The cult of doing business
87 comments
·May 10, 2025jmogly
nine_k
I think it's deeper. The mind is an optimization tool. It always keeps looking for something better, hence it is always not completely happy with the current state of things. The first noble truth (aka the principle of dukkha) is at least 25 centuries old; it says that sentient existence is inseparable from discontent, and thus from suffering.
This whole search for a better optimum, like other evolutionary mechanisms, results in survival and proliferation, but not necessarily in happiness. Proliferation seems to correlate positively with happiness, but up to a limit, and the limit is all too visible.
On the other hand, reaching the true global optimum does not seem too blissful either: any change would be a change to the worse, so all development, all motion except basically spinning at place would need to stop. This is not very different from death. OTOH the human mind, as it is, would still try to keep on searching, still feel somehow discontent.
(I agree that the reasonable path is to try to limit the suffering of living beings, including but not limited to ourselves. It's the least bad option.)
bckr
I don’t have a lot of surplus. I hope to, I’m working towards it. I have the privilege, talent, and positioning. But I can’t understand how anyone just below me in the hierarchy making ends meet.
jmogly
I think that is one of the most interesting take aways from this line of thought. It is nearly impossible to reconcile the idea that we as a species have unimaginable surplus, but nearly all of us feel we are living precariously on the edge of ruin, or are living in destitute poverty. There is plenty to go around, but because the worst parts of human nature have triumphed the good, we are forced to live in an incredibly inequitable distribution.
Rather than build a system that works for everyone in an altruistic manner, we have a system that funnels surplus to our most sycophantic, manipulative, exploitative, brutal members. It might just be human nature, our worst instincts tend to beat our best instincts.
lurk2
> caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry.
Religion predates the emergence of both agriculture and animal husbandry. These belief systems didn’t emerge as a result of surplus.
> There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.
How do you reconcile this belief with the idea there is no meaning, and that “there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done”?
jmogly
Religion is not my strong suit, but I don’t think religion as we think of it today was really around like that, it might have been but that is not my current understanding. IE There probably weren’t prehistoric monks and rabbis having epistemological debates about the meaning of life or what a good life is. Religion was more likely a way of understanding the natural world, like death, floods, luck, etc. Not an expert again.
On your second point, “there is no meaning”, I’m not sure I exactly prescribe that. I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met. And when I say that “there isn’t actually anything that actually needs to be done”, I mean that if you have a surplus of all your needs, say just after harvest, you don’t actually need to do anything. All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day. Prior to agriculture, surpluses were not regular.
Addressing the spirit of your second point though, even today there is much to be done. As a group we have and produce more surplus than we could ever use, but the distribution is such that many people live in abject poverty, or precariously close to it.
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brokegrammer
Well put. Now that we're trying to replace jobs with AI, just like we replaced jobs with software before, it's becoming less clear what "purpose" actually means.
Once we have the surplus of resources, but no job, I wonder what life would look like.
antithesizer
It's not "faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus"
It's "mute compulsion"
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simpaticoder
Listening to Cryptonomican 20 years after reading it. It is a curious embodiment of this "cult" but from a deeper, more epistemic place. The way Steaphenson treats the world, the way he describes it, is frenetic, packed with trivia and connections and ADHD deep-dives into related topics...but there is no heart to it. It's an empty, mechanistic view of the world, reducing almost every person a neat little network of abstractions, and then moving on. It is a strange book in that it seems to be a promotion of a narrative viewpoint rather than about the plot or characters. It is certainly the viewpoint of the "modern" tech entrepenuer, circa 1999. Somehow both extremely open minded AND judgemental; utterly unsentimental about anything, including the self; mere acceptence and wariness about indelible human needs. And so on.
Word on the street is that Cryptonomicon was required reading at Thiel's early Palantir. I read it now and it definitely hits differently. To accept that you must dwell in something in order to understand it, and therefore in order to wield power over it with any wisdom, is the antithesis of "The Cult of Doing Business". The hubris is baked in deep at an epistemic level, which is demonstrated to lead to epic moral hazards at an epidemic level.
fullshark
You should read Zero to One if you really want to unlock Thiel's thinking re: business. It's both the best business book I've ever read and the perfect distillation of the core soullessness at the root of the matter. The goal is positive cash flows that can't be successfully attacked by competitors. That's the game, that's all everyone here is working for.
tchock23
I will never, ever understand the praise for that book.
It can be summarized in one sentence: ‘Get a monopoly if you can.’ Brilliant insight there - thanks captain obvious!
If the author wasn’t famous it wouldn’t have even been published, and certainly wouldn’t have appeared as a ‘best business book.’
fullshark
Well for myself it broke things down clearly in terms of the framework to operate in (zero to one, one to infinity) and what types of products you should even strive to build. I recall not seeing a lot of the ideas put so down so clearly and cleanly before, and as far as I know a lot of the book's framing became conventional wisdom in this industry after publication, or after many took his course at Stanford. So maybe it's nothing new to you because the lessons have been internalized already.
