In the heartfelt movie called Love is a Many Splendored Thing, we find that love is indeed splendid—and elusive. We find the lovers in this movie to be wracked with love, loss, and regret. This man (played by William Holden) and woman (played by Jennifer Jones) were struggling with the issue of marital fidelity during war. As a married American journalist, Holden falls in love with an Asian doctor (portrayed by Jones). noted in the movie, “To go on living, one must occasionally be unwise.” But when should one be unwise?
A similar portrayal can be offered regarding a second compelling force in human life. This force is Money and the accumulation of Wealth. Money and Wealth, like Love, are “many-splendored things.” They are also inevitably interwoven with loss and regret. Furthermore, like Love, Money, and Wealth, these concepts are quite shadowy, with many motivational levels and elusive pathways, side paths, diversionary pathways, and dead ends. This essay concerns the many splendored things and shadowy sides of Money and Wealth. I first consider the dynamics of loss and retreat as related to something in the field of economics called “negative utility”.
Negative Utility: Monetary Loss and Regret
Behavioral economists have found that loss has a more powerful impact on us than the experience of winning something. I know that there was a major emotional impact on me when my favorite football team lost one game in a long season of wins. More than a decade later, I can still recall the day when my team failed to win against a “hated” opponent. I can’t recall any of the other 17 games that my one team won, but I have a vivid memory of the day and place where I witnessed my unbeatable team get beaten.
Loss vs. Regret
As bad as the experience of loss is, behavioral economists point to an even more powerful, emotionally driven motivator. This is an experience of regret. We have an opportunity to do something or achieve something but let this opportunity pass by. It is particularly painful to witness someone else benefiting from this opportunity. If I had been given an opportunity to attend one of the games my football team played, and didn’t take advantage of this opportunity, there would be a sense of regret when I later found out what happened at the game.
I would have even regretted missing the game that my team lost. It’s even worse. I am frustrated and regretful when I miss a televised game because I forgot to record it when I am out of town; I am even more frustrated and regretful if the game is being televised on a cable network to which I don’t subscribe. Am I alone in this very unproductive and in many ways “immature” reaction to a missed game? Probably not, when I am told similar stories from colleagues who are even bigger “fans” (as in “fanatics”) than I am.
I offer one other personal disclosure. I am blessed with very bright and inquisitive children and grandchildren from whom I have learned much. My son was teaching about postmodernism at a university in California. He taught me about this perspective in the late 1980s. I soon wrote an entire book about postmodernism in contemporary organizations (Bergquist, 1993). More recently, one of my granddaughters was taking a course on macroeconomics at her university, and she began to share some of what she learned in the course with me.
I learned about something called “negative utility” and was surprised to find that this powerful concept had passed me by. I began to ponder what “negative utility” looks like from a psychological perspective. As a psychologist with a bent toward depth psychology, and the psychology of Carl Jung in particular, I began to reflect on how “negative utility” might relate to the psychology of unconsciousness. Is there a “shadow function” associated with “negative utility?” And do the powerful motivators of loss and regret relate in some way to both the shadow and our experience of negative utility? Here are my reflections on these matters.
Negative Utilitarianism
An understanding and full appreciation of this important economic principle always seems to start with broccoli! There are often two choices when we go to the supermarket to purchase some broccoli. One choice is to purchase broccoli with stems. The other choice is to purchase broccoli with the stems cut off. The interesting point is that the stemless broccoli costs more per pound than the broccoli stems. It turns out that we are paying for the removal of the stems. The stems have negative utility! They not only provide no benefit; they cost us money (yielding negative utility).
Actually, the notion of negative utilities goes much deeper than the cost of broccoli stems. A school of utilitarian theory, called Negative Utilitarianism, is based on a big-picture (distal perspective) moral principle. There is a fundamental moral principle that we should collectively minimize the total amount of aggregate suffering we produce. At a domestic (proximal) level, there is negative utility if every additional unit of some commodity we consume causes more harm than good. Many commodities belong on this list, including non-renewable resources (such as oil and water), cigarette smoking (endangering both self and others), use of many painkillers (legal and illegal), and consumption of food from endangered species (such as bush meat in Africa, pangolin and shark in Asia, and blue-fin tuna and Red Fish in the USA).
In addition to this big picture (distal) perspective on negative actions, there is a domestic (distal) version of negative utility that concerns something more than the cost of something; it concerns physical harm. rather, it concerns the act of consuming more of an item that is actively harmful or has negative effects. Another domestically based, negative utility is where you have too much of an item, so consuming more is harmful. For instance, the fourth slice of cake might even make you sick after eating three pieces of cake.
Finally, there is the satiation form of negative utility. This utility concerns the diminishing satisfaction or happiness that comes from consuming an additional unit. Happiness derived from the latest unit is less than that from the previous unit. Disney World just isn’t what it was the last time we traveled to Florida. I don’t remember this piece of blueberry pie being quite as good as it was last night when served to our guests. This final form of negative utility is closely related to the process of addiction. We need more of something to get the same “hit” from its original consumption. Our body adapts to the sleeping pill we take, resulting in an increased dosage. Psychological adaptation also occurs. We rapidly become accustomed to something and find it no longer a thrill. As Peggy Lee once sang: “Is that all there is?”
