Designing a New Type of Firm Using Truth-Seeking as a Compass
Ensuring Information Isn't Corrupted by Power
Summary
Modern capitalism elicits vice from employees and customers alike. The advertising-based business model of social media harvests people's attention by inciting anger and envy. Within many large organisations, honesty hinders self-advancement. Moreover, a short-term focus on “external goods” such as profitability can often damage firms by hollowing out expertise or compromising quality.
For those who reject socialism, is there any alternative to this system? This essay argues that a framework of virtue ethics that has as its objective the discovery of knowledge can help us design a new form of capitalism where truth-seeking becomes profitable. The key proposal is to experiment with a new kind of firm, embedded within an institutional structure to bind the firm to the truth and help it become a place where information is not corrupted by power, meaning that one is less incentivised to be dishonest. This is a prerequisite for the firm to become a place where the virtues can be practiced.
Such an institutional structure, or cooperative, would introduce continuous testing and comparison of certain products. It could also experiment with internal reforms to reduce sycophancy and groupthink within a firm, thereby increasing the quality of reasoning. One such reform could concern how personnel are selected for promotions, to curtail any possibility of ingratiation of favouritism being used to obtain patronage.
Importantly, the responsibility for such reforms would not come under the purview of management, as the ultimate intent of these changes would be to ensure that management does not subordinate truth to their own interests.
Instead of asking businesses to sacrifice profit for truth, this system aims to create an environment where truth-seeking becomes a competitive advantage. Businesses within the cooperative could benefit from lower cost of customer acquisition and lower research and development costs. Within the firm, the emphasis on truth-seeking could also improve decision-making and avoid costly mistakes, improving productivity and lowering prices, meaning no economic sacrifice on the customer's part either.
Finally, the essay discusses how a civic movement aiming to do the above could grow over time and reward the members who contribute to such growth. Importantly, in order to succeed, the community would not need to attract mass support: only around 4 percent of the population could be needed for this proposal to work.
Has capitalism, once a force for good, become a vehicle for vice? A trillion dollars is spent annually on advertising1, much of which is manipulative rather than simply educative. Worse yet is that in order to attract this advertising spend, platforms reward content that grabs attention. Expressing moral outrage gets more likes on Twitter, so posters are effectively conditioned to generate discord2. So-called thirst traps get more engagement on Instagram, conditioning people to generate lust. That is before we even discuss envy. That the marriage of the internet and capitalism has amplified the classical vices is surely beyond doubt.
How bureaucratic politics can kill honesty
But this is not the only way modern capitalism propagates vice. Within large firms and organisations, the virtuous will often find themselves hobbled in the quest to get ahead. Consider the following quote from the book Moral Mazes, claiming to summarise the fundamental rules of bureaucratic life:
(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do what your job requires, and you keep your mouth shut. (p. 109-110)
Despite that being a cynical passage that does not apply to all managers, most politically-alert corporate workers will be aware of some of these “rules”. A strong case can therefore be made that the corporate firm often elicits vice from those both within and without.
Government is not a solution
The instinct of many at this point is to make some appeal for a public policy that could purport to solve the issue. However, governmental institutions suffer from many of the same problems we just looked at. Political parties are usually hierarchies, the leader is the boss, and key individuals quickly learn the five rules stated above. Those who do not will be mavericks to whom insiders will not willingly award power. This critique is not limited to democratic structures; authoritarian structures are worse as even more power is concentrated at the top.
Moreover, in order to win the support of the public, politicians often implicitly endorse greed either through offering debt-funded tax cuts or spending increases targeted at those who already have enough. Politics will not be able stem the wave of vice so long as it remains a source of it; a situation that shows little sign of changing anytime soon.
This does not mean that we need to give up—far from it. For the purpose of this essay is to show that a framework of virtue ethics that has as its telos or objective the discovery of knowledge can help us design a new form of capitalism. The key proposal is to experiment with a new kind of firm, embedded within an institutional structure that binds the firm to truth-seeking and helps it become a place where information is not corrupted by power. In such an environment, one would have less of an incentive to be dishonest. This is a prerequisite for making the firm become a place where the virtues can be practiced.
