavioralisms thought that they could murder the ‘uneducated’, and perfectly replace the non-academics with machines. Which is an idea that mostly makes sense to people who have a magic box understanding of machines, and no deep grasp of machinery.
I’ve been very frustrated at people not testing their behavioral theories better, if they are going to invest so much emotion in caring what other people do. One of my takeaways is that I need more humility, because after studying some of the ‘mistakes’ properly, I can see that my thinking is a bit strange, and that I am wrongly estimating what is ‘easy’ for ‘everyone’ to see.