Magnanimity, Generosity, and the Great Soul

A possible antidote for greed

The great challenge when walking the path of social status is that you can never have enough money, good looks, or fame. There is always somebody wealthier, better looking, and more famous than you. And even if by some miracle you make it to the top of the gerbil pile in one of those categories, you are not going to last there for long. Pretty soon it is margin loans and Botox.

The real problem comes when the search for wealth and status becomes all-consuming. It essentially eats you up from the inside. Psychologists have terms for this like greed syndrome. As the management psychoanalyst Kets de Vries put it:

Ironically, however, the pursuit of wealth becomes a Faustian bargain . . . it will never be enough. Greedy people will always want more, like a hunger that’s never sated. They don’t realize that to acquire for sake of acquiring is akin to the way cancer cells grow. And given their single-minded preoccupation, greedy people become takers, not givers. To get more, they are prepared to do anything – to chase every financial opportunity whatever the cost.

Greed is like a cancer. It makes you unhappy and friendless.

So what can we do about this? Well, it’s easy to say “change your motivational system and just focus on being nice or generous,” but that is going to be challenging for people who are wired for status and success. Being “nice” is a poor substitute for an Oscar or a Lambo.

An interesting solution to this problem of greed was offered by Aristotle back in the day. Aristotle was interested in virtue and ethics. And at the peak of ethical development is the great soul. The term great soul in Latin is magnus animus. “Magnus” means great, like legendary Hawaiian detective Magnum PI, and “animus” means soul, as in animism. Some people are lucky enough to experience nature as ensouled. Magnanimity is therefore the modern term for a great soul.

What does a great soul look like? Aristotle writes:

Now a person is thought to be great-souled if he claims much and deserves much.

I thought that sounded a little narcissistic when I first read it. The great-souled man has a pretty healthy ego. But there are a couple of key points that Aristotle is making in that definition that go beyond narcissism.

First, the great-souled man’s ego is balanced by his accomplishments. It’s not a loser with an inflated ego; it’s a winner with an accurate ego.

Second, and I think this is even more important for understanding the term in our culture, when we think of greatness, we basically think of somebody rich and famous. In America, if you are rich and famous, you can get half the people to think you are moral. (Thank you modern science of public relations). So morality isn’t really central to our definition of greatness.

But in Aristotle’s day values were different. A great man was somebody who embodied virtue — a great man was a good man. These virtues could be foundational virtues like a sense of justice in dealing with the world, or they could be one of Aristotle’s virtues that reflected the golden mean, or balance. For example, the virtue of courage lay on the golden mean between cowardice and rashness.

And inasmuch as the great-souled man deserves most, he must be the best of men; for the better a man is the more he deserves, and he that is best deserves most. Therefore the truly great-souled man must be a good man. Indeed greatness in each of the virtues would seem to go with greatness of soul.

So when Aristotle calls somebody great-souled, this person is great in the ways we would think, but also great in the traditional – maybe pagan is the right word – moral virtues.

Aristotle thought of magnanimity, or the great soul, as being the crowning achievement of all the other virtues. Somebody who is virtuous in many different ways could be called great-souled, but somebody who had a single virtue and was otherwise an unvirtuous person would not be. Magnanimity, in that sense, is almost a meta-virtue, although I am using that term loosely.

So, what does magnanimity have to do with selfishness?

Magnanimity counters selfishness by driving generosity. Here’s how. The great-souled man rarely asks for help, because taking help means he is weaker than the person he’s getting help from. But the great souled man offers help to the common people, because that is a mark of greatness.

It is also characteristic of the great-souled man never to ask help from others, or only with reluctance, but to render aid willingly; and to be haughty towards men of position and fortune, but courteous towards those of moderate station, because it is difficult and distinguished to be superior to the great, but easy to outdo the lowly, and to adopt a high manner with the former is not ill-bred, but it is vulgar to lord it over humble people: it is like putting forth one's strength against the weak.

In Aristotle’s world, the great-souled man is generous. He doesn’t bully weak people because that would be pathetic and suggest that he was insecure. If you need to lord it over humble people to feel good about yourself, you aren’t great to start with.

So, in Aristotle’s model, the search for the great soul transforms into the psychology of generosity and helpfulness, especially toward those lower in social status. Instead of trying to pump yourself up, if you are great-souled, you manifest your greatness through helping others beneath you and battling people that you see at your level.

Is there any psychological work on the idea of magnanimity? There is. Evolutionary psychologists have been interested in magnanimity because it’s a nice balance between status-seeking and generosity, self-centeredness and group focus. You can imagine an evolutionary benefit in a small society for the strong people to help the weak within the culture.

Some evolutionary work on magnanimity has noted that it works like a costly signal. Being generous shows your social group that you have so many resources that you can give some away freely. This signals to the group, in a way that actually costs you, that you are a high status person. A weak person who lacks resources will have trouble being generous. You can think of magnanimity a bit like a peacock’s tail in this model.

There has also been some social psychological work on the mechanisms underlying magnanimity and generosity. When we’re doing psychological research like this, we’re not recruiting the top 1% most virtuous people in the world to study. Instead, we’re looking at differences in magnanimity and generosity in normal samples. So it isn’t perfect, but informative.

What you find in this work is that when people are asked to focus on aspirational and self-transcendent motives or goals in their life – basically to think about being their best and highest self – that seems to be associated with generosity.

Underneath this generosity appears to be what is called approach orientation, or the focus on achieving positive goals, rather than avoidance orientation, or defensiveness. So, thinking about greatness and becoming your best self orients you toward an expansive view of the future. That more expansive view of the world drives generosity — whereas a more defensive, short-sighted view of the world would naturally drive selfishness and self-protection.

What is interesting about Aristotle’s original model of magnanimity, as well as the modern evolutionary and social psychological approaches, is that it is a source of generosity that comes out of the quest for greatness rather than compassion or empathy. This means that the quest for greatness doesn’t necessarily lead to narcissism, selfishness, and greed. You can be great, but also generous. In fact, Aristotle argues that generosity is a hallmark of greatness. Generosity is rooted in self-confidence, a well-developed ethical system, and an optimistic and approach oriented view of the future.

So one thing to consider as you chase your dreams of greatness – and I hope you crush it – is to go beyond just being great in one area. Consider strengthening your other virtues. This might not get you the immediate attention and acclaim that your ego seeks, but it will make you a greater person overall. Over time, you might start approaching the profile of the great-souled one, and with that, you are going to show more generosity, especially for the lower rungs of society. Paradoxically, as you become more generous, you’re going to be seen as even greater.

Links to my work: Homepage; Peterson Academy; Books on Amazon

Some Citations

Crisp, R. (Ed.). (2014). Aristotle: Nicomachean ethics. Cambridge University Press.

Boone, J. L. (1998). The evolution of magnanimity: When is it better to give than to receive?. Human Nature, 9, 1-21.

McGregor, I., Tran, A., Auger, E., Britton, E., Hayes, J., Elnakouri, A., ... & Nash, K. (2022). Higher power dynamics: How meaning search and self-transcendence inspire approach motivation and magnanimity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 102, 104350.

Kets de Vries, M. F. (2016). The greed syndrome. SSRN working paper.