On The Disorder of Desire
Keynes, Augustine, and Girard on Abundance, Rivalry, and the Future of Civilization
“The economic problem is not, if we look into the future, the permanent problem of the human race.” - John Maynard Keynes
In 1930, in the shadow of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay that remains one of the most audacious predictions in the history of economic thought. Rather than focusing on the crisis immediately surrounding him, he attempted something far more ambitious: to imagine the material condition of humanity a century into the future. The essay, titled Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, is remarkable not merely for its optimism but for the philosophical territory into which it ultimately wanders. Keynes began as an economist forecasting productivity growth; he ended as a civilizational thinker asking what human beings might become once the ancient struggle for survival was largely overcome.
Keynes’s starting observation was simple but profound. For most of recorded history the material condition of the average person changed very little. From the earliest civilizations through the beginning of the eighteenth century, living standards fluctuated, sometimes violently, yet showed no sustained upward trend. Plagues, wars, and periods of prosperity came and went, but the basic economic life of mankind remained remarkably stable. The reason, Keynes argued, was the absence of two forces that define the modern world: sustained technological innovation and large-scale accumulation of capital.
With the rise of modern science and the expansion of trade beginning in the early modern period, this equilibrium began to break. New inventions multiplied productivity, and profits generated further investment. Capital accumulated, technologies improved, and productivity expanded again in a self-reinforcing cycle. By the nineteenth century this compounding process had accelerated dramatically. Coal, steam, electricity, industrial machinery, and modern finance transformed the productive capacity of society. The result was something unprecedented in human history: sustained exponential economic growth.
Keynes believed this process had only just begun. Even modest rates of compound growth, sustained over generations, produce results that appear almost unbelievable when viewed across a century. If capital increased by only two percent annually, he observed, the capital equipment of the world would multiply many times over within a hundred years. Technological innovation would compound alongside it, increasing efficiency and reducing the amount of human labor required to produce basic goods. Keynes wrote as though he were staring into a tunnel and already seeing daylight at the far end: not a utopia, not paradise, but something that for most of human history would have been indistinguishable from it, the steady removal of necessity as the dominant force organizing ordinary life.
From these trends Keynes drew a startling conclusion. Within roughly a century, the average standard of living in advanced societies might be four to eight times higher than it was in 1930. In such a world the economic problem that had dominated human existence since the dawn of civilization, the struggle to secure food, shelter, and basic material comfort, would no longer be the central organizing principle of life. Humanity would approach a condition in which the necessities of life could be produced with only a fraction of the labor that earlier generations required.
This transformation, Keynes believed, would create a new and unfamiliar challenge. If the production of necessities required only a small amount of human effort, the structure of daily life would inevitably change. Keynes famously speculated that technological progress might reduce the typical workweek to fifteen hours. People would still perform some labor, partly because work satisfies deep psychological impulses formed over centuries of necessity, but the relentless economic struggle that defined earlier eras would fade. Leisure, rather than survival, would gradually become the dominant condition of human life, and the moral imagination that had been trained for centuries to treat work as destiny would be forced to ask what work had actually been for.
The real question, therefore, was not whether humanity could achieve abundance but whether it could learn to live with it. Keynes suspected that this transition might prove psychologically difficult. Human beings had evolved under conditions of scarcity. Their habits, instincts, and social institutions were built around the demands of survival and accumulation. To remove those pressures within the span of a few generations might produce profound disorientation. The economic problem, which had shaped human behavior for millennia, would gradually disappear, and in its place would arise a deeper and more unsettling question: what should human beings do with their freedom once necessity no longer dictates their lives?
Keynes believed this transformation would ultimately allow humanity to rediscover something long neglected. For centuries the pursuit of wealth had dominated social life because it was indispensable to overcoming poverty. Yet the virtues associated with this pursuit, thrift, accumulation, relentless productivity, were not ends in themselves. They were instrumental disciplines necessary for building the material foundations of civilization. Once those foundations were secure, the moral emphasis of society might shift. People would no longer need to organize their lives primarily around the accumulation of capital. Instead, they could devote themselves to what Keynes called the “art of life,” the cultivation of activities valued for their own sake rather than for their economic utility.
At this point the essay’s path is already set, even if most readers do not see it yet. Keynes, with the confidence of a modern economist, forecasts the receding of scarcity; then, with the unease of a moral psychologist, he hints that abundance may leave the human person unmoored. The remainder of the argument can only be completed by those who understood what Keynes gestures toward but does not name: that the deepest human problem is not production but orientation; that the most decisive struggles in prosperous societies occur not over bread but over the objects of love; and that when necessity loosens, the soul does not automatically rise to higher ends, it reveals what it has been worshiping all along.
Nearly a century later the material dimension of Keynes’s prediction appears remarkably prescient. Productivity has multiplied many times over. Technological progress has transformed nearly every aspect of economic life. In the most developed societies, living standards exceed those of Keynes’s era by several multiples. Yet the cultural and psychological transformation he anticipated has proven far more elusive. The expected civilization of leisure has not fully materialized. Work remains central to social identity, and the pursuit of wealth continues to dominate public life, often with a more frantic intensity precisely because survival no longer provides a natural stopping point.
