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Adam Smith
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Smith identifies a third family of passions between the social and unsocial: grief and joy about our own private fortune. They are never as odious as resentment nor as attractive as impartial benevolence, and they lack the double or opposed sympathy those sets provoke. Yet joy and grief diverge in what others will share: we sympathize more readily with small joys than great ones, and with great sorrows than small ones.
Sudden elevation in rank illustrates the asymmetry. Friends' congratulations to an upstart are tinged with envy; if he is wise he suppresses elation, dresses plainly, and courts old companions, yet sincerity is suspected and constraint usually fails, leaving isolation from peers above and below. Gradual advancement is happier because public expectation absorbs each step. By contrast, habitual cheerfulness over everyday pleasures, youth, and small domestic satisfactions wins easy sympathy when envy does not interfere.
Grief follows the opposite scale. Petty vexations from cooks, weather, or missed greetings earn ridicule and raillery because listeners resist trifling sorrow and often enjoy teasing it; well-bred people disguise or joke about such pains. Deep poverty, disease, or disgrace, even partly self-caused, calls forth sincere compassion and aid. Smith's implication is sharp: calibrate your expectations of sympathy to the real weight of your fortune, not to how loudly you feel it.
Sudden good fortune often isolates the person who gained it because spectators sympathize more easily with small joys than with large ones. Smith shows envy and ridicule attending even merited rises, which is why the newly successful redouble humility toward old friends.
If you or someone close to you is rising fast, slow the performance of triumph and increase the practice of attention.
Smith will examine why our sympathy for others' pain, while stronger than our sympathy for their joy, still falls far short of what the suffering person actually feels. This gap between observer and experience shapes how we judge others' reactions to both triumph and tragedy..
What this chapter proves — the pattern beneath the scene
In this chapter, the lesson is Recognizing Moral Corruption by Wealth.
The card below names the pattern this chapter proves — carry it with you into the original text.
Recognizing Moral Corruption by Wealth
The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded. In a crowd he is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel. Rank and fortune amplify sympathy for joy while the unsuccessful stand outside imaginative regard.
Key Insight
Celebrity and wealth trigger automatic sympathy. Smith warns that admiration for the successful can outrun judgment of their merit.
Chapter 10
Of the selfish passions. Besides those two opposite sets of passions, the social and unsocial, there is another which holds a sort of middle place between them; is never either so graceful as is sometimes the one set, nor is ever so odious as is sometimes the other. Grief and joy, when conceived upon account of our own private good or bad fortune, constitute this third set of passions. Even when excessive, they are never so disagreeable as excessive resentment, because no opposite sympathy can ever interest us against them: and when most suitable to their objects they are never…
Public-domain chapter text, formatted for reading.
Think of three people in your life who have experienced different levels of success recently - someone with a small win, someone with a moderate achievement, and someone with a major breakthrough. Write down your honest first reaction to each person's news. Then analyze: which was easiest to celebrate genuinely? Which triggered any negative feelings? What does this reveal about your own psychology?
Write about a time when your own success created unexpected distance in a relationship. What would you do differently now, knowing what Smith teaches about human psychology?
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