Such an institutional structure would organise continuous testing and comparison of certain products by customers, essentially becoming a kind of joint producer-consumer cooperative. It could also experiment with internal reforms to reduce sycophancy and groupthink within a firm, thereby increasing the quality of reasoning. One such reform could concern how personnel are selected for promotions, to curtail any possibility of ingratiation being used to obtain patronage.
But why is virtue ethics an apt framework upon which to build such a system? Simply put, virtue ethics offers a compelling explanation for why humanity has essentially groomed itself to spread vice. To see how, let’s start with a look into the thought of one prominent virtue ethicist, and his criticism of modern morality: moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, emeritus Professor at the University of Notre Dame.
Why did modern morality fail
For MacIntyre, modern “moral language is used to manipulate attitudes, choices, or decisions”, and moral culture has become a theatre of illusions where moral rhetoric is used to mask arbitrary choices. In short, morality is not a constraint on elites, but rather a tool they use to advance their own interests. How did this come to be? For MacIntyre, the enlightenment project has left us with a range of different moral frameworks, but no moral standard with which to choose them. This has given elites an ability to pick and choose moral frameworks depending on what is convenient at the time:
MacIntyre’s critique routinely cites the contradictory moral principles adopted by the allies in the second world war. Britain invoked a Kantian reason for declaring war on Germany: that Hitler could not be allowed to invade his neighbours. But the bombing of Dresden (which for a Kantian involved the treatment of people as a means to an end, something that should never be countenanced) was justified under consequentialist or utilitarian arguments: to bring the war to a swift end.3
Incoherent morality leads people to focus on self-interest
Given that there is no communal vision of what is good, people are left to pursue their own interest. With few exceptions, this has resulted in people pursuing what MacIntyre refers to as external goods: money, power, prestige, and fame. What we eventually get is a “society as nothing more than an arena in which individuals seek to secure what is useful or agreeable to them” rather than a “community united in a shared vision of the good for man (as prior to and independent of any summing of individual interests) and a consequent shared practice of the virtues”4.
External goods vs. internal goods
For MacIntyre, it is the practice of virtues that keeps an individual from being preoccupied with external goods. Virtues help people fulfil their role or purpose in life (their telos) by helping them access the goods that are internal to practices. What is an example of an internal good? MacIntyre offers the example of a chess player. Where the external goods to chess are prize money and possibly fame, the internal goods relate to things such as knowledge of strategies and analytical skill: things you can judge only after becoming proficient in chess. In contrast, one could get external goods by doing a range of other activities: finance, showbusiness, law, and so on.
Alternatively, we could think of an academic, whose role is to generate knowledge. The external goods of being an academic are income and prestige. The internal goods would relate to being an effective teacher, being well-versed in the literature and producing rigorous studies that somehow contribute to society’s knowledge.
Internal and external goods can be in conflict. We know of many cases where academics engage in p-hacking or even data fraud in order to get publishable findings. Conflict is also introduced when academics are paid by vested interests to produce reports: how this affected the economics profession in the period prior to the 2007-2008 financial crisis was highlighted by the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, which depicted how some economists were paid by the financial industry to produce reports to cast the sector in a favourable light. In both the above examples an internal good—rigour—has been sacrificed at the altar of prestige and income.
Implications for the firm
But we can also consider an example at a different scale: that of a company. Take the example of Boeing. The internal goods relate to the reliability and quality of the planes they produce, a reflection of the skill and knowledge of the employees. The external goods are revenue, profit, and the stock price. From around 2005 onwards, an explicit strategy was adopted to prioritise external goods relative to internal goods.
This resulted in the ostracism of engineers who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price, along with a refusal to let such engineers work on the 787 Dreamliner5. Instead, much of this work was outsourced to suppliers, some without engineering departments.
The result was indeed a rise in Boeing’s stock price, but a fall in their engineering reputation. For example, KLM complained that quality control for one delivery was "way below acceptable standards”, while others complained about delays in deliveries6.
