Pod Insights Articles of Interest The Philosophy Club: Mandeville About this episode A new series, featuring Derek Guy.
To hear full episodes without ads, become a paid subscriber at articlesofinterest.substack.com https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/listen
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Avery Trufelman? First of all, we should introduce what we're doing.
0:03 Speaker 01 Yes.
0:05 Avery Trufelman? So can I ask you to introduce yourself?
0:08 Speaker 01 Yes. My name is Derek I. I work as a menswear writer. I write a blog called Die Workwear.
0:13 Avery Trufelman? I would call you a friend of the show, and you've been on Articles of Interest multiple times. I knew you back when you only had 20,000 Twitter followers. And now you're like the man, the myth, the legend, the Twitter menswear guy. I saw someone on the subway looking at your profile. I see that all the time.
0:30 Speaker 01 No way.
0:30 Avery Trufelman? Yeah. Yeah. You're like everywhere. So as much as you feel comfortable, what is this podcast? What is this project we're doing?
0:38 Speaker 01 Avery approached me a few months ago about doing a podcast about fashion essays that are kind of canonical to the subject, that we've never read and thought about having a podcast where we read these fashion essays and discuss them and then share them with an audience that's interested in clothes, but also the kind of intellectual underpinnings of why we buy what we buy and why we wear what we wear.
1:01 Avery Trufelman? And I would clarify that, like, these are kind of obscure things. Like, what kinds of essays are these?
1:06 Speaker 01 They stretch back to maybe about the 17th or 18th century. A lot of them will be well-known to people that have read anything about clothes. Many of the ideas, I think, will be familiar to people. The idea of signaling status, or luxury, or identity. But sometimes the details of the people that thought of these ideas many hundreds of years ago, some of those are sometimes lost. And what we're interested in is getting into the details and just picking them apart, and also sometimes finding quotes that, you know, may be useful to listeners.
1:41 Avery Trufelman? We're basing this loosely off of this book. If any listeners want to get like a sneak preview of the kinds of works we're gonna read, we're basing it off of this academic reader called The Rise of Fashion: A Reader, edited and with an introduction by Daniel Leonhard Purdy. We're gonna go in and like, read the whole book. So it could be, you could treat it like a book club, or like Spark Notes, whichever one you want.
2:06 Speaker 01 Exactly. I hope that each episode is something that gives you a little bit more insight or depth into some of the chapters and excerpts in that book, and then also pick them apart a little bit, as we'll get into with this first episode.
2:18 Avery Trufelman? And we'll get started after the break.
2:23 Speaker 02 Hey there, it's Robyn from PRX. If you're a longtime listener of Radiotopia, you may know that we had a podcast that ran from 2016 to 2020 discussing every episode of the show The West Wing. Well, I'm excited to tell you The West Wing Weekly is back. Joshua Molina, whose star on The West Wing is Will Bailey, and Rishikesh Hirway, creator and host of Song Exploder, have reunited to discuss the hit Netflix political thriller The Diplomat. Just as they did in their original run, they're discussing each episode of the series in sequence, joined by special guests from the show and from the real world of diplomacy. Rishi and Josh will be wrapping up the first season with a special live taping at Union Chapel in London on November 14th. Subscribe now to The West Wing Weekly wherever you get your podcasts.
3:09 Avery Trufelman? You know those pieces in your closet that you grab when you don't know what to wear? The kind of clothes that are comfortable, fashionable, and seem to work for every occasion? Mine is definitely my silk skirt from Quince. Somehow, it works all the time. A gallery opening, a party, a trip to the coffee shop, everything works with a silk skirt, and I can pop it right in the washing machine. It's washable silk. These are the sort of well-made, practical, stylish pieces that will earn a permanent place in your wardrobe, and this is what Quince does so well. Quince makes everyday essentials that are really elevated. And unlike most so-called quiet luxury, you can actually afford these clothes. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than
3:52 Avery Trufelman? similar brands. And it's not just apparel. I use my Quince non-stick frying pan every day. Quince can make every aspect of your life practical, luxurious, and affordable. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Articles of Interest. It's the best way to support the show. I'm always looking for small, independent makers making unusual, strange, compelling clothes that I can't find anywhere else. And those are the kinds- Of independent makers that use Shopify. Shopify is empowering entrepreneurs.
