I hear the buzzing everywhere.
This morning in Tirana, my phone vibrated against the plastic armrest of my wheelchair, that familiar little brrp like a tiny insect trapped under glass. I opened it and felt the warm sting of recognition—the good kind—because someone shared an old FreeAstroScience post of mine. And then, right after, the sour aftertaste: the reflex to check if it got “enough” attention.
That’s the part I don’t like admitting… and that’s exactly why I’m writing this.
I’m going to simplify some dense philosophy and social theory here, on purpose, so you can actually use it in your life without needing a seminar room and a chalkboard. The original spark is Bernard Mandeville’s bee-hive story and what one recent essay highlights about it: society runs less on reason than on our hunger for praise and our fear of shame.
The Sweet Lie We Tell Ourselves
We love to say we’re rational.
You can hear it in the clean click of keyboard keys in cafés, in the confident tone of people explaining what’s “logical” while steam from espresso curls up like a question mark. Mandeville looked at all that and basically shrugged: humans run on passions, and the biggest engine is pride—plus the dread of being laughed at.
He didn’t write this as a cute metaphor, either.
Back in 1705 he published The Grumbling Hive, and later expanded it into The Fable of the Bees (1714, and again in 1723), where a corrupt hive thrives, then collapses when it tries to become purely virtuous. The point lands with a thud like a book dropped on a wooden table: private vices can feed public benefits.
Three Ideas That Sting
Here are three thoughts that’ll annoy polite dinner conversation, the kind where forks scrape porcelain and everyone pretends they’re above petty motives.
One: “Being good” isn’t the fuel of society—being seen is. We don’t just want to survive; we want to be admired, and we build whole systems around that craving.
Two: Manners are often cosplay for virtue. In Mandeville’s time, “politeness” wasn’t just etiquette; it was a social technology for earning respectability, even when the heart underneath stayed selfish.
Three: Shame is real pain over an imaginary threat. The “danger” is often just other people’s opinions inside our own head, but the body reacts anyway—hot cheeks, tight chest, dry mouth, the whole brutal orchestra.
And yeah—those ideas sound cynical.
So let me push against them with something honest.
A Duel Without Pistols
There’s a scene in the essay that I can’t shake: the duel.
In early 18th-century Britain, duelling was illegal and condemned as sin, yet it stayed socially magnetic; refusing to fight meant becoming public comedy—stage-coaches, market-places, the whole loud, jeering street. Mandeville’s diagnosis is icy and clear: the duel isn’t “honour” battling “cowardice,” it’s self-preservation fighting self-liking—the need to be respected, the fear of shame.
Now here’s the twist.
Most of us don’t duel with swords. We duel with reputation, and the weapons are subtweets, group chats, résumés, and that tiny pause before someone answers your message.
A few years ago, back in Rimini, I gave a talk that was meant to be about astronomy—dusty galaxies, light travelling for billions of years, the soft hiss of a projector warming up.
But I spent the whole week before it obsessing over one thing: whether I’d look competent rolling onto that stage, whether people would clap out of respect or pity, whether my Italian jokes would land, whether the room would go quiet in that bad way. The night air smelled like salt from the sea, and I still couldn’t sleep.
That wasn’t “rational planning.”
That was shame avoidance dressed up as professionalism.
The Human Hive Isn’t a Market—It’s a Mirror
A lot of modern readers file Mandeville under “economics.”
The essay even mentions how free-market thinkers later celebrated him, linking him to the logic behind laissez-faire and, by extension, the invisible-hand type story people love to tell about markets arranging social good on their own. But the sharper claim is psychological: before we’re shoppers, we’re esteem-seekers.
That hits me harder than any supply-and-demand chart.
Because when I post something scientific online, the first temptation isn’t money. It’s the bright little jolt of being noticed, the “ping” sound of a notification like a bead dropped on metal.
So when someone says, “People are selfish,” I answer: yes, and also no.
People are hungry—for approval, for belonging, for a face-saving story they can live inside.
“Self-Liking” Has a Smell
Mandeville uses a phrase that feels uncomfortably accurate: self-liking.
It’s that mix of pride and fear, the part of us that overvalues itself but secretly worries it’s a fraud, so it begs other people to confirm it. You can almost smell it in a room full of networking—perfume, sweat, cheap cologne, and the sharp scent of anxiety under polite smiles.
