What is the most important thing?

A reflection on money, power, Succession, and the meaning of life.

What is the most important thing?

It’s a good question.

It may in fact be the most important question.

I don’t know you, and I’d love to hear your answer, but I’m going to guess that you would probably say something like “environmental sustainability” or “racial justice” or “world peace.”

However, I think it would be a more interesting conversation if we started with something less elevated, something more visceral. Something, if I can be frank, more honest.

Something like money.

And, if we are honest with ourselves, even though we know that it isn’t a very admirable answer, the need to earn money does dominate most of our lives most of the time.

This isn’t a criticism – most people throughout history have had to work hard to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. Many of us try to align our values with our way of making a living but, when push comes to shove, the material realities of life take precedence.

After all, if you can’t make rent, you have a great big problem right there.

I’m going to suggest that the need for money is morally neutral – there are good things and bad things about it, and it all depends on what we do and how we do it and a million other things.

But if we are really honest with ourselves, we probably don’t really work purely for minimal accommodation and food. We have slightly higher hopes for our income. Perhaps you desire the new iPhone, a new dress, a pair of trainers, the new(ish) Xbox?

To which the obvious question is: so is the new iPhone / dress / whatever the real “most important thing”?

I can imagine you thinking for a moment and saying: No, that’s just an example. I’m not so naïve that I really think that “if only I had x then I would be completely satisfied.”

(Or perhaps you do think that, in which case I’m sorry to say that you are in for a disappointing experience.)

You continue: It’s more that I want to be able to buy what I want, to feel like I am part of this vital, exciting world. To really live, rather than just subsist. To not be sitting glumly eating baked beans on toast and shivering, unable to afford to run the heating, when the rest of the world is having so much more fun than I am. To be able, for example, to order Uber Eats instead of cooking if  I feel like it.

Money is a pretty weird thing when you think about it for a second. Economists call it “stored value”, but another way to think of it is as the capacity to affect the world; to be able to change things in a direction we like.

This capacity is called “power,” and money is kind of crystalised power. Power is the ability to change the world – to cause things to happen which would otherwise not happen. To have no power at all is to be dead, which I think we can agree is generally not a very desirable state of affairs.

So, as a first pass candidate for the most important thing, let’s take power as the most important thing.

Naming this capacity as “power” opens up an interesting set of questions. It’s entirely possible that you are very uncomfortable with the direction that this conversation has taken. Yes, you might think, I do want the capacity to achieve certain sorts of change in the world (which might or might not involve the latest iPhone or Uber Eats.)  But isn’t power by definition, well, problematic?

Like most people in the world, I have been watching Succession recently. It’s a fascinating, beautifully crafted show and, conveniently for this article, it is largely asking the question: What is the most important thing? If you had all the money in the world, what would you do? How would you live? And what would ultimately matter to you?

In Succession the answer to that involves power at its heart. Sometimes it is power understood as wealth – those private planes, the expensive watches, the ridiculous parties. But sometimes, and especially with Logan, it is just about power as such. The ability to cause people to do things which they would otherwise not do. Logan, the patriarch of the family, is fundamentally motivated by power. There are various pleasures he enjoys, but, fundamentally, his main pleasure in life is power. When he is frustrated in something he wants, his rage is epic.

There is something here about judgment. Not so much in the sense of “being under judgement”, although perhaps that as well. It makes me ask whether I would want that sort of life? And I immediately think: no. But why not? If money is my first answer to the question of what the most important thing is, then why not? Money and power is the water in which these characters swim, but it leaves me with deep reservations. So perhaps that crystalised form of power we call money is not the most important thing after all.

But if not, then what is?

Here’s a question: does this untrammelled exercise in power make Logan happy? Does it make any of them happy? Well, I haven’t quite finished the series yet, but I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the answer is probably going to be “no.”

It is interesting that the question which immediately occurred to me to criticise the characters’ pursuit of power was whether it would make them happy. So perhaps the real candidate is happiness?  Is happiness the meaning of life?

Again, this seems like a strong candidate. After all, one of the most famous statements about happiness in the English language is from the US Declaration of Independence, where it claims that it is self-evidently true that everyone has the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

But what do we actually mean by the word “happiness”? We often use it to describe a pleasant emotional state – the sky is blue, the sun is shining, and the whole of this glorious day off stretches out in front of me.

But it’s a richer word than that. Thinking about Succession again, part of what makes the show work is that they don’t seem happy, in spite of having all this money and power, and that lack of happiness feels somehow right. The characters would be a lot less interesting, and the show would be significantly less satisfying, if they could live the lives they have in the show and be happy all the time.

We feel pretty strongly that the characters in Succession really should not be happy – for many reasons, but chief among them is that their lives have been comprehensively warped by power and the quest for power. I want to shout at them “just walk away! Cash out, do something useful with your money, or just lie on a beach somewhere – but get out!”

I’m guessing that they probably don’t.

The thing about happiness though is that it is not very reliable. It is very much dependent on circumstances. The word actually includes the idea of chance built into it, related as it is to “happen” and “happenstance.” Life is going well, the sky is blue and we feel happy. And the next day something happens to make you un-happy. You never know. Disaster falls upon you out of the clear blue sky and suddenly not only are you not happy, it would be very strange if you were in fact happy.

While it might be a desirable state, you can’t actually build a life on it, because happiness, in our ordinary use of the term, is a feeling. And feelings come and go like the fog on a mountaintop. The weather comes and goes, but Mt Fuji remains.

So, we don’t think that power is the most important thing. We don’t think that happiness is the most important thing either, even though we think both of those things are desirable.

Power and happiness are both good things, both have their place within a good life. But what actually is a “good life”?

Let’s go back to the idea of happiness. I said that it doesn’t work if we understand the word in its usual sense. We pointed to the use of the word in the Declaration of Independence. But the idea that the most important thing might have something to do with happiness comes from the Ancient Greeks, who used it as a way to designate the best sort of life.

But “eudaimonia”, the word which we generally translate as “happy”, doesn’t have anything to do with being in a good mood. The ancient Greeks had a saying: Don’t count anyone happy until they are dead. Not because they believed in a happy afterlife – quite the opposite. Rather, they meant it as something more like “don’t say someone has had a worthy, full, good life until they are dead.” After all, something awful, some terrible betrayal or reversal of fortune, could happen at any time, which would mean that they weren’t happy after all.

Which is a long way around to get back to our original question. What would be the life which would merit the term “happy” in this fuller sense?

What would lead to the worthy, full, worthwhile, good life?

Let me join this question back to where we started by asking “what is the most important thing?”

We started off with a hypothesis that it might be money, which we then crystalised into power – because to have power, to be able to effect change in the universe is better than not having power, to be unable to effect change in the universe.

We have also explored what it might mean to have a “good” life, with the powerful thought experiment in Succession of “what would it be like to have all the money in the world?” And we saw that there was something missing in the lives of the characters which, even though they could afford to buy whatever they wanted, they weren’t happy. And that led us on to discussing what “happiness” is, and what role it plays in the idea of the “good life.”

The thing about the Good Life is not so much that it is a life of continual good mood. Rather, it is a life that is directed to good ends. That’s the part of the message of Succession. What is the worthy object which would, if we directed our lives to it, mean we were living the good life? Not necessarily the maximally pleasant life, not even the maximally powerful life, but the one which is directed towards the best possible ends?

There is a very traditional definition of the word “God” which goes something like: “God is the best that can be thought.” That is, if we put all the good qualities together to get some sort of maximally good thing – that is what the word God means.