4:37 Avery Trufelman? And for the rest of us, fans and the buyers, there's shop. At shop.com shoppers can discover brands they love, save items for later, search across stores at once and track every order in one spot. I like to use it as my massive wishlist across many stores all over the internet. And as if you needed another reason to use shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in shop cash, which is their rewards currency. In this giveaway, 1,000 shoppers will each win $1,000 in shop cash. Think of all the cool stuff you could buy with that. From cult favorites to the world's biggest brands, score sweet deals and check out fast, all at shop.com. Enter to win the $1 million shop cash giveaway from now until November 1st.
5:22 Avery Trufelman? Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.
5:36 Avery Trufelman? Yeah, okay, so what's our first book?
5:39 Speaker 01 So we, for our first episode, we read Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees. It was written in, I think it was the 1700s, so it's in a language that may be harder to parse today.
5:50 Avery Trufelman? Can I just read you some of the background about Mandeville?
5:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:54 Avery Trufelman? Okay. So he was born in Rotterdam in 1670. He was a doctor who specialized in hypochondriac and hysterical passions. And he learned English and he married an Englishwoman and he started working as a translator. And to earn supplementary money as he was starting his practice, he would translate fables. And so he was like, I'm gonna make a fable. So he wrote this like sing-songy little fable. And then he wrote this pamphlet in 1705 called The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits, which I love that name. And it was this little moral fable, a poem about the folly of mankind.
6:31 Speaker 01 Yes.
6:31 Avery Trufelman? And it is like a poem poem. Like, I don't know if listeners will understand that it like rhymes and shit. Like, it really is just a poem.
6:39 Speaker 01 It's actually a really good poem. And the poem is basically, he- Talks about the beehive. The beehive is flourishing when it's full of vice. You know, he has that line in there. Thus every part was full of vice, yet the whole mass a paradise. And then, once you get rid of vice, the whole beehive dies.
6:56 Avery Trufelman? Yeah, talks about this flourishing beehive and everyone's addicted to fraud and luxury and pride. And everyone is trying to get theirs. The lesson is, in his words, only fools strive to make great an honest hive.
7:10 Speaker 01 And many people saw this as a subversive text because he was putting forward the idea that society is not run by virtue, but run by vice, or that it's most flourishing when the leaders of that society correctly channel our natural propensity for vice. And so many Christian thinkers at the time thought that it was a scandalous text because they felt that was promoting vice and looking down on virtue. And the people who pretend to be full of virtue are actually just as, and he listed all of these kind of characters on fringes of society, like thieves and swindlers. And he said,
7:49 Avery Trufelman? The pickpocket.
7:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, pickpocketers. He said, the people that you think are full of vice and criminals and all those people, the elites are just as criminal as them. They just cover it up better. Mandeville says that by channeling vice, we get a more flourishing society. And his work really had amazing resonance, obviously even to today.
8:10 Avery Trufelman? Yeah, I mean, it is really interesting because it had all of these echoes of like greed is good and trickle down economics.
8:17 Speaker 01 Mandeville's idea of self-interest propelling society in some way is, I think, key to how many people start to think of of human beings afterwards. You know, Adam Smith, for example, references Mandeville in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which he wrote before The Wealth of Nations.
8:35 Avery Trufelman? And so this is like, just to super deep clarify, like this is before capitalism. It's like mercantilism.
8:40 Speaker 01 Yes, mercantilism. England's ruled by a king. There's like a priestly class. People are obsessed with divine virtues and Christian values. So he's putting forward at the time a pretty radical. Idea to kind of think of how society works in a more secular way, I suppose.
8:57 Avery Trufelman? It was so outrageous at the time. In July of seventeen twenty-three, it was presented as a public nuisance by the grand jury of Middlesex, and he was attacked in sermons and pastoral letters and lots of different opinion pages, or the equivalent of opinion pages and papers. An anonymous eighteenth-century poet mocked, "And if God, man, vice to abolish came, who vice commends? Man devil be his name." It was pretty good.
9:23 Speaker 01 Such a good line. Very twittery.
9:26 Avery Trufelman? All of it is so twittery to me.
