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- [00:01]
A
First of all, we should introduce what we're doing. So can I ask you to introduce yourself?
- [00:08]
B
Yes. My name is Derek. I. I work as a menswear writer. I write a blog called Dyeworkwear.
- [00:13]
A
I would call you a friend of the show, and you've been on Articles of Interest multiple times. I knew you back when you only had 20,000 Twitter followers, and now you're like, the man, the myth, the legend, the Twitter menswear guy. I saw someone on the subway looking at your profile. I, like. I see it all the time. No way. Yeah, yeah. You're, like, everywhere. So as much as you feel comfortable. What is this podcast? What is this project we're doing?
- [00:38]
B
Avery approached me a few months ago about doing a podcast about fashion essays that are kind of canonical to the subject that we've never read and thought about having a podcast where we read these fashion essays and discuss them and then share them with an audience that's interested in clothes, but also the kind of intellectual underpinnings of why we buy what we buy and why we wear what we wear.
- [01:01]
A
And I. I would clarify that, like, these are kind of obscure things. Like, what kinds of essays are these?
- [01:06]
B
They stretch back to maybe about the 17th or 18th century. A lot of them will be well known to people that have read anything about clothes. Many of the. The ideas, I think will be familiar to people. The idea of signaling status or luxury or identity. But sometimes the details of the people that thought of these ideas many hundreds of years ago, some of those are sometimes lost. And what we're interested in is getting into the details and just picking them apart and also sometimes finding quotes that, you know, may be useful to listeners.
- [01:41]
A
We're. We're basing this loosely off of this book, if any listeners want to get, like, a sneak preview of the kinds of works we're going to read. We're basing it off of this academic reader called the Rise of Fashion, A reader, edited and with an introduction by Daniel Leonhard Purdy. We're going to go in and, like, read the whole book. So it could be. You could treat it like a book Club or like SparkNotes. Whichever one you want.
- [02:07]
B
Exactly. I hope that each episode is something that gives you a little bit more insight or depth into some of the chapters and excerpts in that book and then also pick them apart a little bit as we'll get into with this first episode.
- [02:19]
A
And we'll get started after the break.
- [02:23]
C
Didn't hear this from me, but normal gossip is back for Season 10 All Stars. Join Rachel Hampton as she shares incredibly chaotic gossip from the real world. They're bringing back some all time favorite guests alongside several new friends that people have been requesting for years. They've also got a brand new theme song courtesy of Radiotopia's own Rishikesh Hirway. And to share another secret, Normal Gossip is doing video this season. You can listen to Normal Gossip on all of your favorite podcast platforms like usual or you can come watch jaws drop on YouTube. New episodes out every Wednesday all summer long.
- [03:04]
A
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- [04:44]
B
So for our first episode, we read Bernard Mandeville's the Fable of the Bees. It was written in, I think it was the 1700s. So it's in a language that may be harder to parse today.
- [04:55]
A
Can I just read you some of the. Some of the background about Mandeville Yeah. Okay. So he was born in Rotterdam in 1670. He was a doctor who specialized in hypochondriac and hysteric passions. And he learned English, and he married an English woman. And he started working as a translator. And to earn supplementary money, as he was starting his practice, he would translate fables. And so he was like, I'm going to make a fable. So he wrote this, like, sing, songy little fable. And then he wrote this pamphlet in 1705 called the Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits, which I love that name. And it was this little moral fable, a poem about the folly of mankind.
- [05:36]
B
Yes.
- [05:36]
A
And it is like a poem poem. Like, I don't know if listeners will understand that. It, like, rhymes and shit. Like, it really is just a poem.
- [05:44]
B
It's actually a really good poem. And the poem is basically, he talks about the beehive. The beehive is flourishing when it's full of ice. You know, he has that line in there. Thus every part was full of vice, yet the whole mass a paradise. And then once you get rid of vice, the whole beehive dies.
- [06:01]
A
Yeah, it talks about this flourishing beehive. And everyone's addicted to fraud and luxury and pride, and everyone is trying to get theirs. The lesson is, in his words, only fools strive to make great an honest hive.
