Delphic Maxim 110: Pursue what is profitable
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
110. Pursue what is profitable
I am someone who has — because of my political instincts — typically been very suspicious of the ‘profit motive’. That’s not particularly unusual, and it’s especially not unusual amongst the ancients. Plato, for example, despised the influence of money on our lives, politics and communities. But money isn’t synonymous with profit, and I think that’s worth bearing in mind when we read this maxim.
Profit can actually be interpreted in many different ways. I suppose for the purposes of this piece of writing, I’m thinking of profit as being synonymous with utility: the optimum outcome for the promotion of happiness and wellbeing. This is ultimately what money helps us to achieve after all — though there’s already a pile of research that shows we aren’t particularly good at knowing what will make us happy (and beyond a certain threshold, money loses its power to add more happiness).
So pursuing what is profitable really ought to be read as pursuing what is good, or beneficial. In many previous maxims, we’ve noted the tendency for the ancients to emphasise community and virtue — the building of character, and the inseparability of the building of character from our natures as social creatures. Read like this, profitability should also be considered in the light of our friendships, family relations, and the dynamic of our relationship with our community. It’s more than cash in the bank.
What’s the opposite of pursuing what is possible? You might think it is pursuing what is detrimental — and there’s some truth to this. Our desires for revenge, for cruelty, for violence, all do just as much harm to ourselves as they do to others. These aren’t profitable, and their pursuit is a waste of a life.
But actually, the real opposite involves not only the opposite of profit — which is disadvantage or impoverishment — but also the opposite of pursuit, which we might think of lazily waiting for something to come to us, or even being pursued by impoverishment. This is why it becomes important to pursue what is profitable: if we don’t, we end up either indolent and purposeless, or we are forever running from something.
