Consider these two lists of desiderata.
A: Money, promotions, badges of honor, votes and endorsements, friends, sexual partners, servants or assistants, vanquished enemies, lives saved, items sold, sports records, likes and retweets, precious items, expensive cars, houses and their size.
B: Happiness, virtue, wisdom, serenity, learning, rationality, sanity, compassion, connection, positive impact, a sense of meaning and fulfillment, self-individuation, self-awareness, quality of relationships, love and respect, mastery, flow, kindness, sensitivity, spirituality, enlightenment, transcendence, creativity, heroism.
Both include things that people generally find desirable and worth pursuing. But, like me, you might feel that A and B differ in some important dimensions.
For starters, Bs have higher status. If you're doing a job interview, you would not tell your recruiter that you'd like the job so you can get a fat salary, buy a car and hire five assistants. You are probably better off saying that you want to learn new things, have a positive impact and develop your talents.
The most successful religions and moral systems encourage followers to pursue Bs, while marking As as empty or non-central at best, and harmful or corrupting at worst.
Corporations get a bad rap because they are motivated by profit, which is an A. So they try to improve their reputation by signalling that they want to have a positive impact on the world and help people realize some of the Bs.
If we looked at what people actually want vs. what they say they want, I suspect we would find that the former category mainly samples from A, while the latter mainly samples from B. In other words, people tend to signal that they are pursuing the Bs, even when they are pursuing the As. Or especially then.
Conversely, explaining people's behavior by mentioning the As is considered cynical and mistrustful. "He is supporting the cause to make friends". "She only said that to get votes". "He'll do anything to impress a girl."
Whence this distinction?
There are important differences between As and Bs. First, the desiderata in A are related to zero-sum games. There is only so much money, cars or sexual partners in the world: if you get more, the rest of us are going to have less. This fact may be less obvious for some of the listed items. Likes and retweets, for instance, are virtually unlimited; and if you sell vacuum cleaners and I sell stamps, your selling more does not necessarily cause my selling less. However, if we model likes and retweets as proxies of the users' attention, we must conclude that their supply is limited. And everyone on the market is ultimately competing for the consumers' money.
Furthermore, As often come in power-law distributions, meaning that a few individuals have a lot of them while most individuals have little or none. And many of them tend to concentrate according to the Matthew effect: the more money, sexual partners or followers you have, the easier it is to get even more.
On the other hand, Bs are related to positive-sum games. If I become more knowledgeable, it does not imply that someone has become more ignorant; the general store of knowledge in the world has only increased. The same applies to rationality, compassion and mastery.
The distributions of Bs, if we could measure them, would look normal rather than power-law. Yes, some people score high on self-awareness, serenity or kindness, while others score particularly low. But even those are within a few standard deviations of the mean: there are no people who are 20, 100 or 1000 times kinder or more self-aware than the average human, except perhaps the Buddha.
Qualities like creativity, rationality and self-awareness are so consequential that marginal advantages determine significant differences between individuals. But ultimately their size is capped by the limits of human architecture. You cannot accumulate insane amounts of Bs the way you may do with As, as in Jeff Bezos having ~2 million times the net worth of an average U.S. household or Mick Jagger sleeping with 400 times as many women as the average man, plus David Bowie (citation needed).
The other fundamental difference is that As are easily measurable, while Bs are generally not. In fact, Bs are mostly internal qualities which cannot be observed directly. They are also harder to define. I would have a hard time explaining what enlightenment, self-individuation or transcendence are, let alone try to determine whether someone has them or not. There is no objective, consensual method for determining how much of a B-type quality anyone has.
The non-observability of Bs has some interesting consequences. For one thing, it is easier to be deceived about them, both because we cannot easily observe our level, and because it is difficult to make comparisons. The French say that everybody is satisfied with their wits, while nobody is satisfied with their purse. This is explained by the fact that one's income is easily ascertained, so it is harder to be biased about it. Given that wits are more difficult to measure, most people will happily assume they are above average and not think too much of it. Inequality on these attributes, while significant, will be less salient.
It is not common to envy one's neighbor for their wisdom or serenity. First, it is hard to tell how wise they are (maybe they are just good at signalling wisdom). Second, the illusion of superiority ensures that we feel very wise, and there is little chance that reality will intrude upon us and correct our bias. Third, we know that a third party will have a hard time determining whether our neighbor is wiser than us. For the same reasons, it is more likely that we will envy them for having more money or friends.
Let us take a step back and restate our observations.
As are related to zero-sum games, come in power-law distributions, accumulate according to the Matthew effect, and are easily measurable.
Bs are related to positive-sum games, come in normal distributions, one cannot have insane amounts of them, and are not easily measurable.
The fundamental difference between As and Bs seems to be their ability to generate social conflict.
For 90% of history, humans lived in foraging societies with egalitarian social structures. In this context, a person's fate was strongly dependent on the judgment and opinions of the community. At any moment, an individual who was deemed dangerous could be punished, ostracized or exiled; and in the absence of a strong central power or a system of codified laws, there was nothing in the way of her peers' wrath. Hence, it was very dangerous to stand out or inspire envy, and even more so to reveal antagonistic goals. The ancient proverb, "The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut by the scythe" was especially valid.
In horizontal, egalitarian environments of this sort, we would expect individuals to be very careful about their stated goals and aspirations. In particular, we would expect them to under-emphasize any aims or projects which could make them dangerous to their peers, and to over-emphasize innocuous or universally beneficial goals. Conversely, in stratified environments where some individuals hold significant power and are protected by laws and other social structures, we would expect high-ranking individuals to be more candid about holding competitive A-type objectives, and even to display them conspicuously for purposes of status-boosting, power signalling and intimidation. (Low-ranking individuals, on the other hand, would be still incentivized to appear innocuous, to avoid being punished or preemptively dispatched by the powerful).
Robin Hanson has pointed out that the industrial era has brought about a revival of forager values [1] [2] [3]. In fact, since the French Revolution, the highly stratified regime of monarchic/feudal/agrarian societies has given way to an egalitarian ethos where everyone is entitled to the same level of deference and overt display of status and resources is generally frowned upon. Our social environments have become more forager-like; hence, we are less likely to reveal our interest in A-type resources and zero-sum games.
Unlike in forager societies, we cannot be punished or exiled on a whim. But our peers still hold great power over us. They determine our standing and reputation, influence our self-worth and self-esteem, and can release or withhold precious resources. The social pressures shaping our persona are as strong as ever.
