Integrity In The Age of Billionaire Gurus

I have often argued that one of the diseases most responsible for the West’s decline is the increasing willingness to identify financial success with moral greatness or wisdom, and hence to regard the world’s wealthiest businessmen — social benefactors by the workings of the invisible hand, which is to say as an accidental feature of their private obsessions — as being unusually qualified to advise us all on how to live, or even to play a disproportionate role in determining our laws and leaders. The presuppositions implied in this common perception are many and troubling, not to mention absurd.

I see a headline informing me that Warren Buffett has named one decision that separates successful people from those who only dream. Here, from the accompanying article, is a summary of that advice:

It’s that one decision Buffett says you can’t afford to ignore.

Integrity is such a non-negotiable aspect of Warren Buffett’s business practice that he vows the key to success is to associate only with people who possess it. He once said:

“If you’re going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb.”

It should be noted that one logical implication of Buffett’s dictum about “the key to success” is that not only he, but in principle anyone who achieves and sustains great wealth in business, at least over the long term, necessarily adheres to this advice to associate only with people of integrity — in other words, that all the world’s wealthiest business tycoons got there by being men who valued character as an essential, indispensable good. Does this sound plausible?

First off, then, while Buffett himself may adhere to this advice, as he interprets it, there is little reason to believe that any of his fellow candidates for richest man on the planet are equally constrained by his concern with hiring, or associating with, only men of integrity, and hence no reason to believe that a person who aims for success in wealth-getting endeavors “can’t afford to ignore” such a concern. More to the point, there is the question of what exactly constitutes integrity, on Buffett’s terms. Might it merely be, in practice, a matter of not breaking the law, of not embezzling funds from the company, or of signing on for “social responsibility” projects as a show of good neighborliness in the communities in which you are doing business? The famous quip about sincerity (a near kin of integrity) comes to mind here: “If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Then, of course, there is the larger matter of presupposing as the ultimate standard of behavior or character Buffett’s implicit definition of success, namely the accumulation of great wealth.

I offer, as an alternative view, a fragment of Epictetus:

Examine yourself, whether you had rather be rich or happy; and, if rich, be assured that this is neither a good, nor altogether in your own power; but, if happy, that this is both a good, and in your own power, since the one is a temporary loan of fortune and the other depends on choice.¹Fragments of Epictetus, Elizabeth Carter translation, London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1910, XVI.

To come at this from another angle, we may say that if one were to name the greatest successes in history, one might, as Buffett apparently would, draw up a list comprised mainly of the richest men of each era. (A hint of this likelihood may be gleaned here.) Or one might, as I might, draw up a list that included Socrates, Jesus, Dante Alighieri, William of Ockham, and Nietzsche, to name a few — individuals of limited material means, and more importantly individuals who adopted ways of life that were both practically and theoretically antithetical to the prioritization of material gain. My list, that is, would include a great many people who would be deemed highly unsuccessful on Buffett’s terms; and, I suspect, very few if any who would be deemed successes on his model.

Now a qualification: It is reasonable to ask whether a society that is going to thrive in a manner that can sustain the material wellbeing of the general population might need more than a few men who are inclined to define success and integrity on the standard of wealth-getting and property ownership, as Warren Buffett does. I believe the answer is yes — but I also see this fact not as a vindication of material acquisitiveness (in which point I vehemently reject today’s standard “conservative” espousal of the profit motive as a new virtue), but rather as an important lesson in resignation and realism, against all utopian fantasies of human perfectibility or universal happiness.

And the last thing I would ever advise — actually, it is one of the things I frequently advise against — is the mistake of confusing those men of degraded priorities (whose activities may indeed enhance the material strength of their society) with sages, political advisors, or models of human goodness. They are, and should be seen as, none of those things. Furthermore, the extent to which this error becomes pervasive in a society is precisely the extent to which the beneficial effects of such men’s activities are doomed to be purely temporary, ultimately giving way, as we can easily see today, to the pernicious outcomes of crony capitalism (i.e., incipient fascism), unlimited government, the rule of vested interests, and a moral lassitude consisting in the public’s slavish submission to any and all chains in exchange for nothing grander than a promise of material comfort. Such men and their public effects, in sum, far from being admirable standards of proper success, are merely evidence of the complexity of our composite nature, and specifically of the perpetual conflict between body and soul, material gratification and higher aspiration; a conflict in which the soul’s needs ought to be the priority inculcated in the young and rewarded by the mature, even while we accept, with a healthy dose of discomfort and/or irony, the secondary goods that may derive, by the workings of the invisible hand — that is, without intention — from some men’s misguided desires and obsessive acquisitiveness.

As a final note, I should add that the principle outlined in the preceding sentence applies not only to the relationship between societies and their prominent wealth-getters, but ought also to be invoked within the private soul of each and every individual who seeks to live his own life, composite as it must be, according to the standard of man’s highest nature. A healthy life, inevitably being something less than a perfectible one, must be lived in constant awareness of the inherent tension of human nature, constant dedication to the ultimate priority of the thinking soul, and constant vigilance to ensure that our scale is forever weighted in favor of form over matter, substance over substratum, purpose and freedom over necessity and comfort.