9:28 Speaker 01 Very, very twittery. Man devil is like very, it's a very kind of quote tweet and then dunk.
9:34 Avery Trufelman? Oh, yeah. This edition in the book was from seventeen twenty-four. He just kept putting out new editions of the pamphlet, surrounded with more writing and more defenses of his argument. Like, every essay, he's sort of clapping back and being like, "No, that's not what I meant. You all like got it totally wrong." And he spent the rest of his life defending this weird take.
9:51 Speaker 01 Exactly.
9:52 Avery Trufelman? And it's really funny to see this in an era like before capitalism, before the internet. He's like, "No, no, no. Like, why is everyone mad at me? You clearly didn't do this."
9:59 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly, exactly. He made a troll post.
10:03 Avery Trufelman? And at a certain point, I wanted him to stop. Exactly.
10:05 Speaker 01 It did feel like he just put out like a troll post, got piled on.
10:09 Avery Trufelman? Exactly.
10:09 Speaker 01 And then got really serious and was like, "No, this is what I meant."
10:13 Avery Trufelman? Exactly, exactly. And then like as the essays go on, he gets like increasingly more pedantic and uptight. It's like, "Bro, like, walk away. You really don't have to engage with this." It's so, it's so funny and it's something like really reassuring. It's like, "Oh, we're just built this way."
10:28 Speaker 01 Yes.
10:29 Avery Trufelman? And it was so funny in the beginning, I don't know which edition you had, but I was reading the Penguin edition, and in the beginning, it was like, "No book, except maybe The Prince or The Leviathan, has been as profoundly moving to society." And I was like, "Really? A fable of the bees? Like, why have I never heard of this before?"
10:46 Speaker 01 I've only came across the name Mandeville in passing in other texts, but I've never actually read Mandeville. And so this was a fantastic kind of opportunity to get into the actual primary text of what he said. But I think actually, if you want to understand the nut of his argument, I got the most out of the chapter titled "An Inquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue." And his view is that humans are like all animals and they pursue self-interest. And so we are naturally inclined to please ourselves.
11:22 Avery Trufelman? Right. And it's, his belief is that it's built into us as people because we're the only animal that wears clothes. What, where is it? It's like, um, what else but in excess of stupid vanity could have prevailed upon our reason to fancy that ornamental beyond all other animals that are readily clothed by nature herself? Like, we, we are the wanting creature.
11:46 Speaker 01 Yes.
11:46 Avery Trufelman? But it's his idea that like, if it wasn't for our vanity, no one would buy clothes, no one would buy art. And I feel like this is kind of what Bernard Mandeville is talking about. He's like, we're full of vice. It's rife everywhere. Everyone's gonna try to rip you off. I mean, it's more pessimistic than I personally believe.
12:05 Speaker 01 It's incredibly pessimistic.
12:05 Avery Trufelman? But he's like, you're not gonna purge it. You're not gonna find the perfect society. It's not gonna exist. We have to like, love all members of society. And there are some parts of that argument that I sort of adore. It reminded me most readily of, did you ever see, um, there's this clip of Slavoj Zizek in this movie where he's talking about like, "Dich ist was we need to, to love ourselves and to learn to survive." And he's at a dump and he's pushing his nose into all this trash and he's like, "Dich ist was we make."
12:38 Speaker 01 You know, I, I think it's absolutely undeniable that people buy clothes to pursue status and for vanity. So many parts of it ring true, that, you know, someone's desire for consumption or their greed drives production. But the difference is that when we started to form a society, the rulers started to realize that you cannot have a society where people are just stealing from each other. So they set up a reward system. And by setting up this kind of judgment system, vice and virtue,
13:09 Speaker 01 We direct people's behavior, even if we all recognize that we would like to steal. We all have an incentive to agree to the system because we would like other people to be virtuous to us. And we would also like to behave virtuously, not because we think virtue is good, but because we want praise and we want to feel good about ourselves.
13:31 Avery Trufelman? It's like really coming after Christianity. He's like, it's social engineering. Every religion is involved in the suppression of selfishness, the suppression of desires. It's clearly social and he's not coming out and being like, there's no gods, no masters, guys. Like, he's not being that radical, but he's basically edging right up to that.
