Since we are all reasonably well-read and unreasonably self-assured, my Sunday evening Zoom conversations with my brothers tend to be burnished with references to such luminaries as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Confucius, John Locke, and Jean Paul Sartre, to name a few.
This time, the conversation once again drifted to the idea of virtue – to whether it is something that can be universally defined and understood (as many of the great philosophers and theologians have said) or whether its meaning differs depending on social, cultural, and economic circumstances.
To keep it from moving into the usual highfalutin slugfest of esoterica (at which I tend to be at a disadvantage), I tried to redirect the conversation.
“I believe there are all kinds and manners of virtue,” I said. “High virtues and low virtues, survival virtues and abundance virtues, business virtues and personal virtues, etc. Let’s talk about loyalty, for example. I think we can all agree that loyalty is a virtue.”
They agreed, and I continued.
“A dictionary might define loyalty as faithfulness to a person, group, cause, or ideal. But that doesn’t explain the many ways one can show loyalty. One way is to be faithful in marriage. Penelope was faithful to her husband Odysseus for 20 years, despite entreaties by wealthy and generous suitors almost every day.
“Another definition of loyalty might be having an allegiance to a cause, idea, or ideal – such as defending one’s country or equal rights or Communism. Of course, this kind of loyalty is a two-edged sword, for it must eschew judgement, and evenhandedness, and sometimes even the truth. When I swore to the cops that that tall guy hit Mike P. first, I was being loyal, but I wasn’t telling the truth. One could also argue that a mother turning in her kids to the cops might be practicing a form of loyalty – loyalty to the idea that truth is the ultimate ethic.”
We had some fun with that idea for a while, but it wasn’t anything we could sink our teeth into. So I did what I usually do in such situations: I doubled down on my argument by making it even more extreme.
I took a moment to take a long, slow draw on my Padron Aniversario Churchill.
“There are two major distinctions that must be made when talking about virtues,” I said, not quite sure where I was going with this.
“Which are?” one of them asked.
“Although some virtues can be said to be ‘human virtues’ because they apply to everyone, there are some that apply only to one group or another.”
“For example?”
“For example,” I said, “some virtues are masculine. And some are feminine.”
“As in only men have this virtue and only women have that one?”
“No, not like that,” I said, shaking my head.
I thought for a moment.
Then I said, “Since we’ve been talking about loyalty, let me use that as my example. Consistency and reciprocity are forms of loyalty – virtues that can (and should, depending on the context) be practiced by both sexes and in all situations. But I see consistency as being essential in creating love and harmony in personal and social relationships. So for that reason, I’m going to call it a feminine virtue. And I see reciprocity as being essential in maintaining goodwill and cooperation in economic and business relationships, which makes it a masculine virtue.”
Then I said something like this:
“The primary social contracts in our personal lives are between husband and wife and between parent and child. Virtue in this context means being faithful to the core requirement of social relationships. And that means doing what you promised to do and sticking around for as long as you promised and are needed. In traditional marriages, the tenure of the spousal promise is until death does the parting. In traditional parenting, the tenure is until the child can survive and prosper on its own.
“The primary social contract in business and wealth building is reciprocity – the free exchange of one type of value for another. The most obvious example is the buying and selling of goods and services. But this principle also holds true for other sorts of exchanges. For example, the salary the manager pays for the work of the employee. It holds true also for the relationship between CEOs and company shareholders. And between wholesale and retail exchanges. The list goes on and on.
“There is another kind of value exchange in business where the rules of reciprocity are not so clear. I’m thinking of mentorship – the free exchange of knowledge and skills, which provides the recipient with an invisible ticket on an invisible train that will take him up the corporate ladder and allow him to become wealthy and powerful if he plays it smart.
“The opposite of consistency is abandonment. The opposite of reciprocity is defaulting on an IOU. We can try to rationalize abandonment and default if we feel we need to. But we can never escape the guilt of those two evils because their virtuousness is deeply threaded into our DNA.”
Since my bailiwick is business and wealth building, I’m going to continue here with my thoughts on the virtue of reciprocity. And I’m going to define it as the foundational moral contract between people engaged in business and commerce. It is the sometimes unspoken but always existent agreement between employers and employees, companies and their customers, corporate management and shareholders, etc., to treat one another fairly.
