Musings with Montaigne: One Man's Profit is Another Man's Harm

Summary: In this brief essay, Montaigne argues that there are no gains in life without someone else’s loss. The first example that he gives is an undertaker: for this death doula, someone’s demise is necessary in order to make a profit. If there were no deaths, there would be no profits. He gives litany of examples, like soldiers in war, that demonstrate that there is loss embedded in every situation where someone gains something. Montaigne perceives this to be a law of nature, finding it’s expression everywhere one looks.

Reflection: In some respects, Montaigne is describing a Zero Sum Game, which you can see in the chart above: there can be only one winner and therefore all others are losers. Non Zero Sum Games, by contrast, through cooperation, can produce multiple as share efforts can result in bigger prizes that can be shared. When it comes to this essay by Montaigne, I would dispute the pejorative term “loss.” Death is in some respects a loss, but there’s also the gain of the family who needs help processing the body post-mortem. I believe that a loss typically, though not always, involves a lack of perspective around the variables at work and distributed networks of benefit.

Wright’s book was influential in arguing that cooperation produces benefits for all and that a world where there is shared benefits for all. However, the virus of Zero Sum thinking is hard to shake, as we are seeing in an increasingly isolationist political stances adopted by both major political parties in the United States. This mindset is hard to shake in that many of these ideas run counter to some of our evolutionary tendencies and our culture’s celebration of Zero Sum competition.