FredPret
But Stephenson describes things in this mechanistic, ADHD way. It’s just his technique - he still paints a picture of people with rich inner lives and strong desires. Maybe the characters’ sentiments (mostly pro-Western tech optimism) don’t resonate with you, but that hardly means they don’t have any.
anon_hn_pltr
It definitely wasn't required reading. I have never met anyone who's read it or even mentioned it.
fullshark
I heard that anecdote but it was at paypal/x, which makes more sense given the book's plot.
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moshegramovsky
I have run into many of these types over the years. It's amazing to watch them run up their ladder of manipulative tactics until they realize that they aren't going to get what they want. Then you see who they really are. The whole problem is that being genuine matters.
The best boss I ever had never tried to be charismatic. He was a good listener, he was fair, and he took us seriously.
The Naploean Hill/Dale Carnegie types make my skin crawl.
mlsu
Keep your own house.
I like working, I’m not quite sure what I would do otherwise. It is perfectly acceptable to have genuine relationships with your coworkers, employees, and customers, but “genuine” is the key. What’s bad for you is not work, but lying and trying to pull a fast one on everyone around you.
Work, family, and a little leisure. Those are the three pillars. This hasn’t changed since we grew a brain stem, it comes far before language or farming.
djoldman
> Employees, no matter what their job, crave recognition, autonomy, and a personal connection to work, which is why they often contribute more than they’re paid for. Baker’s point is that celebrating workers’ “proactivity” disguises an essentially exploitative relationship.
The story of the modern Western economy is that all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked from the tree of technological and productivity improvements (in the context of the regulatory environment).
Therefore, the proportion of profit and revenue rooted in exploiting human flaws is and will continue to rise.
Examples are:
* Humans engage with drama and negative content (ad supported media)
* Humans overindex on a sense of family/belonging/tribe (employers as family extract more work for less pay)
* Etc
Perhaps the biggest is regulatory capture and exploitation of regulatory loopholes.
narrator
The irony of "higher" standards of living is that meanwhile, African countries, and a few strict islamic ones, have much less of all this and they're the only places reproducing at faster than replacement rate.
ranprieur
This all makes more sense if you go through the article, and every time you see the word "work", substitute "work for money".
foobarbecue
This is a book review, right?
I'm confused by this pattern of people reading book reviews and treating them as if they were the book itself, or an original article.
Isn't the purpose to decide whether you want to buy the book?
wslh
If you are interested I always recommend to at least download the "sample" from Amazon Kindle before buying it.
greenie_beans
21st century version is naval's twitter thread about becoming rich and paul graham's blog and tim ferris's 4 hour work week. i call it "microfeudalism", a riff on technofedualism and microcelebrities
rubitxxx
> But it’s even better to treat love itself as the most important work.
While Maslow's hierarchy of needs help us understand motivation, this is the most true.
CrulesAll
Strip him of his tenure, and let's see if love pays the rent.
bgnn
This isn't uniquely American, but obsession with wealth accumulation as an individual is. I don't think this applies to all Americans at all, but it is just mire commonly accepted than other cultures.
ativzzz
Wealth is freedom. One of the core tenets of Americanism is "freedom", in quotes because most of us are far from free, just different from "freedom" in monarchical/feudalistic societies. We are bound to the accumulation of wealth. However, some of us are able to break free. Software engineering for instance is a profession that allows this. It doesn't require the full commitment of your life to attain wealth, like finance or law or medicine for someone who has some intelligence and drive.
yfw
There is no freedom. Everyone lives on earth. Despite all the billionaires building bunkers might think otherwise. Microplastic pollution and global warming will kill everyone.
know-how
Only an academic could write something like this;
"But it’s even better to treat love itself as the most important work."
Your mortgage servicer doesn't accept love as payment.
QuantumGood
The comment below yours mentions suicide. Your brain doesn't accept mortgage servicing as a reason to continue living. So I think the idea is that priorities should flow from fundamentals.
dade_
Or the Protestant work ethic? I didn’t think this needed a new explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
dataviz1000
For me, an American, the work ethic comes from reading Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography after being inspired by a passage found in an American Literature textbook in 10th grade. [0]
edit: Of all the different philosophies a young person can subscribe to, entering in the middle of my life, I'm lucky to have chosen one of the better ones. I remember at the time really wanted to embrace an identity of being American and here is a founding father who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and signed the Constitution who was born and raised with the institution of slavery owning slaves himself and evolving into an outspoken anti-slavery advocate working to abolish the practice. That is what it means to be an American, to grow, change, and become better, just.
thimkerbell
Nice. On the virtue of silence: "in conversation [knowledge is] obtain’d rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue, ..."
dataviz1000
> My list of virtues contain’d at first but twelve; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my pride show’d itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinc’d me by mentioning several instances; I determined endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list, giving an extensive meaning to the word.
> I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.
(I alway laugh at this because to be truly humble a person can not boast of being virtuous therefore can't boast of being humble which creates a paradox.)
sseagull
As a high school teacher would say:
“The good Lord gave you two eyes, two ears, but only one mouth”
graemep
I think there are several weakneses in the Protestant work ethic as an explanation.
