This is a special stroke of policy. They are of special power because they are general... the common prejudice that any one is satisfied with his fortune, however great, or unsatisfied with his intellect, however poor it is... Everything past seems best and everything distant is more valued.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The individual folly is easy to spot and avoid; the universal one is nearly invisible precisely because everyone shares it, so it does not stand out as error. The maxim names several: nobody is content with his fortune however large, everybody rates his own intellect however small, each envies others' lots, and everyone believes the past was better and the distant more valuable. These biases feel like clear sight from inside, which is what makes them dangerous. Freedom from them is a genuine edge, because seeing accurately where the crowd is systematically distorted lets you value the present fairly, judge your own mind honestly, and resist the pull of the grass that is always greener somewhere you are not.
Practice
- Name the universal biases and check yourself against them: dissatisfaction with your fortune, overrating your own judgment, envying others' lots, gilding the past.
- Distrust "things were better before" and "it is better over there"; both are the standard distortion, not usually the truth (maxim 120 lives in the present age).
- Value the present fairly; the crowd systematically undervalues what it has and overvalues what is distant, and simply not doing that is an edge.
Use this when
- Use this when a feeling is widely shared and strong; universal agreement is exactly when to suspect a common bias rather than a truth.
- Use it against nostalgia and grass-is-greener thinking in career and life decisions, where these biases steer people wrong under the cover of feeling obvious.
Ignore this when
- Don't assume the crowd is always wrong; sometimes the common view is simply correct, and contrarianism for its own sake is its own folly (maxim 143).
- Don't use bias-awareness to dismiss real dissatisfaction; some discontent is accurate and worth acting on (maxim 200 keeps one live hunger).
A picture of it
A capable professional is privately miserable at a good job, convinced a rival company across town is where real careers happen and that his own field was better a decade ago. Both feelings are the standard distortions, distant grass greener, past gilded, and they feel exactly like clear-eyed truth. A friend who has actually worked at the rival company punctures the first, and an honest look at his old field punctures the second. Freed from the two universal follies, he sees his present position accurately for the first time, and it turns out to be better than the fantasies he was measuring it against.
The errors everyone shares are the ones you cannot see. The past was not better and the distance is not greener; check the crowd's bias, then your own.