Love Quote by E. F. Schumacher

Self-knowledge, Schumacher suggests, is often just self-indulgence with better PR. “Many people love in themselves what they hate in others” is a compact diagnosis of moral hypocrisy: the way we excuse our own vanity as “confidence,” our own ambition as “drive,” our own stubbornness as “principle,” then feel righteous disgust when the same traits show up without our preferred backstory. The line works because it refuses the comforting fiction that our judgments are mainly about ethics; they’re about ownership. We like our flaws when they feel like self-authored style, and despise them when they appear as someone else’s imposition.

Coming from an economist best known for Small Is Beautiful, the intent isn’t merely psychological. It’s political economy in miniature. Modern systems train people to treat preference as virtue: if I want it, it must be good; if you want it, it’s selfish. That mental habit scales up nicely into consumer capitalism, national chauvinism, and workplace hierarchies, where “necessary” becomes whatever benefits the in-group. The subtext is that our public morality is often a form of market branding: we curate a story of who we are, then punish anyone whose similar impulses threaten our status or narrative.

Schumacher’s era mattered: postwar affluence, managerial technocracy, and rising ecological limits. He’s warning that the biggest obstacle to saner economics isn’t lack of data; it’s the ego’s double standard. If we can’t recognize our own contradictions, we’ll keep designing societies that institutionalize them.