13:50 Speaker 01 This is one of the things I don't agree with his argument is that it doesn't seem like he believes there is any inherent goodness in virtue and any inherent badness in vice. And then he thinks about the creation of vice and virtue is just essentially a kind of trick to direct our behavior. And then going back into the poem, he talks about how everyone's actually full of vice, even if they promote virtue or pretend to be virtuous.
14:19 Avery Trufelman? They're like certain little zingers, like there are certain little takes of his. I was like, this is kind of clever. The idea that pride is the only sin, how does he put it? He says, if you are celibate and you see someone who has a lot of sex, you're going to judge them. And if you're sober and you see someone who drinks a lot, you're going to judge them and vice versa, right? If you love to drink, you'll be judgey of a sober person. But only pride is the virtue that is the most hypocritical. Prideful people get the most upset at other prideful people.
14:54 Speaker 01 Yes, yes. Only, only a truly humble person. Only a truly humble person would not be upset at someone who's full of pride. But your own pride makes you upset at other people's pride. I thought that was also a really good observation. That, that was one thing that I took away from it is I recognized my own pridefulness in Vandy as I was reading. His text, um, in that line, the idea that you are only upset about other people's pride because you're prideful, that made me realize that I am myself very prideful.
15:27 Avery Trufelman? Really? I don't think, that's so funny. Like, your, your, your picture's not on, like, you don't think of you as a very prideful person.
15:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, I mean, that's the thing is that he, he views everything as driven by pride, right? Like, you want to write a good article because you're prideful.
15:44 Avery Trufelman? Yeah, that's true.
15:45 Speaker 01 You know, like, and that was, I mean, that's the thing of, part of his, of his book is that he, he boils everything down to a certain kind of vice. But as I was reading it, I was thinking like, yeah, like, I bought something because I'm prideful. I want to write a good article because I'm prideful.
16:02 Avery Trufelman? Yeah.
16:03 Speaker 01 I am sometimes defensive when someone criticized me, and that's because I'm prideful. And so I think when I was reading it, I recognized that he was pointing out many things that I could point out in myself. And I suppose that's kind of what he was aiming for, because presumably only, the only literate people at the time that was reading were probably of the elites anyway. So the elite and the educated. So he was really speaking to them that you're constantly morally posturing, but you're actually a very morally flawed person. And also made me think of the way that people posture online. It's, you know, like Instagram is full of pride.
16:36 Avery Trufelman? Yes. This line that he said, nothing is more ravishing to the proud than to be thought happy.
16:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:42 Avery Trufelman? I was like, Instagram. And it's kind of interesting, because I think when we think about pride, we think of all these material things. Oh, my watch, you know, or like shoes. And it does show that pridefulness is also something quite existential and deep. You want people to think you're happy. You want people to think you're smart. You want people to think you're productive.
16:59 Speaker 01 Something that I recognized in myself, but then also, there are differences in kind and differences in degrees that he does not particularly recognize.
17:07 Avery Trufelman? Yeah.
17:08 Speaker 01 But I would just say, there are actually good forms of pride and bad forms of pride, even if socially, it is operating on a way for people to climb up the social ladder, signal sadness, you know, flatter their vanity, get praise, so on and so forth.
17:23 Avery Trufelman? My conversation with Derek Guy will continue after the break. October hits different. The seasons shifted, the light has changed, and your whole rhythm has changed with it. AG1 can give your body what it needs before the dark mornings, tank you before you even start. Every morning, before I even have my coffee, I have a scoop of AG1 in water, and I shake it up, and it gives me all the nutrients I need to power through my day. AG1 Next Gen has over 75 ingredients with vitamins, minerals, pre- and probiotics, and superfoods. It's a baseline assurance that you're getting everything you need for your body to function very, very well. Four independent studies showed that key nutrient levels improved
18:07 Avery Trufelman? within three months of consistent use. I personally find AG1 adds a sense of stability to my morning routine. I'm doing something really good for my body as soon as I wake up every single morning. Go to drinkag1.com artikels and for a limited time, get a free immune support bundle, including a bottle of omega-3 fish oil and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com artikels. When my husband and I moved to a new apartment earlier this year, it was much smaller than our last apartment. And we suddenly were like,
18:51 Avery Trufelman? how do we deal with all our stuff? This is where Wayfair came in. Wayfair is the go-to place for affordable, stylish home furnishings. And they have some inventive solutions I never would have thought of on my own, like a bathroom caddy that fits exactly over the toilet to fit all my excess spillover skincare supplies. Wayfair has thousands of products across every single style, every single budget, whether you're simply replacing an appliance or transforming your home from tip to stern. You can do it with the assurance that more than 20 million verified 5-star reviews are there to confirm the products and find the right fit for your home. Find pieces made for real life and get even more value with Wayfair Rewards. Join Wayfair Rewards today
19:34 Avery Trufelman? to get 5% back on every purchase. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com.