This is a specific example of a general phenomenon to prioritise stock price, especially by linking executive compensation to increases thereof. In fact, it seems that the financialisation of capitalism implies a broad decision to sacrifice internal goods for short-term profit, even if that hollows out companies in the long-run.
In contrast, a virtue ethics framework could play an important role in addressing the damaging effects of short-termism, by ensuring that we focus on building and retaining our long-standing skills and capabilities, rather than sacrificing these for transient external goods.
Virtue Ethics as solution?
The framework of virtue ethics therefore gives us a powerful lens to interpret the modern economy and why in some aspects it seems to go awry. But before we can apply it to the economy, we need to outline what the actual framework involves.
What makes a virtue a virtue?
How does MacIntyre decide whether something is a virtue? It must satisfy three conditions:
Necessary to achieve the goods internal to practices;
Contributes to the good of a whole life;
Relates to the pursuit of a good for human beings, the conception of which can only be elaborated and possessed within an ongoing social tradition
One such virtue is constancy. This is the virtue whereby a human life follows a single narrative, where the individual wills one purpose: the individual’s telos. Having this kind of narrative could help the individual overcome challenges and make hard but right decisions. As Nietzsche once said, “he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”. Without such a personal narrative, it is easier to understand why someone would sacrifice the interests of society for their own benefit: after all, why sacrifice something for others who would never themselves sacrifice something for you?
Another key virtue is phronesis. This is knowing how to exercise judgement in particular cases. This virtue is a prerequisite for the other virtues to be consistently applied as the “very same action which would in one situation be liberality could in another be prodigality and in a third meanness.”
A third is sophrosyne, which is the ability to control one’s passions and therefore refrain from abusing power.
Taken together with others, these virtues could help individuals self-regulate, as they would know how their role fits into the broader frame of society and act accordingly. They would know why they do something, so ethics would not be just about following a list of rules.
But the virtues only make sense in a virtue ethics framework if the end or function of the community is described—this is the telos. Moreover, because the virtues represent habits, they also need a community in which they can be practised. This relates to the third condition mentioned above: what is the common good, or telos, that the community is pursuing?
What is the telos?
For Aristotle, the telos was eudaimonia. This term cannot be directly translated to happiness but rather connotes a combination of blessedness, happiness, and prosperity. How does one attain this? According to Aristotle, where a being has a function, then what is good for that being is whatever helps it perform this function well. For Aristotle, the function of humans is to reason, as this is what is specific to us and differentiates us from other beings. To attain eudaimonia is then to attain a state of reasoning well.
While MacIntyre initially proposed a telos that “the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man”, he would later convert to Catholicism after being convinced of the merits of the Thomist teleology.
MacIntyre is also rather restrictive regarding the environments in today’s world which he sees as being arenas where the virtues can develop. Rejecting the nation-state as a theatre where the virtues can be developed, he instead offers quasi-historical examples of such communities:
fishing communities in New England over the past hundred and fifty years . . . Welsh mining communities [instantiating] a way of life informed by the ethics of work at the coal face, by a passion for the goods of choral singing and of rugby football and by the virtues of trade union struggle against first coal-owners and then the state . . . farming cooperatives in Donegal, Mayan towns in Guatemala and Mexico, some city-states from a more distant past.7
One might then wonder how MacIntyre sees society changing to overcome the wave of vice. This is more or less left by him as an exercise to the reader near the end of After Virtue:
What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.8
But what if we want virtue ethics to solve the problems we have here and today, which means competing with the current system both materially and psychologically? Localism cannot compete against capitalism with its global markets and value chain, so we’ll need to devise a new strategy. What would it take for a new community to compete with capitalism? It would need to:
Create firms where the virtues can be practised
Somehow endow such firms with a competitive advantage against non-community firms
Be able to bootstrap itself without needing support from wealthy patrons or the government
In the following section, we will discuss such a strategy to create a constellation of firms and organisations where the virtues can be practised.
