Your greatest prejudice
“Businessmen. Your business is your greatest prejudice: it binds you to your locality, your society, and your tastes. Diligent in business but lazy in thought, content with your paltriness, and with the cloak of duty concealing this paltriness: thus you live, and thus you like your children to be.” -Nietzsche (Daybreak)
This aphorism has always been one of my favorites—it’s the kind of thing that made me love Nietzsche.
His use of prejudice here is interesting—we often think of a prejudice in terms of like bias or bigotry, but this isn’t that. Prejudice here is stripped down to its essence—something that blinds you. Bias and bigotry blind you—you can only see someone’s race or whatever, and so you miss out on everything else about them. But this is a bias that isn’t based on “hate” or anything like that—it’s business. With bias or bigotry, the prejudiced person is probably on some level aware that it’s bad—some are proud of it, but that’s rare. But with this kind of prejudice, business prejudice, the prejudiced person doesn’t think it’s bad at all—they’re proud of it, think it’s good, and never reconsider it, or realize how it’s blinding them at all; which makes it all the more insidious as a prejudice.
This is the essence of the aphorism—blinding you but in a way that you are proud of. Shameless ignorance—that is the worst kind of prejudice. Again, this surely happens with other forms of bias or bigotry, but it’s usually more in the shadows, less celebrated as something positive. Racial prejudice, when it’s held, is usually defended as a necessary evil, “just the way it is,” “race realism” or something like that, not as an out and out good, the way that business prejudice is.
Business prejudice is a “cloak of duty” concealing spiritual paltriness—what is spiritual paltriness? Being incurious about the world, small-minded, locked into your routine, letting the world pass you by, leaving important things unsaid—all things that gnaw at your conscience, because on some level you know that you should not be this way; but business prejudice reassures you that it’s fine to be so small, because it functions as a cloak of duty you can wear. This cloak reassures you that deep down you would like to be other than you are, but you are locked into being small, because you have to put business first—and business is a god that we must serve, after all. Business makes us think that putting it before everything else will pay off—even as our life erodes bit by bit.
Business prejudice enables you to miss out on life, but with a clean conscience—which is a very useful thing, because life is scary, and shrinking away from it is the easy way out; but doing so can leave you feeling empty and regretful, and a cloak of duty keeps those feelings at bay.
This is the essence of prejudice, and why business prejudice is the greatest kind—it helps you make yourself and your life worse, but in a way that makes you think you are improving it.