- [06:15]
B
And many people saw this as a subversive text because he was putting forward the idea that society is not run by virtue, but run by vice, or that it's most flourishing when the leaders of that society correctly channel our natural propensity for vice. And so many Christian thinkers at the time thought that it was a scandalous text because they felt that was promoting vice and looking down on virtue. And the people who pretend to be full of virtue are actually just as. You know, he listed all of these kind of characters on the fringes of society, like thieves and swindlers. And he said the pickpockets. Yeah, pickpocketers. He said, the people that you think are full of vice and criminals. And all those people, the elites, are just as criminal as them. They just cover it up better. Mandeville says that by channeling vice, we get a more flourishing society. And his work really had amazing resonance, obviously, even to today.
- [07:15]
A
Yeah, I mean, it is really interesting because it had all of these echoes of, like, greed is good and trickle down economics.
- [07:22]
B
Mandeville's idea of self interest propelling society in some way is, I think, key to how many people start to think of human beings afterwards. You know, Adam Smith, for example, references Mandeville in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, which he wrote before the wealth of nations.
- [07:40]
A
And so this is like just to super duper clarified, like this is before capitalism. It's like mercantilism.
- [07:45]
B
Yes, mercantilism. England's ruled by a king, there's like a priestly class. People are obsessed with divine virtues and Christian values. So he's putting forward at the time, pretty radical idea to kind of think of how society works in a more secular way. I suppose.
- [08:02]
A
It was so outrageous at the time. In July of 1723 it was presented as a public nuisance by the grand jury of Middlesex and he was attacked in sermons and pastoral letters and lots of different opinion pages or the equivalent of opinion pages and papers. An anonymous 18th century poet mocked and if God man vice to abolish came who vice commends man, devil be his. It was pretty good.
- [08:29]
B
Such a good line. Very twittery.
- [08:31]
A
All of it is so twittery to me.
- [08:33]
B
Very, very twittery. Mandevil is like very. It's a very kind of quote, tweet and then dunk.
- [08:39]
A
Oh yeah. This edition in the book is from 1724. He just kept putting out new editions of the pamphlet, surrounded with more writing and more defenses of his argument. Like every essay he's sort of clapping back and being like, no, that's not what I meant. You all got it totally wrong. And he spent the rest of his life defending this weird take.
- [08:57]
B
Exactly.
- [08:57]
A
And it's really funny to see this in an era like capitalism before the Internet. He's like, no, no, no. Like, why is everyone mad at me? You clearly didn't.
- [09:04]
B
Yes, exactly, exactly. He made, he made a troll post.
- [09:08]
A
I wanted him to stop.
- [09:09]
B
Exactly. It did feel like he just put out like a troll post. Got piled on.
- [09:14]
A
Exactly.
- [09:14]
B
And then got really serious and was like, no, this is what I meant.
- [09:18]
A
Exactly, exactly. And then like, as the essays go on, he gets like increasingly more pedantic and uptight. It's like, bro, like, walk away. You really don't have to engage with this. It's so. It's so funny and it's something like really reassuring. It' oh, we're just built this way.
- [09:33]
B
Yes.
- [09:34]
A
And it was so funny in the beginning. I don't know which edition you had but I was reading the Penguin edition and in the beginning it was like, no book, except maybe the Prince or the Leviathan has been as profoundly moving to society. And I was like, really? Fable of the Bees, like, why have I never heard of this before?
- [09:51]
B
I've only came across the name Mandeville in passing in other texts, but I've never actually read Mandeville. And so this was a fantastic kind of opportunity to get into the actual primary text of what he said. But I think, actually, if you want to understand the nut of his argument, I got the most out of the chapter titled An Inquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue. And his view is that humans are like all animals, and they pursue self interest, and so we are naturally inclined to please ourselves.
- [10:27]
A
Right? And it's. His belief is that it's built into us as people because we're the only animal that wears clothes. What? Where is it? It's like, what else? But an excess of stupid vanity could have prevailed upon our reason to fancy that ornamental beyond all other animals that are readily clothed by nature herself. Like, we. We are the wanting creatures. But it's his idea that, like, if it wasn't for our vanity, no one would buy clothes, no one would buy art. And I feel like this is kind of what Bernard Mandeville is talking about. He's like, we're full of vice. It's rife everywhere. Everyone's gonna try to rip you off. I mean, it's more pessimistic than I personally believe.