Designing a new community
When creating a community inspired by the principle of virtue ethics, the first question is what the common purpose of this community must be?
For this, we return to Aristotle, who said that the telos of a human is to reason well. However, this “function argument” has commonly been considered a fallacy, as he is deriving an ought from an is. Can we have a formulation of a telos that does not suffer from such a problem? And which also does not require a leap of faith, which MacIntyre took when converting to Catholicism?
The Metasophist Imperative
In previous work, I proposed the Metasophist Imperative as a telos: that the goal for humanity should be to acquire knowledge, in the hope that at some point we may definitively and conclusively determine what the meaning of life, or the purpose of this universe, actually is. The word “Metasophist” indicates that this imperative requires us to integrate the knowledge of different worldviews, perhaps even going so far as to incubate them.
The argument for adopting such a telos is as follows. Either there exists an objective concept of good, or not. If not, then we are in a world of moral nihilism. Nothing can be criticised on moral grounds, for there are none. But if there is an objective good, then we should try to figure out what that is, even if we are unsure about our capacity to do so.
There is no leap of faith here, simply an admission of uncertainty paired with an ambition to overcome it. Having such a mission definitively aligns the community with the search for truth, while being open to different views on what the meaning of life is. This also aligns well with the original Aristotelian telos: although we reject Aristotle’s biological teleology, we preserve the emphasis on reasoning well which is a prerequisite for a search for truth.
Is this simply another version of consequentialism? Not really: different worldviews will have different opinions on what constitutes valuable knowledge. And we don’t know which worldviews, present or future, will prove key to realising this telos. For this and other reasons, consequences in the context of knowledge are prohibitively difficult to calculate, so it makes more sense to focus on the character that will lead people to sincerely search for the truth. But what kind of character is this?
Members of the community oriented towards the Metasophist Imperative should have humility in order to recognise the legitimacy of different approaches to the telos; constancy in the sense that they themselves are aligned with it; and phronesis so that they can adapt their tradition and are not slavishly in thrall to it. Humility also has a key role: there will be disagreement about the truth within the community, so one needs to accept one might be wrong therefore remain committed to the truth-seeking mission and the mechanisms needed to do that. Such individuals will then be better placed to decide the different visions to be pursued and traditions to be preserved.
What are the implications of this telos for firms and individuals? We earlier mentioned that virtue requires consistent practice. Such consistent practice is not possible in a world replete with corporate and media entities eliciting vice for short-term ends. Therefore, we will need to reinvent the firm into a place where the individual can practise the virtues. The ultimate objective would be to create a new constellation of Metasophist firms that can survive and expand over time by beating today’s organisations at their own game.
The Metasophist firm
Earlier we discussed how firms generate vice through manipulative advertising and internal power dynamics. The solution could involve nesting firms within a community, and requiring them to follow a code to avoid or at least mitigate such dynamics. But what would such a code involve? And would it enable them to withstand their competitors?
Trustworthy information as an alternative to advertising
Let’s consider one tractable problem: firms making misleading claims regarding products. This can be addressed in two ways: verifying the quality of production, and by testing how such products do when in the hands of the customer. Take a product like supplements. We care about the production so that there are no impurities in the product, and to ensure that it is what it claims to be.
But even if the product is fully reliable in terms of its inputs, there is still a question of whether it will have the effects the firm claims it can have. Will that toothpaste really whiten your teeth? Will that supplement really improve your sleep quality? In the latter case, this could be tested by a community using devices such as wearables, allowing us to see:
Whether a supplement works for a given individual (as opposed to for a group on average)
What are the chances that it works for a given person
Which brands produce the supplements that are most likely to work
Are there other effects which are unstated
I have already built an initial version of this system—if it gains enough users, it could be the first Metasophist firm, the profits from which could be used to start other such firms.
The advantage of relying on wearables is that testing is relatively cheap. Initially, the community could focus on products and attributes where testing can easily be done with this system. As the community gets larger, more challenging testing can be taken on.
Of course, different products would require different types of tests; for example, we may be interested in durability for items like electronics. That would also apply for candles, but in that case we could also be interested in how they affect air quality.
