What are we doing? We plunge ourselves into the pressure cooker called entrepreneurship to create products, sell them, and hopefully yield a surplus, from which we stock up on wealth. When tired of the business, or when an irresistible offer is made, many have cashed out and swore to retirement or a life of ease, only to find themselves, after encountering the grotesque nakedness of boredom, back on the mill, building another business or living vicariously through other entrepreneurs as an investor.
It cannot be, that the Utilitarian impulse courses so powerfully in the entrepreneur’s veins that they cannot help but want to maximise the welfare of the many by innovating and creating more products. I dare say, it is quite the opposite of utility that entrepreneurship ultimately produces. It seduces the consumer exchange their “true means” for contrivances, conveniences and pleasure. With money, anyone can buy food, a t-shirt, or build a grand house. But can they make a t-shirt, produce food, or build that house, even if not by themselves — which would be the true meaning of living within one’s means — but by the reach of their natural persuasion in the absence of money? This is hard to imagine for the cosmopolitan consumer, but not far fetched for a villager, whom despite being classed and labelled as poor is nevertheless living within their means, and therefore not poor by any common sense. So, the consumer, for all that they can enjoy with their money, is actually living beyond their means; the entrepreneur seduces them with “All the things [they] wanted to be and then all the things [they] wished [they] never wished for.” 1 The entrepreneur produces, in endless supply, “a delicious itch you want to scratch but you find it under the skin.“
The entrepreneur is also trapped, but for entirely different reasons. Many talk about helping society by creating some beneficial product, or creating jobs, or doing God’s will, or testing the limits of their potential. Some are flatly lying, even to themselves, and are really out to acquire as much as they can out of fear of the pangs of poverty, or driven by the lust for conquest. After all, a lot of wealth, in South Africa, was prayed for shortly before killing and maiming and displacing people. However, what can be said about those genuinely ensconced, let us say, in their identity and find meaning in entrepreneurship for its own sake?
Andrew Carnegie, in his famous essay, The Gospel of Wealth,2 seems to suggest that they are a rare breed. Unlikely the mere mortals who pay their bills, take their kids to good schools, pay off their homes and cars, and accumulate a good pension — the competent members of society, according to Carnegie — the other breed is talented, relentless and simply sees the world in terms of which it must be transformed at a grand scale. They are the civilisers of society!
If you were to dump them on an island with nothing but creatures lurking in the dense forests out to rip them apart, they would tame that island and turn it into a tourist destination the world over would wish to visit. And perhaps, as was done in Dubai, they would create a destination for which many would be prepared to loosen their morals, not even to be there but to be seen to be there.
I want to argued that these rare people do not act from an intrinsic sense of meaning even though, when interviewed, they may dazzle and inspire the audience with their supposed “why”. There’s a spirit about them, perhaps the Spirit of Wealth, or perhaps we can generalise it as the Spirit of Creation that courses through their veins, so that if they found themselves in a possible world without “wealth” and dare I say, “without God” in our sense, they would nevertheless shape that world with ideas and sweat, as they do now.
Now with the knives unsheathed, if anything for suggesting that God is contingent, let me put it in these terms: “All thought is anthropomorphic,” said Albert Camus.3 This means our thoughts are limited by the contours of the mind. Therefore, an a priori God may exist, but we could never in earnest reason ourselves into Knowing that God. Upon reaching this limit, some philosophers, like Sören Kierkegaard have invoked a Leap of Faith, or Faith as knowing without reason, and without the necessity for reason. Even so, Camus thought these justifications for knowledge without reason — fideism, as it is called — are back doors through which “meaning” and religion and so on are smuggled into our lives. Fideistic thinkers correclty identify the philosophical problem that the mind is adapted to nature, insofar as it can find patterns, make abstractions, and even predict the patterns of nature. However, nature itself is not answerable to the mind because it far exceeds the mind. Nature is (if I am to anthropomorphise) not concerned with the trivialities of a species. In the same way that many species are now extinct, if the weeds of misfortune spread sufficiently to engulf the human creature, it too will be forgotten and nature will carry on as if nothing happened.
And so in the deepest of despair, man prays for help and is answered by silence, and if he cannot bear the cold silence for what it is and what it represents, which is that there is nothing out there to soothe him, the machinations of his mind smuggle in an assortment of voices, purposes and reasons to live, through which he finds solace and comfort, albeit an absurd comfort.
This being the case, those rare builders of wealth, whom I will call entrepreneurs, operate by some kind of cosmic hydraulic force and cannot help but do what they do. Although they are convinced of meaning, purpose, doing God’s will, or realising potential, the naked truth is that closing a multi-billion dollar deal is no different in weight than an ant carrying a grain of sugar. However, accepting this would flash the absurd, and would burn without fire. Hence, to escape the absurd they manufacture meaning at conferences. They fight for justice. They inspire. They do deals. They engage in philanthropy and mentor others. They are like Sisyphus, pushing a boulder up a hill, and at the climax, instead of gazing at the absurd, let the boulder roll down the hill, only to push it up again in the name of some other or perhaps the same “why”.
Until next week.
Vusi.
References
- Nolan, C. (Director). (2026). The Odyssey [Film]. Universal Pictures
- Carnegie, A. (1889). Wealth. North American Review, 148(391), 653–665.
- A. Camus and J. Wood, The Myth of Sisyphus. Penguin Classics.