- [11:10]
B
It's incredibly pessimistic.
- [11:10]
A
But he's like, you're not gonna purge it. You're not gonna find the perfect society. It's not gonna exist. We have to, like, love all members of society. And there's some parts of that argument that I sort of adore. It reminds me most readily of. Did you ever see there's this clip of Slavo Zizek in this movie where he's talking about, like, dich ich what we need to love ourselves and to learn to survive. And he's at a dump, and he's pushing his nose into all this trash, and he's like, what we make, you
- [11:44]
B
know, I think it's absolutely undeniable that buy clothes to pursue status and for vanity. So many parts of it ring true that, you know, someone's desire for consumption or their greed drives production. But the difference is that when we started to form a society, the rulers started to realize that you cannot have a society where people are just stealing from each other. So they set up a reward system. And by setting up this kind of judgment system, vice and virtue, we direct people's behavior. Even if we all recognize that we would like to steal, we all have an incentive to agree to the system because we would like other people to be virtuous. To us. And we would also like to behave virtuously, not because we think virtue is good, but because we want praise and we want to feel good about ourselves.
- [12:36]
A
It's like, really coming after Christianity. He's like, it's social engineering. Every religion is involved in the suppression of selfishness, the suppression of desire. It's clearly social. And he's not coming out and being like, there's no gods, no masters, guys. Like, he's not being that radical, but he's basically edging right up to that.
- [12:55]
B
This is one of the things that I don't agree with his argument is that it doesn't seem like he believes there is any inherent goodness in virtue and any inherent badness and vice. And then he thinks about the creation of vice, and virtue is just essentially a kind of trick to direct our behavior. And then going back into the poem, he talks about how everyone's actually full of vice, even if they promote virtue or pretend to be virtuous.
- [13:24]
A
They're like certain little zingers. Like, there are certain little takes of his. I was like, this is kind of clever, the idea that pride is the only sin. How does he put it? He says, if you are celibate and you see someone who has a lot of sex, you're gonna judge them. And if you're sober and you see someone who drinks, drinks a lot, you're gonna judge them and vice versa. Right. If you love to drink, you'll be judgy of a sober person. But only pride is the virtue that is the most hypocritical. Prideful people get the most upset at other prideful people.
- [13:59]
B
Yes, yes.
- [14:01]
A
Only.
- [14:01]
B
Only a truly humble person. Only a truly humble person would not be upset at someone who's full of pride. But your own pride makes you upset other people's pride. I thought that was also a really good observation. That was one thing that I took away from it. I recognized my own pridefulness in vanity as I was reading his text. And that line, the idea that you are only upset about other people's pride because you're prideful, that made me realize that I am myself very prideful.
- [14:32]
A
Really? I don't think that's so funny. Your picture's not on. You don't think of you as a very prideful person.
- [14:40]
B
Yeah. I mean, that's the thing, is that he views everything that's driven by pride. Right. Like, you want to write a good article because you're prideful.
- [14:49]
A
Yeah.
- [14:50]
B
That's, you know, like. And that was. I mean, that's the Thing of. Part of his. Of his book is that he. He boils everything down to a certain kind of vice. But as I was reading it, I was thinking, like, yeah, like I bought something because I'm prideful. I want to write a good article because I'm prideful.
- [15:07]
A
Yeah.
- [15:08]
B
I. And sometimes defensive when someone criticized me. And that's because I'm prideful. And so I think when I was reading it, I recognized that he was pointing out many things that I could point out in myself. And I suppose that's kind of what he was aiming for, because presumably the only literate people at the time that I was reading were probably of the elites anyway, so the elite and the educated. So he was really speaking to them. That you're constantly morally posturing, but you're actually a very morally flawed person. And also made me think of the way that people posture online. It's like, you know, like, Instagram is full of pride.
- [15:41]
A
Yes. This line that he said, nothing is more ravishing to the proud than to be thought happy.