The reason for this divergence lies in a dimension of human behavior that Keynes recognized but underestimated. Material scarcity may diminish as productivity grows, but desire does not diminish with it. Instead, it adapts, expands, and finds new objects. As societies become wealthier, competition shifts from the realm of survival to the realm of status, recognition, and symbolic prestige. Abundance does not calm human aspiration; it often intensifies comparison.
“Virtue is nothing other than the order of love.” - Augustine, City of God
To understand why abundance does not resolve the human problem requires turning from economics to anthropology, and from anthropology to theology. Long before Keynes wrote his essay, Augustine argued that the deepest problem of human life is not the presence of longing but its disorder. Human beings are creatures of love. They are oriented, always, toward something they treat as higher, something they pursue as final, something they implicitly regard as worthy of sacrifice. The central moral question is therefore not whether we love, but what we love most, and how our loves are arranged.
Augustine described this through the concept of ordo amoris, the order of loves. Every human life, he believed, is structured by a hierarchy of attachments. When that hierarchy is properly arranged, the soul becomes stable and peaceful, because it is aligned with reality: higher goods govern lower goods, and the heart does not demand ultimate fulfillment from what cannot provide it. When the order collapses, restlessness emerges, because the heart begins to treat finite goods as infinite ones. The result is not merely disappointment but a kind of inner fragmentation: the person becomes pulled in multiple directions, haunted by wanting, incapable of rest.
In Augustine’s framework the highest object of love is God, the source of truth and being. Beneath this stand the legitimate goods of human life, friendship, family, knowledge, beauty, civic duty, and material provision. These goods are not evil; they belong to the created order and may be enjoyed rightly. Yet they must remain subordinate. When finite goods are treated as ultimate goods, the hierarchy of loves becomes inverted. Wealth, pleasure, recognition, and power begin to function as substitutes for transcendence. Because these goods cannot bear the weight placed upon them, they produce only temporary satisfaction followed by renewed craving. The promise they make is larger than the substance they contain, and the gap between promise and substance becomes the engine of modern restlessness.
If Keynes’s forecast was that scarcity would recede, Augustine’s warning is that the recession of scarcity does not guarantee the rise of wisdom. Abundance does not automatically free the soul; it tests the soul. When necessity loosens its grip, the heart does not become quiet by default. It becomes revealed. A culture that has not learned the order of love will not become contemplative simply because it becomes rich; it will merely become more capable of pursuing its idols at scale.
“My weight is my love; by it am I borne wherever I am borne.” - Augustine, Confessions 13.9.10
This line captures, with Augustinian precision, what modern prosperity tends to conceal. The soul is carried by what it loves as surely as a body is carried by gravity. If the highest love is disordered, the whole person tilts. If a society’s loves are disordered, its institutions follow. This is where René Girard becomes indispensable, because he explains not merely that love can be disordered, but how disordered desire becomes contagious and civilizational.
“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.” - René Girard
Girard argued that human desire is fundamentally mimetic. We learn what to want by observing what others want. Desire is not simply an instinct arising from within the individual; it is shaped by imitation. Human beings borrow their desires from models whose preferences become the template for their own aspirations. This is not a minor sociological detail; it is a mechanism by which entire cultures are formed. We imitate what counts as success, what counts as admirable, what counts as happiness, and, more quietly, what counts as worthy of sacrifice.
The consequence of imitation is rivalry. When two individuals imitate the same model, they begin to desire the same object, and competition intensifies not merely because the object itself is scarce but because the rival becomes part of the desire itself. The rival is not simply an obstacle; he becomes a mirror. The object becomes valuable because the other values it, and the other becomes valuable because he is perceived as the one who knows what is worth desiring. The rivalry is therefore not merely economic; it is metaphysical. It is a struggle over significance, over ranking, over the right to feel that one’s life counts.
Girard’s insight complements Augustine’s analysis. Augustine explains that human misery arises when lesser goods are elevated to ultimate ones. Girard explains how such misdirected desire becomes socially contagious. When influential individuals treat wealth, prestige, or recognition as ultimate goods, others imitate their orientation. Soon entire societies organize themselves around the pursuit of those goods. What begins as personal disorder becomes a cultural system. The hierarchy of loves becomes collectively inverted, and the social order begins to reward those who most perfectly embody the new idols.
Modern consumer capitalism operates with extraordinary efficiency on this principle. Markets do not simply respond to existing needs; they actively generate new desires by presenting models of desirable life. Advertising, media, and now algorithmic platforms display images of success, beauty, comfort, and influence that invite imitation. Individuals measure their lives against these models and pursue the objects associated with them. Yet the process rarely produces lasting satisfaction. As soon as one marker of status is acquired, another appears. Desire advances indefinitely because the model itself continues to evolve, and because what is being pursued is not merely the thing but the sense of being the sort of person who has the thing. Abundance, on this reading, does not solve the economic problem; it expands the theater in which mimetic rivalry can play out.
