On Quality and Morality

“With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan, - mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.” – Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principles

“Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.” – Robert Pirsig

I want to talk about Quality. Yes… with a capital Q. Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZATAOMM), described Quality as something we can all recognize, though find very difficult to define. It is that nature of Quality that has made it so elusive in society. We live in an era defined by distraction – never ending sound bites, emails to read, notifications to check, short-form media to doomscroll, and algorithms intended to exploit our dopaminergic systems. Despite unprecedented access to knowledge and material resources, Quality feels more elusive than ever as distraction and efficiency overshadow virtue and deliberation. The incessant need to be better, quicker, faster, stronger, richer, more successful, and more efficient has led us astray, coming at the cost of our individual morality.

In this essay, I assert that there is no Quality without individual Morality, as one necessitates the other.

The Essence of Quality

In the opening quotation, Thoreau suggests that this exclusive devotion to productivity misses the mark. It is a means, but surely not the end in the path toward finding true satisfaction in life and commerce alike. The missing piece: Quality. Quality isn’t just about a product or its craftsmanship, but a way of being – an approach to all aspects of life where we give proper attention and diligence to the task at hand.

“Diligence” comes from the Latin root diligentia meaning “to love, to care for, to esteem”, and suggests “the quality of being thorough, careful, and persistent in performing tasks or duties”. This has two components: (1) loving and caring, which suggests a moral selection to an occupation or pursuit that warrants care and effort and (2) a thorough, careful, and persistent execution of that occupation or pursuit. Morality, defined as “a system or collection of ideas of right and wrong conduct,” plays a role in our selection process – of finding that thing that warrants our effort and diligence, that warrants Quality.

It is no shock then that many a philosophical or religious sect spanning the Stoics to the Protestants had an undertone of self-reliance and diligence. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his most famous essay Self Reliance, asserts that there is an internal pull toward what is true to oneself (Morality). No one can direct us to this path; we must find it through experience and reflection. These sentiments only get us so far though – we can feel whatever we want, but without deliberate action, we remain trapped in abstraction. Diligence, then, must consist of those deliberate actions that illustrate our intuitive sense of what is true. Herein lies a nuance, as we can always act out of congruence with that intuitive sense. So long as our morality aligns with our actions though, we can find Quality in all aspects of our lives.   

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till… Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

It is only when intuitive Morality is met with the deliberate action of diligence that we can arrive at Quality.

The Erosion of Quality

“When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom.” – Confucius

This simple but profound quote from Confucius presents the problem of today’s age. Ask yourself:

• What is so “social” about social media if feelings of loneliness and rates of anxiety and depression are at all-time highs?
• What is so “super-intelligent” about artificial intelligence if it is trained on the very data that we mere mortals must feed it?
• What is so “healthy” about chemically man-made foods if the bounty of the earth is deemed a health risk?
• What are our children “learning” if rates of educational proficiency have plummeted?
• What are our “representatives” exactly doing if we do not feel represented?

We, as a society, have encouraged shortcuts and superficiality over the deliberate effort Quality demands.

This erosion of Quality is evident across many industries, but it is particularly striking in finance, where the concept of “fiduciary duty” has been hollowed out. Fiduciary comes from the Latin word fiducia meaning “trust, confidence”, stemming all the way back to the late 16^th century. The financial community will advertise and market themselves as fiduciaries, yet we must ask ourselves honestly, as a community: “Do we really inspire trust and confidence in our investors?”. Look at any newspaper from the last 30 years, and the answer seems a resounding “no”. From the banking systems origins – where lenders were often viewed as usurers – to the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, financial institutions have repeatedly failed those they claim to serve. There has been a lack of Quality.

Even active investing – meant to expose bad actors in our marketplace while directing capital to its “highest and best use” – has been perverted. Gamification and passive investing have severed the link between investment decisions and moral discernment. Trillions of dollars now flow into passive strategies, diminishing corporate accountability and severing the link between investors and the consequences of their capital allocation decisions. The result? A world where corporations face less scrutiny, and thus consumers (society) experience diminishing freedom.

This passivity is mirrored in most all aspects of our lives, sacrificing Quality in the name of convenience, efficiency, and immediate gratification – consuming products that were designed from the beginning for obsolescence, relying on pharmaceuticals to mask symptoms rather than address root causes, and increasingly outsourcing our thinking and creativity to algorithms.

To be clear, I am not calling to reject modernity, but for a renewed active participation in shaping our system – rather than being apathetic bystanders.

The Way Forward

I don’t wish to suggest that investors can be the beacon of light for society. I know I don’t produce a product or provide some tangible service to society that will directly correlate to human flourishing. However, as an observer of this system and society we find ourselves in, I do believe there is a path forward that may involve retracing our steps and resurfacing the original principles of the system we find ourselves in. In this series of essays, I wish to lay out said path forward.

The very basis for active participation in the capitalist system is to direct the flow of capital to its “highest and best use” which necessitates illuminating the “good” and “bad” in a market economy, an inherently moral task. That is why the Capitalist system, at its roots, has worked better than any other economic system in history. The “trading” of the moral codes of millions of participants has led us to human flourishing over time, even with its bad actors. It is the very demonization of such a system that has led us to the pseudo-Capitalist society we find ourselves in today, where passive speculation overtakes moral discernment, hedonism overtakes virtue, conformity overtakes independent thought, and thus power concentrates with those possessing the greatest resources, regardless of the merits of their actions.

This is not a condemnation of Capitalism but an argument for course correction. Disentangling the pseudo-Capitalist structure from its roots will take many essays, and I intend to publish them in due time. In the interim, suffice it to say that we must embrace Quality again, regardless of occupation or social status.

This philosophy must be both Romantic and Classical:

• Romantic, in the sense that, given our seemingly limitless resources, we should strive to “do the right thing the right way for its own sake” (self-reliance)
• Classical, in that we also have a duty to “learn the nuts and bolts of the right thing because that’s how one does things right” (diligence)

If we continue down our current path, devoid of this balance, we run the risk of apathy in our lives. The way forward is active engagement – asserting your own moral code onto the world. It requires both individual purpose (Romanticism) and diligent execution (Classicism).

In the end, Quality is inseparable from Morality.