- [15:47]
B
Yeah.
- [15:47]
A
I was like, Instagram. And it's kind of interesting because I think when we think about pride, we think of all these material things. Oh, my watch, you know, or like, shoes. And it does show that pridefulness is also something quite existential and deep. You want people to think you're happy. You want people to think you're smart. You want people to think you're productive.
- [16:04]
B
Something that I recognized in myself. But then also there are differences in kind and differences in degrees that he does not particularly recognize.
- [16:12]
C
Yeah.
- [16:13]
B
But I would just say there are actually good forms of pride and bad forms of pride, even if socially it is operating on a way for people to climb up the social ladder, signal sadness, you know, flatter their vanity, get praise, so on, so forth.
- [16:28]
A
My conversation with Derek Guy will continue after the break. Summer always has a feeling like a big weekend. You know what I mean? Like, June is Friday, July is Saturday, and August is Sunday. You start to get a little bit of the Mondays and be like, where did the time go? You know, August slips away, but summer's not over yet. It's only mid July, so you gotta live it up while you can. And Macy's is here to help you squeeze in that summer feeling and enjoy it for as long as possible. Now is the time for that road trip or that beach getaway. Seize the day. Stock up on everything you need, from swimsuits to sunglasses to sunscreen to towels, all in one place. Make the most out of your summer before you have to start Thinking about back to school or back to college or back to work. Treat yourself now and live it up. It's still Saturday. Shop in store or online@macy's.com Summer may seem like it's just about wearing less, just baring all your arms and legs. But that's not actually true. It's more about the fabric. The cotton, the silk, the linen. You need good breathable fabrics. And for high quality ingredients, there's no better place to turn than Quince. Quince's prices are kind of unbelievable. They have 100% European linen pants and machine washable silk that start at $32. How do they do it? But they cut out the middleman and work directly with ethical factories. So you're just paying for the quality, not the brand markup. I don't know what I'd be doing this summer without my Quince silk skirt. I wear it like a skirt. I wear it like a slip. I've worn it to formal events. I put it on when I'm just running out the house and I don't know what else to wear. It elevates every single day. Make your summer wardrobe feel easier. Go to quince.com ofinterest for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com of interest for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com of interest. This podcast is supported by Her Private Hell, official selection of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Her Private Hell is the newest film from Nicholas Winding Refn, director of Drive and the Neon Demon. It has been hailed by critics as a visually striking hypnotic neo noir. Starring Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton. Her Private Hell is now playing in theaters.
- [19:01]
B
So to the example you were talking earlier to bring it back to clothing. We are adorning ourselves to seem like we're better than we are. To give a contemporary example, why are we moving away from slim pants to fuller pants is because in the early 2000s, wearing slim pants signaled that you were fashionable in the know. But when everybody's wearing slim pants and the way to distinguish yourself is by wearing full fuller pants. And therefore the game repeats itself. And so Mandeville's idea that fashion essentially runs on vanity in pursuit of status, that kind of drives his whole argument. It's not just about clothes. He talks about it in terms of everything. To give an example, you know this podcast I will go on social media and say, avery and I have this fantastic podcast. You should subscribe. But if I were a truly honest person, I would say we have a podcast. But you might not like it. It might not be worth anything. There are parts of it that are really dull. And honestly, you know, they're probably a little overly academic. Yeah, they're probably better people out there. That's the true honest answer. But by tricking people into subscribing, then I benefit, and then I can take that money and then buy other things to someone else who is tricking me. And the whole trickery system repeats itself. I think that is essentially the core of his argument, is that all of this production runs on some kind of vice, trickery, deceit. There are so many parts where he's really talking about the leaders, and he's talking about the really wealthy man who has stores of gold. He's hoarded this gold because he's tricked so many people. I don't want to make too much of it, but when I read that passage, I thought, Elon Musk recently got convicted of deceiving investors out of millions of dollars when he purchased Twitter by manipulating the market and then he lowered the stock price. But he essentially manipulated market to take millions of dollars away from certain people, while at the same time pointing to Somali Minnesotans and saying some immigrants there did some. Some fraud or something. And that is the sign of downfall of society when he's actually cheated people out of much more money. And that is kind of the whole idea in his book is that this vice is actually what he sees is not actually the downfall of society. He sees it as the driver of production.