1. why is it directed at making money rather serving society? 2. Why does it glorify the rich rather than the "lowly workman" mentioned in the intro to your wikipedia link? 3. lots of evidence against it
The first two of these are even less convincing given that background of a religion that condemns the accumulation of wealth ("eye of a needle" etc.) and literally worships a "lowly workman".
As for evidence, this section of the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic#Criticis...
valiant55
As a former Christian coming of age in the early 2000s there was a popular IP called "Left Behind" about the Rapture. I always thought the concept of the anti-christ was ridiculously absurd. That someone could convince Christ's followers to basically believe the opposite of the Gospel. After witnessing the rise of 45/7 and the complete bamboozling of my deeply Christian extended family I no longer consider it ridiculous.
All that to say I'm not sure it really matters what exactly was written in the Bible because clearly a lot of the supposed followers of Christ never read it.
alabastervlog
> All that to say I'm not sure it really matters what exactly was written in the Bible because clearly a lot of the supposed followers of Christ never read it.
It’d be wild if they had. It’s a harder read than lots of books that the median reader struggles to understand, let alone enjoy enough to actually make it through. Most folks lack basically all historical context for the tales in it, and the book itself, so it reads as this unmoored set of confusingly-arranged-and-selected stories that have no hope of really making sense to them without a pile of reference books open alongside (what proportion of people are comfortable with and willing to engage in that style of reading?)
On the other hand, it’s also wild that more haven’t—one would think it’d be way up their list of life priorities. I take it as a sign they’re not really, under the veneer and trappings, convinced about the eternal (!!!) ramifications of the whole deal. “Well sure my eternal soul is on the line and I ‘believe’ I’m holding the literal word of the creator of the universe… but it’s haaaard and boring.” LOL.
graemep
What is an IP?
Also, I think its clear that some of this predates modern American evangelical Christianity, and some lies in secular values.
> That someone could convince Christ's followers to basically believe the opposite of the Gospel.
There are a number of historical examples. Most recently prosperity gospel and Positive Christianity?
> All that to say I'm not sure it really matters what exactly was written in the Bible because clearly a lot of the supposed followers of Christ never read it.
Often the ones who place the most importance on the Bible alone, and the most likely to be literalists! I think that is the root of it, because read as a "book" rather than a collection of documents, that exists in multiple versions, subject to disputes about wording and translation, each document written within a cultural (sometimes even personal) context, you can make it mean whatever you want to.
foobarbecue
What is 45/7 ?
By the way, I highly recommend all of nonstampcollector's videos! https://youtu.be/7gvv_UM7CYg?si=Yer3KeaJZs7FQ03s
betterThanTexas
> why is it directed at making money rather serving society
i think this particular phenomenon is rooted in calvinism, particularly in North America, and calvinists hated humanity. It also wouldn't surprise me if the protestants coming over here normally prone to social responsibility (eg some lutherans) were less willing to show up for their community than those in the old world.
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foobarbecue
right, a.k.a "European Miracle" . I had classes about this (racist and largely debunked) concept in undergraduate Geography. But the link above is a review of a book that presumably aims to take existing research further.
Hilift
> Weber also argued that the Protestant work ethic influenced the creation of capitalism
An alternative explanation is for the first 140 years of the US, "Protestants" were the "people that did the work". Catholicism was illegal until the states re-wrote their constitutions/laws after the revolution (or ratification of the First Amendment, which ever came first).
Also, there wasn't anything to do but work. If you wanted a house, you cleared land and built it. 50% of early European settlers were indentured servants.
Oh and there wasn't any money or banks. Tobacco was the currency (in Maryland/Virginia). The only business partner was the UK, that managed the colonies as businesses. The entrepreneurial part was the Crown getting shareholders to foot the bill for provisions for the colonies. Shares in Virginia were sold on the London Stock Exchange. Maryland had a sole proprietor that funded the infrastructure build out.
ashoeafoot
Its more protestant/catholic structures create legal structures/institues that then form into a modern state and accidentally support the mechanisms that secularize society and themselves. The main component is driving sexual others into social service contract cults while severing ties to clan/family.
Source:
lurk2
> The main component is driving sexual others into social service contract cults while severing ties to clan/family.
The implication being homo- and asexuals join the clergy because it obviates the expectation that they will marry? How does this lead to secularization?
Protestantism lacks a clerical tradition (reverends and ministers can still get married, and there are no monasteries to join), so how does your theory apply there?
It’s a crisis of faith, caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry. The human mind has wandered since. We’ve built systems of belief, technological systems, political systems, every possible system you can imagine. All to deal with the simple fact that our minds feel like they should be doing something, but there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done; surplus.
Since our first surplus all those years ago, we have continued to increase our surplus relentlessly. The problem is the more surplus we have, the more the mind idles, the more we try to invent things for the mind to do.
That is where I see the cult, the cult consists of faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus, whether it’s through positive means like improving technology or business, or negative means like slavery and exploitation. It’s a hollow existence. There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.