"I call this paradox the principle of obliquity. It says that some objectives are best pursued indirectly. I owe the phrase to Sir James Black, the chemist, whose career illustrates the principle in action. Black made more money for British companies than anyone else in the history of British business, by inventing beta-blockers and anti-ulcerants. The first he discovered in the laboratories of ICI, the second in those of Smith Kline French after he had decided that ICI was more interested in profits than in chemistry. To quote Black 'I used to tell my colleagues (at ICI) that if they were after profits there were easier routes than drug research. How wrong could one be?' The attempt to pursue profit too earnestly is pharmaceutical research defeated its own objectives. We are all familiar with one application of the principle of obliquity. While Americans, characteristically, talk of the pursuit of happiness, happiness is rarely best achieved when it is pursued. Research in social psychology confirms our intuition and experience.
Happy people are not, in the main, those who selfishly promote their own interests: in fact happy people are most often characterised by a kind of uncalculating and outgoing generosity. Instinctively, we understand why. What makes for happiness is rather complicated and uncertain, and dependent on interactions with other people. The frequent repetition of pleasurable experiences, although superficially appealing, rarely leads to happiness: hedonism and happiness are not the same thing. Our own satisfactions depend on the response of others, and instrumental behaviour is rarely effective. Flattery and bonhomie do not evince the same response as genuine praise and genuine friendship. In noting these things, we can see that they have direct business analogies.
Al Dunlap is the business equivalent of the hedonist. He recognises a series of actions that improve immediate profits, just as the hedonist knows what actions provide immediate gratification. But neither Al Dunlap nor hedonism create anything of enduring value. And instrumental behaviour towards employees or customers is ultimately, and often quickly, distinguishable from similar actions motivated by genuine concern.
Let me state the principle of obliquity rather more formally. When a characteristic is selected for in an uncertain and imperfectly known environment, deliberate action to promote that characteristic is often self-defeating, and the highest values of the characteristic will often be achieved by chance. When I say 'selected for in the population' I have in mind characteristics like happiness, or health, or profit. Habits, or agents, or organisations that have high values of the characteristic tend to grow at the expense of others. Because people form groups with happy rather than unhappy people, because healthy people go out more and live longer than the unhealthy, because profitable firms grow at the expense of unprofitable firms. (Incidentally, wealth is probably not a characteristic that is selected for, because wealthy people do not significantly outlive or outbreed poor people. In this, individual wealth and corporate profit are quite different. So, if you want to be rich, the best way is probably to try to get rich).
Perhaps the clearest way to see the principle of obliquity in action is to look at the most remarkable example of this kind of model: natural selection in modern evolutionary biology. Richard Dawkins has described this through the metaphor of the selfish gene. His claim is that most of species evolution, and much of species behaviour, can be explained by the hypothesis that genes act so as to maximise their incidence in the population. This is why we show more concern for our siblings and children than our cousins or great-grandchildren yet still more for these relations than for the population at large. It is why we love people more than ants. It all depends on the proportion of genes we have in common. Now - as Dawkins keeps having to repeat to critics - the selfish gene is a metaphor. He does not believe that genes literally act selfishly, or indeed have any motives at all, or that someone who jumpsinto a raging torrent to save a life calculates the fraction of genes they share with the person drowning. But genes and people typically behave as if they made these calculations, because that is the behaviour which selection has favoured. But ask - hypothetically - what would happen if genes did become literally selfish? Suppose someone was appointed - call him the Gene Manager - to instruct genes and the organisms that contain them how best to propagate themselves.
The Gene Manager would certainly want to make changes. Al Dunlap would have little time for the cleaner fish, who swim into the mouths of much larger fish, clean the detritus from their teeth, and are allowed to swim out again unscathed. There is no room for that kind of sentimentality in Dunlap's world: if you want a friend, get a dog. Or what of the drones which consume the honey but do no work? They would soon be receiving their redundancy notices.
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