Such evaluative practices would help us to test the quality of products that would themselves be produced by the community. The result could be the creation of a trustworthy brand or seal of quality assurance, which could be granted to Metasophist firms i.e. firms that are part of the Metasophist community.
But what other practices might such firms be subject to? Now we turn to the other internal reforms.
Patronage as a source of vice
We previously discussed how large organisations corrupt, because personal advancement sometimes requires excessive deference to those in power. Is it possible to create a functional firm where all authority is not entirely vested in the top, so that one would never need lie or conceal just to remain in favour with one’s superiors?
This probably requires a dilution or even a separation of powers, where one’s career progression does not hinge on being on favourable terms with some specific individual or group. How could this be implemented? We could alter the CEO role such that this person is responsible for everything except for who gets promotions. Instead, a Community Representative would be responsible for ensuring the separation of powers within the organisation, for example by ensuring a framework like the following:
Promotions could be allocated using a combination of:
A board of externals
Some metrics used to measure employee performance
Verified work portfolios
Input from fellow employees
A mixture of the above
The Community Representative should not have any personal say in the decision or the selection, as they could then be in a position to extract favours, reproducing the problem we want to solve. Even worse, they could become an alternative pole of power as others would seek their favour to boost their chances of promotion.
The CEO or another key manager could have a veto for well-founded reasons, which would need to be justified on a factual basis.
The above list is not meant to be exhaustive, merely a way to prompt the imagination. A risk with having any one metric or system is that people could figure out some way to game it. For this reason, it might be useful to have multiple systems or procedures, with the one(s) to be used in any given situation being selected semi-randomly. The effort involved in gaming one of these would become greater compared to the expected payoff, so the amount of gaming overall should fall.
The optimal system would vary by firm size, industry, country, and so on. Such a system may be more beneficial in firms with a comfortable market position. In such firms, people are more likely to start fighting over the division of the pie, as opposed to working just to ensure that a pie exists.
The idea of having a Community Representative in a company could yield other uses. As this person is not accountable to management but rather to the Board and the Community itself, they could function as part of a general check upon management, which is sometimes prone to put its own interests above those of the firm or the general community. This means they could ensure that information is not corrupted by power.
This more general role could be used to target common firm inefficiencies by tracking the responsibility for key decisions, noting the predictions that staff make in key meetings, and gathering feedback on whether meetings in general are useful and well-prepared. Currently, management might not gather such information as it may eventually prove unflattering to them. Yet, this same information may prove vital if we wish to improve the quality of reasoning within firms.
The community representative role is designed in such a way that it is not easily corruptible. What could management or staff offer them that would incentivise them to corrupt information? A later job, perhaps—but this is something a code of conduct should forbid.
In any case, the representative should not have very much to offer; as they do not take many decisions, they should not become a power broker. Selection of procedures to set promotions is a long-term procedure, so is relatively immune from tactical short-run power plays.
Furthermore, in the long-run, there could be two or more Community Representatives, making corruption more expensive and harder to co-ordinate. Where possible, both could get non-renewable 4-year terms which would overlap by 2 years: the fact that the Representative is not a lifer would mean their opinions would count for less as their influence, if any, has an expiry date. It also means that subsequent representatives could detect unjustified or strange behaviour.
Such schemes may or may not work; ultimately they would need to be tested in reality. If they don’t work, or yield dysfunctional firms, then another path forward may emerge from the experience. The costs of trying are relatively low compared to the pay-off, which is reducing the amount of attention devoted to internal politics, and creating an environment where people are able to speak their mind without fear of damaging their chances for promotion.
Strategies to Build the Metasophist Economy
How can we bring such firms into existence such that the community, by owning or otherwise controlling them, can ensure they follow a suitable code? The following are some ways that this could be done.