19:47 Avery Trufelman? I know how your sunglasses are probably faring after this summer. They're probably beat up and scratched. The prescription might not be totally up to date and maybe the hinges don't even work anymore. But you're not even thinking about it. You're like, whatever, fine. Because replacing sunglasses or glasses is a big pain in the butt. And new glasses cost a few hundred dollars. But this is where Zenni comes in. Zenni is an online eyewear shop with extremely stylish prescription glasses, sunglasses, and customizable lens options at prices that make it easy to own more than one pair. They start at under $30. And at that price, you can take a new style risk. My husband just wanted to try out some Zenni glasses and he was like, whatever, I'll get the green ones. Lo and behold, he wears them every single day.
20:31 Avery Trufelman? They have become his daily pair. And I don't think he ever would have found it without Zenni. That scratched up pair has done its job. Upgrade today with Zenni. Go to zenni.com/podcast and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off your first order, plus free shipping on all US orders over $65. The styles sell out, so don't sit on it. That's Z E N N I dot com slash podcast. Promo code PODCAST15.
21:02 Speaker 01 So to the example you were talking earlier, to bring it back to clothing, we are adorning ourselves to seem like we're better than we are. To give a contemporary example, why are we moving away from slim pants to fuller pants? It's because in the early 2000s, wearing slim pants signaled that you were fashionable in the know. But when everybody's wearing slim pants and the way to distinguish yourself is by wearing fuller pants, and therefore the game repeats itself. And so Mandeville's idea that fashion essentially runs on vanity and pursuit of status, that kind of drives his whole argument. It's not just about clothes. He talks about it in terms of everything. To give an example, you know, this podcast.
21:47 Speaker 01 I will go on social media and say, Avery and I have this fantastic podcast. You should subscribe. But if I were a truly honest person, I would say, hmm, we have a podcast, but you might not like it. It might not be worth anything.
22:01 Speaker 01 There are parts of it that are really dull. And honestly, you know, there are probably-
22:05 Avery Trufelman? A little overly academic, yeah.
22:06 Speaker 01 There are probably better people out there. That's the true, honest answer. But by tricking people into subscribing, then I benefit. And then I can take that money and then buy other things to someone else who is tricking me. And the whole trickery system repeats itself. I think that is essentially the core of his argument is that all of this production runs on some kind of vice. Trickery, deceit. There are so many parts where he's really talking about the leaders. And he's talking about the really wealthy man who has stores of gold. He's hoarded his gold because he's tricked so many people.
22:46 Speaker 01 You know, I don't want to make too much of it, but when I read that passage, I thought Elon Musk recently got-
22:53 Avery Trufelman? Yeah, of course.
22:54 Speaker 01 convicted of deceiving investors out of millions of dollars when he purchased Twitter by manipulating the market. And then he lowered the stock price, but he essentially manipulated market to take millions of dollars away from certain people. While at the same time pointing to Somali Minnesotans and saying, some immigrants there did some fraud or something. And that is the sign of downfall of society when he's actually cheated people out of much more money. And that is kind of the whole idea in his book is that this vice is actually what he sees is not actually the downfall of society. He sees it as the driver of production.
23:34 Avery Trufelman? Right. He's like, our vices make for a great society. He's saying, he admits that there's a way to make a society that isn't completely succumbing to vice and selfishness. But that's going to be like a small, weak, not powerful society. You'll never be great unless you embrace your vices.