- [21:33]
A
Right. He's like, our vices make for a great society. He's say he admits that there's a way to make a society that isn't completely succumbing to vice and selfishness, but that's going to be like a small, weak, not powerful society. You'll never be great unless you embrace your vices.
- [21:54]
B
When I'm reading the poem, I'm thinking, sometimes a lot of this stuff makes sense. But then why is there something about this that doesn't seem right? The reason why I disagree with him is because I disagree with his view of human nature. And that is the idea that we are only driven by vice and virtue is simply a social construct, you know, that we seek praise or we want to feel good about ourselves. To give an example, you know, he talks about how even animals are just driven to kind of please themselves, but that's not totally true. I mean, animals do exhibit pro social Behavior, they groom each other, they share. There are experiments that show that monkeys have a sense of fairness, that they will get upset if there's no sense of fairness in the kind of social group. And there's cognitive science and psychology kind of experiments that show that people's. Have you heard of this term mirror neurons?
- [22:48]
A
No.
- [22:49]
B
When I was in college, I lived with someone who was in cognitive science, and she was telling me about mirror neurons. And mirror neurons is the part of your brain that lights up when you can see something that you can relate to. So to give an example, if you were a ballet dancer and you're watching on screen someone. Another ballet dancer dancing, your brain would react differently to the images than someone who is not a ballet dancer because they don't have any sense of what is really happening in front of them. The ballet dancer can relate more, and this translates even to other kind of images. So if you see a monkey, your brain lights up in some way to identify yourself with the monkey in a way that's different than if you were to look at a video of an ant, for example, that you can't relate to at all. And the idea of mirror neurons could be the cognitive kind of scientific basis of empathy. And so Mandeville, I think, sets up an impossible standard. He says that nobody is truly driven by virtue. You know, he gives this example. If you stop a baby from falling into the fire, you're not truly virtuous because you only did it because seeing the baby burn would make you feel bad. So all you're trying to do.
- [24:08]
A
That was the most deranged argument.
- [24:10]
B
I was like, that's true. I would feel bad if I saw a baby burn. But does that make me not virtuous to stop the baby from burning? And then he says, another example of pity. If you walked by a poor person on the street and you gave them money because you pity them, you're doing it only because you want to feel good about yourself. So, you know, it's that, like, Curb youb Enthusiasm episode where Larry David donates money and gets his name put on the wall. But, like, somebody else donates and they don't put their name on the wall, except they tell Larry David's wife, and so she gives him praise. But then Larry David feels that by not putting your name on the wall, you seem even more virtuous if someone has out virtued you and gotten even more praise, right? But Mandeville sets up this possibility of, okay, you pass by a poor person on the street, you give them money, Nobody sees it at all. And you don't tell anybody. So there's no praise possible. But he still doesn't think that's virtuous because you're doing it to feel good about yourself. So the only possible way of virtue, true virtue, is if you are doing something where the bad outcome would not make you feel bad, nobody would praise you, and you don't even feel good about yourself doing it. If you set up that standard, sure, then his whole argument flows. But I think that's almost kind of an impossible standard. And when Adam Smith has that famous line in the wealth of nations, it's not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from the regard of their own self interest, which is kind of Mandevillian in a sense. But Smith's view is that this is a reasonable level of self interest. The baker is baking the bread because he wants to feed his family and also clothe and house himself and feed himself, and then the other person is buying the bread because they also want to feed their family. And so this is mutual self interest. And I think that's a reasonable definition of self interest. Whereas Mandeville is setting up a standard where even wanting to clothe yourself and feed yourself and feed your family is considered, you know, like a form of vice. And I just don't think that's how we normally use these terms. And that's where I think, although like
- [26:32]
A
the galaxy brain moment of it is like, it's a vice and it's not bad, you know, but he was really reacting against the sort of fire and brimstone of the Church and these really rigid ideas of goodness and sin, like this idea that you'll burn in hell if you don't do X, Y, Z. And that's the thing. I agree with you. I think he takes it a little too far by being like, there is no goodness, like we can never get it, you know, I feel like that's almost why he's doing this all encompassing definition of vice, to be like, see? See, like you're also a viceful person. It's funny, he's almost full circle, getting all the way right back to Catholicism, being like, we're just so evil, like there's no repenting for us.
