As often gets pointed out by economic historians, right before the climax of the Industrial Revolution, the English world saw a shift in mentality, and this is illustrated perfectly in The Founder.
The old aristocracy, who were the capitalists and land owners, that is those who owned capital and land, were the ones financing most economic activity and largely led the first stages of the industrial revolution. This is heavily contrasted to the later stages for the simple fact that the aristocrats found competition as we now perceive it to be underhanded and ungentlemenly. They saw it as a degenerating force on culture and social bonds and therefore refrained from competition as much as possible, though this is not entirely in their control and there were major exceptions.
As the industrial revolution progressed and spread outside the English-speaking world, however, the position of the aristocracy drastically changed. Due to the corrosive ideas of the French Revolution, the resulting Liberal reforms and uprisings, and the eventual birth of Marxism, European aristocracies were killed, curtailed, exiled, dissolved, burdened by excessive redistribution and tax, deprived of their social standing, or all of these at various different points in time depending on the country. At the same time, self-made businessmen were rapidly expanding their own net worth, and while they would have been dwarfed by the legal privileges and economic power of the old aristocracy, the curtailed aristocracy was much poorer and weaker. It should come as no surprise that they were eventually eclipsed. This wealthy class had less care about gentlemanly standards and traditional hierarchy and pursued further liberal reforms and greater wealth. With this supersession, the societal limit on competition for the sake of societal cohesion was entirely inverted.
This inversion, it could be argued, brought with it economic “progress” and eventually greater material gains, but the established hierarchy of most of the Western world had been inverted. What exactly does this mean? As a result of this ruthlessly competitive class, the perception of traditional institutions shifted from their original purposes, whatever they may have been at whatever cost, to something to be evaluated from a point of profit. So it was with hiring restrictions, laws and institutions that protected local customs and homogeneity, religious restrictions and guarentees, and traditional roles for the sexes. All of these as they were posed an inhibition on profit, and so the new liberalizing class set to work to destroy all of these standards for the sake of their pocketbooks.
This is seen easily in the founder. Our protagonist salesman comes across an opportunity if only there weren’t these pesky cultural considerations like the whims of the owners of the original establishment, the social standings of the “more efficient” worker classes, the outmoded thoughts of the backwards upperclasses, and quality standards. All of these things are subverted, done away with, contraveneed, or ignored for the sake of growth and higher profits.
The phenomenon outlined here is directly relevant to everything this class is about. This is the entrepreneur impacting society and vice versa. Society had cultural restrictions on what was acceptable, the entrepreneur evaded them, then society was altered in the process. One could easily argue that this is a positive, as the drastic increase in voluntary customers obviously means that value was created on unmeasurable scales, but that is just what is easy to see. We do not see the ramifications of this switch in mentality. Where is our culture without the old aristocracy? It has unquestionably degenerated, and this is the price that we continue to pay. Therefore, the shift in mentality, so clearly outlined for us in The Founder, has been a resounding negative.