23:55 Speaker 01 When I'm reading the poem, I'm thinking sometimes a lot of this stuff makes sense. But then why is there something about this that doesn't seem right? The reason why I disagree with him is because I disagree with his view of human nature. And that is the idea that we are only driven by vice. And virtue is simply a social construct, you know, that we seek praise or we want to feel good about ourselves. To give an example, you know, he talks about how even animals are just driven to kind of please themselves. But that's not totally true. I mean, animals do exhibit. Pro-social behavior, they groom each other, they share. There are experiments that show that monkeys have a sense of fairness, that they will get upset if there's no sense of fairness in the kind of social group.
24:40 Speaker 01 And then there's cognitive science and psychology kind of experiments that show that people's... Have you heard of this term mirror neurons?
24:48 Speaker 03 No.
24:50 Speaker 01 I, when I was in college, I lived with someone who was in cognitive science, and she was telling me about mirror neurons. And mirror neurons is the part of your brain that lights up when you can see something that you can relate to. So to give an example, if you were a ballet dancer, and you're watching on screen someone, another ballet dancer dancing, your brain would react differently to the images than someone who is not a ballet dancer, because they don't have any sense of what is really happening in front of them. The ballet dancer can relate more. And this translates even to other kind of images.
25:30 Speaker 01 So if you see a monkey, your brain lights up in some way to identify yourself with the monkey in a way that's different than if you were to look at a video of an ant, for example, that you can't relate to at all. And the idea of mirror neurons could be the cognitive kind of scientific basis of empathy. And so Mandeville, I think, sets up an impossible standard. He says that nobody is truly driven by virtue. You know, he gives this example, if you stop a baby from falling into the fire, you're not truly virtuous, because you only did it because seeing the baby burn would make you feel bad. So all you're trying to do...
26:09 Speaker 03 That was the most deranged argument.
26:11 Speaker 01 I was like, uh... That's true. I would feel bad if I saw a baby burn. But does that make me not virtuous to stop the baby from burning? And then he says another example of pity. If you walked by a poor person on the street and you gave them money because you pity them, you're doing it only because you want to feel good about yourself. So you know, it's that like curb your enthusiasm episode where Larry David donates money and gets his name put on the wall. But like somebody else donates and they don't put their name on the wall, except they tell Larry David's wife. And so she gives him praise, but then Larry David feels that by not putting your name on the wall,
26:53 Speaker 01 you seem even more virtuous as someone has out virtue you and gotten even more praise.
26:58 Speaker 03 Right.
26:59 Speaker 01 But Mandeville sets up this possibility of, okay, you pass by a poor person on the street. You give them money, nobody sees it at all and you don't tell anybody. So there's no praise possible, but he still doesn't think that's virtuous because you're doing it to feel good about yourself. So the only possible way of virtue, true virtue is if you are doing something where the bad outcome would not make you feel bad. Nobody would praise you and you don't even feel good about yourself doing it. If you set up that standard, sure, then his whole argument flows. But I think that's almost kind of an impossible standard. And, and when Adam Smith has that famous line in The Wealth of Nations,
27:42 Speaker 01 it's not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from the regard of their own self-interest, which is kind of Mandevillean in a sense. But Smith's view is that this is a reasonable level of self-interest. The baker is baking the bread because he wants to feed his family and also clothe and house himself and feed himself. And then the other person is buying the bread because they also want to feed their family. And so this is mutual self-interest. And I think that's a reasonable definition of self-interest. Whereas Mandeville is setting up a standard where even wanting to clothe yourself and feed yourself and feed your family is considered.
28:24 Speaker 01 You know, like a form of vice. And I just don't think that's how we'd normally use these terms. And that's where I think-
28:32 Avery Trufelman? Although like the galaxy brain moment of it is like, it's a vice and it's not bad, you know, but he was really reacting against the sort of fire and brimstone of the church and these really rigid ideas of goodness and sin, like this idea that you'll burn in hell if you don't do XYZ. And that's the thing, I agree with you. I think he takes it a little too far by being like, there is no goodness, like, we can never get it, you know, I feel like that's almost why he's doing this all encompassing definition of vice. It'd be like, see, see, like, you're also a viceful person. It's funny, he's almost full circle, getting all the way right back to Catholicism, being like, we're just so evil. Like, there's no repenting for us.