- [27:12]
B
Yes, and I agree with you. It makes sense in the context of when he's writing it, because there are so many. So all these Christian discussions, and I'm not trying to pin it just on Christianity, but religious discussions of vice and virtue. And I Think what he's saying is that if you were to eliminate all of the things that you see as vice and only pursue virtue, like temperance, the beehive, essentially, it's not that it completely dies. It's just not as flourishing.
- [27:38]
A
Right.
- [27:38]
B
You know, Exactly.
- [27:39]
A
It's not a great nation.
- [27:40]
B
It's not a great nation. It's not like the Roman Empire is not the United States, which is incredibly productive, but is critiqued all the time for our greed and individualism, our vanity, our selfishness, so and so forth, while at the same time constantly preaching virtue and pretending that we're virtuous.
- [27:59]
A
Yeah, actually, that was going to be a question I had for you if, like, we have any examples in the modern economy of anywhere that could be considered like the beehive, like a place that is a virtuous and not great nation.
- [28:14]
B
To me, he sets up such an impossible standard. But when I was reading it, the only thing that I could compare it to is kind of like a Tibetan monastery, essentially.
- [28:23]
A
Right, right.
- [28:23]
B
And then you can get into. I mean, you know, many people have critiqued Marxists, have critiqued the kind of Buddhist. The idea of working families giving money to these, like, monks that, you know, are not productive. People have critiqued that as well. Again, I think he just sets up an impossible standard.
- [28:40]
A
Exactly. And another thing that I wanted to mention is, yeah, he talks a lot about fakery and shysterism. Like the lawyers over bill, the physicians extort fees. What is it? The physicians valued fame and wealth above the drooping patient's health, which is such a great line. And that everyone's, like, desirous and prideful. And I think even if someone listening to this is like, well, that's not me, you know, I just, like, do my job. I don't lie. It gets back to this idea of fashion. Like, he speaks directly about what is considered luxurious and how it comes from cruelty. Like this character of haughty Chloe that has furniture which the Indies were ransacked for. Yeah. And this casket, India's glowing gems unlocks and all Arabia breathes from yonder box. The tortoise here and elephant unite transformed into combs, the speckled and the white. And this is something I think we think about a lot in modern consumption. Like, every substack is about this. Like, oh, no, I want this pretty thing.
- [29:40]
B
Yeah.
- [29:41]
A
But should I use leather? Should I buy from another country? Like. And, yeah, if you. The countries with the really nice stuff, they've conquered other places. There's this element of colonialism, which I don't think Mandeville is progressive enough to say outright, but he is. He's pointing at it.
- [29:58]
B
Yeah, I think about. There is a Duke University cognitive science professor named Daniel. I don't know if that's how you pronounce his last name. He wrote a book called the Honest Truth About Dishonesty. And it's about how we think that society is corrupted by the Enron scandal and the big thieves and the people who really cheat society. But he says, he talks about how everybody steals in some way. So, like, you take home a pen from work and you think, oh, it's not a big deal. It's just a pencil or whatever. But on a massive level, everyone does this, and it does result in a larger loss than one big Enron scandal. And his point is that we all cheat in these small, tiny ways, but we lie to ourselves cognitively because we want to believe that we're virtuous. It turns out at the end, and some listeners may know, the funny thing about Dan Arley is that in the end, it turns out that many of his papers were like, relied on fabricated data. Get out. And so the guy who wrote about the honest truth of dishonesty was himself dishonest, which I suppose proves his point. But that is both Dan Arley's. I think he wrote that sometime in the 2010s or something, sometime recently. And then also Mandeville, who wrote this in, I think, the early 1700s, is that everybody is dishonest, but we all lie to ourselves that we are honest because we want to feel morally superior, which is a result of our vanity.