Seen in this light, the paradox of modern prosperity becomes clearer. Abundance does not extinguish rivalry; it refines it. Instead of competing for subsistence, individuals compete for distinction. Education becomes a competition for institutional prestige rather than merely knowledge. Careers become signals of identity and status rather than simply sources of income. Even leisure becomes competitive as individuals display experiences and lifestyles that signify success. This is why the fifteen-hour workweek did not arrive. The gains of productivity were converted into new positional contests, and the heart, lacking a stable order of love, found new arenas in which to chase significance.
The political philosophers who preceded Keynes sensed this long before the digital economy perfected it. Aristotle warned that societies must distinguish between wealth as a means and wealth as an end, and that the good life is not identical with the prosperous life. Tocqueville observed that democratic equality expands the field of comparison, making restlessness a stable feature of modern freedom rather than a temporary fever.
“He who has set his heart exclusively upon the pursuit of worldly welfare is always in a hurry…” - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Tocqueville’s point is not that comfort is evil, but that a culture that treats comfort as the highest good becomes permanently agitated. The horizon of desire recedes as it is approached. Girard supplies the mechanism: imitation proliferates models, and models proliferate rivalry. In such a world, even moral language can become mimetic; even virtue can become a status symbol; even “authenticity” can become a competition. The society grows wealthy and yet grows thin.
Nietzsche, from another angle, saw where this could end if comfort became the implicit god of a civilization. He feared that prosperity without higher ends would not produce liberated human beings, but diminished ones: the “last man,” who seeks safety, mild pleasures, and therapeutic stability while losing greatness, aspiration, and the capacity for reverence.
“‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
This is not an argument against abundance; it is an argument against abundance being mistaken for the good. Keynes hoped abundance would open the space for the art of life. Nietzsche feared it would close the space for the heroic. Augustine would say the outcome depends on love: on what is treated as ultimate, and therefore on what forms the soul.
This tension becomes even more significant in the present technological moment. Advances in automation and artificial intelligence promise to extend the trajectory of productivity Keynes observed nearly a century ago. Machines increasingly perform tasks once reserved for human labor, first manual work, then routine cognitive work, and now even forms of creative and analytical labor. The possibility that once seemed speculative in Keynes’s time, that the economic necessity of human labor might gradually diminish, no longer appears implausible. Keynes’s language of “technological unemployment,” which read like a prediction of transitional pain, begins to look like a forecast of a civilizational test: what happens when large numbers of people are no longer needed for production in the way earlier societies required them?
Yet such a development will not resolve the deeper questions raised by Augustine and Girard. If anything, it may intensify them. In modern societies, work has become more than economic contribution; it has become a structure of meaning, a ritual of legitimacy, and an approved way of locating oneself in the world. Work provides hierarchy, routine, identity, and often a moral alibi. Even those who quietly worship status can do so under the respectable banner of productivity. If automation loosens the binding force of work, if fewer people are needed, or if the content of work becomes thinner and more performative, then the culture loses one of its primary scaffolds. Rivalry will not disappear. It will migrate. It will intensify around prestige, identity, and symbolic recognition, because those arenas remain when economic necessity fades. The danger is not that machines will leave humanity idle; the danger is that machines will expose how much of modern meaning has been borrowed from necessity, and how unprepared a prosperous culture may be to answer the question of what life is for.
The century since Keynes wrote his essay has confirmed both his insight and his oversight. He correctly perceived that technological civilization would generate unprecedented abundance. The tunnel of economic necessity has indeed grown shorter, and the material predictions he made were, in broad outline, far closer to the truth than the pessimists of his era could have imagined. But the deeper transformation he anticipated, the emergence of a civilization liberated from the tyranny of accumulation, has not yet arrived, and it may not arrive automatically, because it was never an economic problem to begin with.
The economic problem was never the deepest problem of human life. It was merely the most visible one. Economic development can eliminate scarcity, but it cannot teach a civilization what is worth loving. That task belongs to moral formation, to culture, to religion, to philosophy, those forces that establish a hierarchy of goods and teach human beings how to place lower loves beneath higher ones without despising the lower or idolizing them. A civilization capable of generating immense wealth must decide whether wealth will remain a means or quietly become an end, whether comfort will serve life or replace it, whether prosperity will widen the space for contemplation or only widen the theater of rivalry.
The deeper task of prosperous societies is therefore not merely to produce abundance but to cultivate the wisdom required to live with it. Aristotle spoke of the ends of political life as higher than mere wealth; Augustine described virtue as the right order of love; and Keynes himself, at his most honest, conceded that economics was never meant to be the master science. Freedom from necessity is not the culmination of human life; it is the beginning of a more demanding responsibility, because freedom does not remove the need for order, it intensifies it. Keynes believed that once the economic problem receded, humanity would confront its “real, permanent problem”: how to live wisely and well. In this sense he was exactly right. The age he imagined is now arriving.
The machines are increasingly capable of producing the necessities of life with astonishing efficiency. What remains uncertain is whether human beings are equally capable of ordering their loves, and whether prosperous civilizations can recover a vision of higher ends strong enough to resist the constant pull of mimetic rivalry and the quiet idolatry of comfort. The future of prosperous civilizations will depend less on the power of their technologies than on the clarity of what they worship.