29:13 Speaker 01 Yes. And I agree with you. It makes sense in the context of when he's writing it, because there are so, so all these Christian discussions, and I'm not trying to pin it just on Christianity, but religious discussions of vice and virtue. And I think what he's saying is that if you were to eliminate all of the things that you see as vice, and only pursue virtue, like temperance, the Beehive essentially, it's not that it completely dies, it's just not as flourishing.
29:38 Avery Trufelman? Right.
29:39 Speaker 01 You know?
29:40 Avery Trufelman? Exactly. It's not a great nation.
29:41 Speaker 01 It's not a great nation. It's not like the Roman Empire, it's not the United States, which is incredibly productive, but is critiqued all the time for our greed and individualism, our vanity, our selfishness, so on and so forth, while at the same time, constantly preaching virtue and pretending that we're virtuous.
30:00 Avery Trufelman? Yeah, actually, that was going to be a question I had for you. If like, we have any examples in the modern economy of anywhere that could be considered like the Beehive, like a place that is a virtuous and not great nation?
30:15 Speaker 01 To me, he sets up such an impossible standard, but when I was reading it, the only thing that I could compare it to is kind of like a Tibetan monastery, essentially.
30:23 Avery Trufelman? Right, right.
30:24 Speaker 01 And then you can get into, I mean, you know, many people have critiqued, Marxists have critiqued the kind of Buddhist, the idea of working families giving money to these like monks that, you know, are not productive. People have critiqued that as well. Again, I think he just sets up an impossible standard.
30:41 Avery Trufelman? Exact. And another thing that I wanted to mention is, yeah, he talks a lot about fakery and shysterism, like the lawyers over bill, the physicians extort fees. What is it? The physicians valued fame and wealth above the drooping patient's health, which is such a great line. And that everyone's like desirous and prideful. And I think even if someone listening to this is like, well, that's not me, you know, I just like do my job. I don't lie. It gets back to this idea of fashion. Like, he speaks directly about what is considered luxurious and how it comes from cruelty. Like this character of hottie Chloe that has furniture which the Indies were ransacked for.
31:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:20 Avery Trufelman? And this casket, India's glowing gems unlocks and all Arabia breathes from yonder box. The tortoise here and elephant unite, transformed into combs, the speckled and the white. And this is something I think we think about a lot in modern consumption. Like, every Substack is about this. Like, oh, no. I want this pretty thing.
31:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:42 Avery Trufelman? But should I use leather?
31:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:45 Avery Trufelman? Should I buy from another country? Like, and yeah, if you, the countries with the really nice stuff, they've conquered other places. There's this element of colonialism, which I don't think Mandeville is progressive enough to say outright.
31:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't think so.
31:58 Avery Trufelman? But he is, he's pointing at it.
31:59 Speaker 01 Yeah. I think about, there is a Duke University cognitive science professor named Dan Airley. I don't know if that's how you pronounce his last name. He wrote a book called The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. And it's about how we think that society is corrupted by the Enron scandal and the big thieves and the people who really cheat society. But he says, he talks about how everybody
32:25 Speaker 01 Steals in some way. So like you take home a pen from work and you think, oh, it's not a big deal. It's just a pencil or whatever. But on a massive level, everyone does this and it does result in a larger loss than one big Enron scandal. And
32:41 Avery Trufelman? Yeah.
32:41 Speaker 01 His, his, his point is that we, we all cheat in these small, tiny ways, but we lied to ourselves cognitively because we want to believe that we're virtuous. It turns out at the end, and, and some listeners may know, the funny thing about Dan Arley is that in the end, it turns out that many of his papers were like relied on fabricated data.
33:06 Avery Trufelman? Get out.
33:07 Speaker 01 And so the guy who wrote about the honest truth of dishonesty was himself dishonest, which I suppose proves his point. But that is, that is both Dan Arley's, I think he wrote that sometime in the 2010s or something, you know, some, sometime recently. And then also Mandeville, who wrote this in, I think, the early 1700s, is that everybody is dishonest, but we all, we, we all lie to ourselves that we are honest because we want to feel morally superior, which is a result of our vanity.
33:39 Avery Trufelman? Although I think the interesting thing about what Mandeville is doing is something that really rubbed me the wrong way. When he was like, purveyors of vice can still be really good people. He was like, you know, think of the, the merchant tendering alcohol.
33:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:52 Avery Trufelman? And he is actually an upstanding member of society and was good to his wife and like a doting father and like replace alcohol with CEO of Purdue Pharma. It's like, should we live in a world where someone is a peddler of vice and still lives a good life? It really reminded me of, do you remember that McSweeney's article that's like, outside of my evil job, I'm really a nice person. And it's like, even though I spend most of my waking hours assisting in like unspeakable crimes against the environment, on my weekends, I'm really there for my friends. And it really felt like this is what Mandeville is saying, like, bad people are good too.
34:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:34 Avery Trufelman? And it's like, Ooh.
34:35 Speaker 01 Hitler was vegetarian.
34:36 Avery Trufelman? Ah. Exactly, exactly. And it's like, okay, I know capitalism doesn't exist yet, but doesn't this mean that like something is a little wrong if someone's allowed to have a morally virtuous life?
34:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's what-
34:49 Avery Trufelman? By contributing something that is bad?
34:51 Speaker 01 And I think the biggest difference, which is weird to me, is that he's pointing out this hypocrisy, but he also says that this is, results in the most flourishing societies. So Mandeville, he talks about how, even in the 1700s, he was talking about how this moment in history is the best that we've ever had, in terms of material comforts and everything, but yet people are unhappy.
35:11 Avery Trufelman? Right.
35:12 Speaker 01 And that in itself is driven by vanity and greed. You cannot even be content with our 1700 standard of living, which was better than the 1600s and the 1500s, and it's the same today. He has a section in the remarks where he talks about why people buy certain things, and it's this idea that by dressing a certain way, you can pretend to have certain virtues. And so in his example, there's, there is a lot of misogyny in his, in his text. I was like, okay.
35:44 Avery Trufelman? I mean, he's super sexist.
35:46 Speaker 01 He talks about these like vain women who are essentially like either poor or middle class, not particularly elite, but on fancy days, they will dress like the elites so that people treat them like elites, because they want to pretend they have the virtues of elites. And this runs throughout all of fashion today. We do not live in a system where we just imitate the ruling class. We imitate all sorts of people. But you might dress like a rugged, outdoorsy person because you want to pretend that you have the virtue of ruggedness. You might dress, I don't know, like old money because you want to pretend that you have the virtue of a higher class or whatever. That was one insight that he tapped into early is that-
36:31 Speaker 01 Appearance or fashion allows you to pretend to have certain virtues, and that's what drives fashion. And you see this constantly, at least in tailored menswear discourse. The way that people wrap up classic men's tailoring, which is what I primarily write about, with the idea of being a gentleman. And there are two ideas of what it means to be a gentleman. One idea of being a gentleman is the way that you treat people, treat them kindly and with respect and so on and so forth. And then another idea of the term gentleman is the socioeconomic class, like Prince Charles and the people that are born into a privileged class.
37:08 Avery Trufelman? Like the actual title of gentleman?
37:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, like a title gentleman. And people often wrap the idea of wearing a suit and tie with either the virtue of being a kind person without actually taking the pains of being a kind person. They just want to be looked upon as being a kind, gentle person. Or they dress a certain way because they want to pretend that they're part of a socioeconomic class that is not available for entry to you at all. And I think he taps into this idea is that we pursue certain looks because we want to both feel good about ourselves and not only status, but also to signal certain virtues. And that once we do this and receive praise, then we're addicted.
37:52 Speaker 01 That's what then drives the vanity and the virtue signal and so, so, so on and so forth.
37:56 Avery Trufelman? Oh, my God. Yes, 100%. And of course, I think about, like, the most ready example that I think about is like the Unite the Right movement, wearing collared shirts, you know, just like looking virtuous, looking like good neighbors and really holding murderous beliefs. This was only the first half of my conversation with Derek. There's so much more we got into, like why Mandeville thinks it's good to be bad with money and what Karl Marx would make of this entire thing. To hear the full conversation with no ads, become a paying subscriber at articlesofinterest.substack.com. And then you'll get to hear all of our full conversations ad-free. Articlesofinterest.substack.com.
Previous The Princesses of China Next Lace and Labor Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated