Gongol.com Archives: November 2023

November 29, 2023

Charlie Munger, underrated philosopher

It seems unlikely that self-regarding academics will give Charlie Munger so much as a footnote in the serious records of philosophy. That is a shame in a moral sense, and it may also come to be regarded someday as a consequential oversight. ■ Munger, who has passed away after 99 years, didn't write dense treatises on the nature of existence that people lie about having read, nor was he tortured by questions about existence and transcendence. He was unapologetically a person of business, commerce, and markets. And, aside from a handful of lectures and long-form interviews, he was known mostly for pithy observations that could fit on the back of a business card. ■ But what Munger did, better than anyone else of his or our time, was to make the case for putting rationality in service of virtuous behavior. The order of those words is important: Some people try to logically deduce behavioral rules from logical foundations -- think, for instance, of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. ■ The less-rigid philosophy of which Munger was so vocally a proponent says, instead: "If you've exposed yourself to enough of history, then you probably have a fair sense of intuition about what's right and what's wrong. Follow that, because a logical assessment of the consequences will support following that intuition." ■ His most memorable comments were generally shorter than that. They came in the form of maxims like, "Rationality is a moral duty" and "It's dishonorable to stay stupider than you have to be. That's my ethos. You have to be generous, too." He advised that "A lot of places work better when they operate with a high degree of earned trust" and "The way to get a good spouse is to deserve one. The same thing goes with a partnership in business. If you behave yourself correctly, it's amazing how well it works." ■ The thing that stands out about these pronouncements is that Munger wasn't speaking in abstractions or burying his thoughts in complicated jargon ("You shouldn't assume that just because the language is highfalutin, it's better."). He was speaking as a billionaire who continued working into his 99th year of life. ■ And he used his platform, as an indisputable winner under (and proponent of) the capitalist system, to say that there was no excuse for a capitalist not to deliberately seek to be good and to consciously behave with honor. His innovation, in a sense, was to say that good behavior was virtually always logical behavior, and quite usually profitable behavior, too. That sort of message is pretty vital if we think that markets are going to continue (which they will) and that people need to hear messages from credible sources (which he was). ■ You don't get to pick your ancestors, but you can always choose the people who influence your thinking. And any of us could do a whole lot worse than to pick Charlie Munger as one of those influences.