- [31:38]
A
Although I think the interesting thing about what Manville is doing is something that really rubbed me the wrong way when he was like, purveyors of vice can still be really good people. He's like, you know, think of the merchant tendering alcohol. And he is actually an upstanding member of society and was good to his wife and like a doting father and like, replace alcohol with CEO of Purdue Pharma. It's like, should we live in a world where someone is a peddler of vice and still lives a good life? It really reminded me of. Do you remember that McSweeney's article? That's like, outside of my evil job, I'm really a nice person. And it's like, even though I spend most of my waking hours assisting in, like, unspeakable crimes against the environment on my weekends, I really there for my friends. And it really felt like this is what Mendeville is saying, like, Bad people are good, too.
- [32:32]
B
Yeah. And it's like, oh, Hitler was vegetarian.
- [32:37]
A
Exactly, exactly. And it's like, okay, I know capitalism doesn't exist yet, but doesn't this mean that, like, something is a little wrong if someone's allowed to have a morally virtuous life?
- [32:47]
B
Yeah, that's what.
- [32:48]
A
Contributing something that is bad.
- [32:50]
B
And I think the biggest difference, which is weird to me, is that he's pointing out this hypocrisy. But he also says that this is results in the most flourishing society. So, Mandeville, he talks about how Even in the 1700s, he was talking about how this moment in history is the best that we've ever had in terms of material comforts and everything, but yet people are unhappy.
- [33:10]
A
Right?
- [33:11]
B
And that in itself is driven by vanity and greed. You cannot even be content with our 1700 standard of living, which was better than the 1600s and the 1500s, and it's the same today. He has a section in the remarks where he talks about why people buy certain things. And it's this idea that by dressing a certain way, you can pretend to have certain virtues. And so in his example, there is a lot of misogyny. In his. In his text, Honestly, I was like, okay.
- [33:44]
A
I mean, he's super sexist.
- [33:45]
B
He talks about these, like, vain women who. Who are essentially like, either poor or middle class, not particularly elite, but on fancy days, they will dress like the elites so that people treat them like elites because they want to pretend they have the virtues of elites. And this runs throughout all of fashion today. We do not live in a system where we just imitate the ruling class. We imitate all sorts of people. But you might dress like a rugged, outdoorsy person because you want to pretend that you have the virtue of ruggedness. You might dress, I don't know, like old money because you want to pretend that you have the virtue of a higher class or whatever. That was. One insight that he tapped into early is that appearance or fashion allows you to pretend to have certain virtues. And that's what drives fashion. And you see this constantly, at least in tailored menswear discourse. The way that people wrap up up classic men's tailoring, which is what I primarily write about, with the idea of being a gentleman. And there are two ideas of what it means to be a gentleman. One idea of being a gentleman is the way that you treat people, treat them kindly and with respect and so on and so forth. And then another idea of the term gentleman is the socioeconomic class, like Prince Charles and the people that are born into a privileged class.
- [35:07]
A
And like the actual title of gentleman.
- [35:10]
B
Yeah, like a title, gentleman. And people often wrap the idea of wearing a suit and tie with either the virtue of being a kind person without actually taking the pains of being a kind person. They just want to be looked upon as being a kind, gentle person, or they dress a certain way because they want to pretend that they're part of a socioeconomic class that is not available for entry to you at all. And I think he taps into this idea, is that we pursue certain looks because we want to both feel good about ourselves and not only status, but also to signal certain virtues. And that once we do this and receive praise, then we're addicted. That's what drives the vanity and the virtue signal and so on and so forth.
- [35:55]
A
Oh, my God, yes, 100%. And of course, I think about, like, the most ready example that I think about is, like, the Unite the Right movement, wearing collared shirts, you know, just like, looking virtuous, looking like good neighbors and really holding murderous beliefs. This was only the first half of my conversation with Derek. There's so much more we got into, like, why Mandeville thinks it's good to be bad with money and what Karl Marx would make of this entire thing. To hear the full conversation with no ads, become a paying subscriber@articlesofinterest.substack.com and then you'll get to hear all of our full conversations. Ad free. Free. Articlesofinterest.substack.com Radiotopia from PRX.