1. Reclamation of purchasing power
Every day we hand over power to companies when buying goods and services. What if we could reclaim this purchasing power by setting up companies to provide common products like household products and clothing? The community would then have control over the profits, or a share thereof. This strategy could initially focus on consumer goods and ideally those that can be sent by mail, given that any idea-based community is likely to be geographically dispersed initially. However, this strategy would only work when the community is of a sufficient size. Furthermore, for such companies to be viable they would also need to sell beyond the community—some expertise in marketing would therefore be necessary.
2. Minority Leverage
A second strategy would involve something that I call the minority leverage tactic. As described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, small minorities with strong preferences can determine decisions when nobody else cares about the outcome and compliance for the majority is cheap. That means a small but cohesive Metasophist community could leverage their purchasing power to stock the products we manage to produce from Strategy 1 in physical shops and supermarkets. However, this would only work if the community could count on the support of around 4 percent of the population in a given area.
3. Community Marketing: Organising and Rewarding Contributions
Community members themselves could market the products of the community over social media—whether by sharing content, mentioning the products online in relevant discussions, contributing to studies testing such new products, or simply buying the product themselves.
In order to be able to reward members, the different contributions would need to be tracked in some way. Some kind of peer assessment and other measures could then see whether the contribution is genuine and effective (a bot tweeting to other bots should not be rewarded) while not breaking any rules (such as by vote manipulation on forums that ban that). What is important here is to have a system of recognition and reward that can elicit contribution from members, but does not reward members in the event that no contribution was possible or forthcoming for whatever reason.
In return for contributions, the user could get non-tradeable rights. At the same time, a certain percentage of the company corresponding to the value of the rights could be put into a common holding entity. Eventually, the holding entity would become the recipient of dividends. The rights could then be used to decide what to do with such dividends.
In this sense, the rights could be used to de-escalate disagreements that would emerge between different wings of the community. For example, if the three wings of the community each want to develop a particular type of technology, then they can allocate their rights to the project they choose.
More broadly, the rights could have several uses:
Carried over as an investment in future community projects
Used to vote on certain matters relating to the community as a whole
Redeemed in return for products produced by the community
Redeemed for cash, at a markdown to discourage cashing out.
Why discourage cashing out? Because the more capital under the control of the community, the more power we have in total. And the more power we have, the better we will be able to pursue the telos and bring more organisations and people into our constellation. However, a markdown might not apply in the event of an insurable event, such as a personal catastrophe. In that sense, the rights could function as a kind of insurance fund.
The First Campaign
At this stage, a number of different strategies have been outlined for developing Metasophist firms. But we have elided a key question: how do we find members in different countries in a scalable way? This is particularly important, because Metasophism in one country will probably only be marginally effective and not able to live up to its full potential. But this necessary international approach raises certain challenges.
First, messaging needs to be tailored for different societies. Metasophism may be able to solve different problems in different countries. In some countries, there may be very high levels of distrust and it may have a valuable role to play in that environment. In other countries, especially small ones, the problem could be monopolisation and crony capitalism. In another the main attraction of Metasophism would be as an alternative to short-termism driven by a financialised economy.
However this geographically-tailored messaging should not be done in a way that introduces confusions or contradictions. The ideas of Metasophism could be confused with structures that already exist. For example, the approach may be misidentified as a workers cooperative in countries where those are common. In other countries, it may be assumed that the idea is to make all companies non-profits, or to keep money within the local community—neither of which are objectives. Avoiding such misunderstandings or nipping them in the bud early is the key to reduce the risk of a possible schism, which would then drastically weaken the ability of the movement to compete with capitalism.
This calls for a designed Discourse and Outreach Programme. The idea here is to reward members for articulating the ideology in external discourse, but to do so in a way that avoids the above problems and does not incentivise spam.
This could work as follows. First, an index of problems and solutions is compiled. This indicates the core problems a society is facing, the deeper issue or cause underlying that, and how Metasophism could contribute to the solution.
For example, if we are talking about over-regulation, then the deeper cause of that is a lack of trust in business, and the solution is a trustworthy capitalism as represented by Metasophism.
Alternatively if we are talking about climate change, an aggravating factor there is people’s idea of success and meaning aligning with material consumption. Part of the solution could be an alternative way of deriving meaning in life by participating in the truth-seeking mission of Metasophism.