And the weirdest part is what the essay points out next.
We learn to hide our pride, then we take pride in hiding our pride.
That sentence is a little monster.
It explains why someone can humblebrag with a straight face, why a “modest” person still checks if you noticed their modesty, and why I sometimes pretend I didn’t care about an award nomination while refreshing the page like a lab rat hitting a lever.
When “Virtue” Is Just Training
The essay doesn’t stop at manners; it goes straight into gender and the brutal double standard of shame.
In Mandeville’s world, men’s honour centred on courage, women’s honour on chastity—and a “slip” for women was framed as unrecoverable.【】 That idea has the texture of sandpaper, because you can still feel it today in the way people gossip, in the way whispers scrape someone’s name.
Mandeville goes further: women aren’t “naturally” ashamed of sexuality; they’re trained into it, by imitation and social cues so early that shame blooms before understanding.
That’s not morality descending from the heavens.
That’s education as social conditioning, with shame as the leash.
The Story That Flips the Knife
The most haunting example in the essay is the link between this shame-training and infanticide.
Mandeville describes how poor women and servants couldn’t hide pregnancy the way wealthy families could; the fear of public disgrace pushed some toward abortion or killing newborns, not because they lacked love, but because shame became stronger than maternal care. Reading that, I felt my stomach drop, like an elevator cable snapped.
And then the essay adds a detail that’s almost unbearable: prostitutes, he notes, were less likely to kill their children—not because they were kinder, but because they’d already lost “modesty,” so shame had less grip on them.
That’s Mandeville at his most ruthless.
It’s also a warning: when a culture makes reputation more valuable than life, people pay in blood.
So, What Does This Mean for Us in 2025?
The modern hive isn’t made of bees.
It’s made of timelines, comment sections, workplaces with “culture decks,” and classrooms where kids learn what gets laughs and what earns eye-rolls. The sound isn’t buzzing wings; it’s notification chimes and the soft tap-tap of thumbs on glass.
We still treat shame as a moral compass.
But shame is a social weapon that can be pointed anywhere—at disability, at poverty, at sexuality, at failure, at saying the “wrong” thing in the wrong room.
I’ve felt it when people talk over me instead of to me, their voices syrupy-sweet, their assumptions heavy as wet wool. I’ve felt it when a venue isn’t accessible and the organiser says “Sorry” with a smile that means “Please don’t make this awkward.”
That moment isn’t about ramps.
It’s about whether I’m allowed to exist without becoming a lesson.
A Better Way to Read Pride
Here’s where I push back against the bleak reading.
Pride isn’t only vanity; pride is also the engine behind care.
When I work on a FreeAstroScience piece late at night, the room quiet except for the low hum of my laptop fan, I’m not chasing a “like” in some shallow way. I’m chasing the feeling that I contributed something honest, that I didn’t waste my one weird life.
That’s still “esteem-seeking.”
But it can be aimed at something decent.
Mandeville’s uncomfortable genius is that he refuses to pretend we’re angels, and he refuses to pretend we’re demons. He says: we’re animals that crave recognition, and society grows by steering that craving into patterns that don’t tear us apart.
So the real question becomes: who gets to steer it?
A 60-Second Experiment You Can Try Tonight
Try this with a sound you’ll recognise: the little whoosh of sending a message.
Next time you’re about to post something, correct someone, or even drop a “fun fact,” pause and ask yourself two blunt questions while you feel the phone’s smooth edge in your hand. “Am I aiming for truth or applause?” and “What shame am I trying to dodge?”
Then send it anyway—but change one tiny thing so it’s less about status.
Make it clearer, kinder, more direct, less performative.
That’s how you tame the hive without pretending you’ve left it.
The Future Smells Like Choice
Mandeville says morals and manners evolve without a grand plan, shaped by pride, shame, and our need to be accepted.
That can sound like fate.
I hear it as a challenge.
Because if these forces built the world we inherited, they can also build the world we choose next—one school rule, one workplace norm, one family conversation at a time, with the clink of dishes and the smell of dinner anchoring the change in real life.
You and I don’t need to kill pride.
We need to stop pretending it isn’t there.
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