It means that each party agrees that in the mutual transactions of business there exists an ethical obligation to pay one’s debts – whether they are stated or not. And that the term of such obligations is until they are paid.
The Anthropology of Reciprocity
The idea of reciprocity wasn’t invented in a boardroom, just as the idea of consistency wasn’t started in a medieval court. It started much earlier – back when dinner could swim away or outrun you.
In hunter-gatherer societies, survival depended on skills that took years, often decades, to master. Hunting large game. Reading the weather. Finding fish when the rivers ran thin. These weren’t things you figured out with a YouTube tutorial. You learned them from someone older, someone who’d already made all the expensive mistakes.
Anthropologists call this kind of know-how “embodied capital” – i.e., wisdom stored in muscle memory and scars.
According to Nigel, research on foraging societies shows that people continue to develop subsistence and survival skills into their 30s and 40s. But they don’t wait till they are done producing to pass along those skills to the next generation. They start mentoring the young when they are in their late teens and 20s, which begs the question: Why would an expert train his replacement?
The answer, some anthropologists say, is a deal as old as humans: I’ll teach you how to survive now. And when I slow down, you’ll make sure I still eat.
I asked Nigel to give me some back up on this, and here is what he said:
Food sharing among hunter-gatherers wasn’t an occasional act of charity; it was constant and extensive. Among the Aché of Paraguay, anthropologists Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan found that hunters shared a large majority of what they caught far beyond their immediate families.
And crucially, this sharing wasn’t always immediate or equal. It often worked on delayed reciprocity: You give now, trusting that the group – and specific people within it – will give later.
In Inuit societies, for example, ethnographic and oral-history accounts describe younger hunters routinely provisioning elders, especially parents, as a matter of obligation and respect. Food circulated through kin networks not because people were nice, but because everyone understood the math: Someday, you’d be the one with slower legs and shakier hands.
Modern economists might miss this because they look for explicit contracts. But the virtue of reciprocity doesn’t need paperwork. It needs memory. You remembered who taught you. Who helped you when you were helpless. Who mentored you when you were unskilled and ignorant. You remember those who showed you where the fish truly were – not where they were supposed to be.
Seen this way, loyalty isn’t some Victorian moral ideal. It’s a sophisticated and fundamental survival technology. A way to stretch the benefits of skill across lifetimes. Knowledge flowing forward. Caretaking flowing back. And the gene pool enduring.
What to Do When Your “Quid” Is Not “Pro-Quo’d”
But what do you do when someone you’ve helped succeed in business is disloyal to you?
I’m not talking about minor acts of disloyalty, such as not giving credit where credit is due. I’m talking about people stealing from the hand that once fed them. Or even biting it just to see it bleed.
This sort of disloyalty doesn’t happen very often. In my personal experience, it happens rarely. But it has happened to me. And when it happened, my immediate response was – as you might expect – shock followed by outrage followed by thoughts of punishment and revenge.
But those are thoughts that need to be vanquished. I learned long ago that indulging such emotions – even a little bit – almost always takes the relationship (and one’s peace of mind) from bad to worse.
One of my lifelong friends who is familiar with the way I do business once asked me why I am so loyal to others even when they are disloyal to me. I told him that I had decided that there were some thoughts and feelings that, however spontaneous or common they were, had a negative effect on my character.
The desire for retribution and revenge are two of them. So are jealousy, resentment, and envy. I see them as symptoms of weakness. The emotional responses to injury or imagined injury of weak-minded people. Allowing them space is distracting. Dwelling on them is hobbling. Indulging in them crippling and counter-productive.
I’ve had this perspective for many years now and it has found roots in my limbic brain. Whenever I encounter acts of disloyalty from people who should be grateful to me, my first response is no longer anger. It’s more like resigned disappointment, followed by, “How can I minimize this or make it disappear?”
I see it as not only a grace that calms my nerves, but as a super-valuable skill that allows me to sometimes turn water into wine.
I don’t often talk about this to people I’m coaching or mentoring. What I do talk about – a lot – is the power of reciprocation and how it compounds over time. I tell these young people that if they train themselves to appreciate the gifts that others give them and never fail to reciprocate –abundantly, not just in kind – the path ahead of them will get straighter and smoother with every passing year.
I say it because I know it to be true.