Or if there is a corporate scandal due to lying about product quality or some egregious case of abuse of power, mention how the truth-based governance of the Metasophist firm would avoid that. Over time, particular cases could be gathered to illustrate the difference Metasophism could make.
Second, contributors are rewarded rights for making comments. Peer assessment would ensure that people are rewarded for intelligent contributions (which would have to be logged and verifiable) that are real, relevant and rule-compliant. This also prevents gaming or farming of rights: contributions are manually verified, making farming of rights difficult (in any case, their non-tradeable nature makes any farming less attractive).
It also does not restrict speech. Members can make other claims about Metasophism, unsupported by the mapping. They simply won’t be rewarded for that.
Finally, information flow must be two-way. There could be regular meetings of contributors to discuss external criticisms and raise problems for which there is no mapped solution.
This system would have a number of advantages. It would allow us to reach into all corners of the discourse in many countries, helping us to get the scale to compete with capitalism. It would also educate our own members on the objectives and capabilities of Metasophism, helping to prevent incoherency, ideological drift, and schismatic tendencies.
Conclusion
In a stand-alone firm, there is a tension between truth and profit. This essay outlined how to alter the economic environment so that this no longer is true, at least for Metasophist firms. There are two pillars—internal and external— underlying this new environment. Both pillars need not always apply: some firms will be too small, or provide a service that cannot be tested.
The first pillar involves a firm being part of a credible truth-seeking cooperative which could give it a competitive advantage in the market. The community itself provides distribution, lowering the cost of acquiring customers. Product quality is credibly verified, helping marketing efforts, and community experiments would mean lower research and development costs.
The second pillar relates to internal reforms to improve truth-seeking: reducing costly mistakes, favouritism in promotions, sycophancy, and group-think. There could therefore be large efficiency benefits to making the firm a place where one can reason well—which cannot be done so far because it can only credibly be done through the type of community I propose in this essay.
This model could outcompete normal firms. Improved efficiency means lower costs and therefore also lower prices: consumers do not need to sacrifice to buy our goods. Moreover, employees in Metasophist enterprises would not need to be paid less: in fact, if the theory is right then they may be more productive and therefore possibly able to earn more.
And of course, the community itself is a moat: other companies cannot replicate credibly the community or the truth-seeking model, as that would require big changes in ownership which would not be accepted unless the company is under severe threat, at which point a Metasophist competitor would be well-established.
All of these points mean that the theory can actually work. Furthermore, the essay lays out a concrete way of doing this, starting at a very small scale, thereby avoiding another failure mode of big visions where they apply to an entire society at once, leaving no room for experimentation.
Starting small also means we don’t need to get thirty or forty percent of society on board to implement these ideas. It is this need for mass support that results in so many reform ideas being watered down or supplemented with electoral bribes which ultimately makes them self-defeating—a fate a Metasophist community can escape.
Do we need everyone to care about the truth? No, because we would only need around 3 to 4 percent of the population to actually succeed. Plus, the system is as attractive for what it is against as for what it is for: against materialism, nihilism, and manipulative manifestations of capitalism. The philosophy addresses causes that historically have attracted mass support.
Even if not everyone cares about the truth, they should. Plans for societal and economic reform often fail because the organisations and individuals that constitute society cannot or do not want to change their habits. True transformation requires training people to resist vice in themselves. This can be done if one has an unwavering commitment to the truth, and the dominant organisations in society are reformed to reflect this.
The truth is an acid to vice, but a foundation for virtue. And upon this foundation, we can build the truth-seeking economy.
Practically and conceptually, there is much to discuss and do. If you are interested in following this, subscribe to the mailing list. If you already decided this is a good idea and would like to implement it as a Contributor (in the sense described above, in return for rights), please email me at themetasophist@gmail.com.
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After Virtue (p. 236). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/
https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-787-dreamliner-airline-complaints-quality-production-2019-8
Dependent Rational Animals, page 143.
After Virtue, page 243.