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I don’t believe Steve Jobs’ well known quote; ‘people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,’ is a comment on listening to your customers, as it is most often understood.
I think it’s a comment on the nature of desire.
In the Symposium, Socrates argues that in order to desire something, we must lack it. We can’t desire what we already have. Better yet, we can’t desire what we already think we have:
Anyone, who has a desire, desires what is not at hand and not present, what he does not have, and what he is not, and that of which he is in need; for such are the objects of desire and love. (Plato Symposium, in Reeve 2012: 184)
But it goes further than that. We cannot desire what we aren’t aware we lack. So, if personal computing doesn’t exist, we can't say that’s what we want. Unless we have the imagination of Steve Jobs. Most of us? We need to be shown.
Same deal for social impact. If we aren’t aware that some social problems of equal importance receive vastly different amounts of funding (e.g. health in developed vs developing countries), how can we desire to change that reality?Â
The nature of desire goes the other way, too. If we aren’t aware that we are already rich, how easy is it to desire more money? That’s not to say desiring money is bad - it’s not about the money. It’s about the dreams and wishes we can indulge with that money. We want the things that money represents:
Money takes wishes, however vague or trivial or atrocious, and broadcasts them to the world, like the Mayday of a ship in difficulties. Unlike the Mayday, it appeals not to sensations of individual benevolence or common humanity...but offers a reward that is not in any sense fixed or finite - there is no objective or invariable value in money - but that every person is free to imagine in the realm of his own desires. (in Frozen Desire, James Buchan, 1997, p.19).
This process of imagining a future, desiring that future, going after it via money - is the engine of progress. It works because money moves from person to person, mobilising wish upon wish, setting the future in motion. That’s why it matters where and how and why we spend our money: money is a symbol of our desires, and our desires shape our world.Â
The difficult territory to navigate is when we hold conflicting desires. We want a well funded public health system but we also want to pay less taxes. We want to exercise but we also want to lie on the couch. We want to have more but we don’t want others to have less than us.Â
Holding conflicting desires is deeply uncomfortable. So what do we do? We tell stories. We invent myths. We build patterns of interpreting the world that reduce the discomfort.
Cinderella: The prince and the maid are equals despite all of the obstacles.
Star Wars: Good guy battles bad guy for moral future of the planet. There’s always a bad guy, and the bad guy isn’t like us.
I’ll exercise tomorrow.
Where progress sucks is that, in achieving it, we can’t have everything we want. We can’t have additional comforts, luxuries, and benefits without sacrificing some of our deeply held beliefs, challenging our assumptions, and losing things we value. In Objects of Desire (1986), author Adrian Forty writes:
It is a peculiarity of capitalism that each beneficial innovation also brings a sequence of other changes, not all of which are desired by all people so that, in the name of progress, we are compelled to accept a great many distantly related and possibly unwanted changes. The idea of progress, though, includes all the changes, desirable as well as undesirable.Â
Inventing myths helps us deal with change, but it can also hold us back. Take the good guy/bad guy myth, and climate change. Climate change is our collective responsibility, but putting people into good and bad camps creates division. Stories about good and bad guys; ‘invest an individual’s entire social identity in him not changing his mind about a moral issue – perversely end up discouraging any moral deliberation.’
We must ensure the stories we tell ourselves create the reality we want, like Erin Brockovich catalysing the environmental justice movement. As Esther Perel says; ‘it’s not about letting go of what’s led us to this moment, it’s about writing new chapters for change.’
In the next chapter? We’re all impact investors - spending money in ways that ensure our desires match what’s good for the world and everyone in it. In both our professional and personal lives.
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