Franklin Only Cared About Useful Virtue
Benjamin Franklin had a test for ideas, almost rude in its simplicity: does it work. He didn’t much care whether a belief was elegant or orthodox or pleasing to authority. He cared whether it produced results. He praised religion not for being true but for being useful — for making people behave better. He chased virtues not because heaven demanded them but because they got him further in this life. He was a pragmatist before the word existed, and I think it’s the most underrated trait a builder can have.
Most people aren’t actually pragmatists, even the ones who say they are. They’re loyal to the elegant. They want the beautiful architecture, the clever idea, the approach that signals taste — and they’ll quietly prefer it even when an uglier thing works better. Franklin would have found this absurd. To him a thing’s virtue was its usefulness. The clever solution that doesn’t ship is less virtuous than the boring one that does, because virtue, for Franklin, lived in the result and nowhere else.
Sounds obvious until you watch how hard people fight it. We’re deeply attached to being right in the abstract. The engineer who insists on the theoretically superior approach while the deadline burns. The founder in love with the elegant business model no customer actually wants. The whole genre of being correct in a way that produces nothing. Franklin’s pragmatism is a cold shower on this: I don’t care that it’s elegant, I care that it works, and if the ugly thing works and the elegant thing doesn’t, the ugly thing is better, full stop, and your discomfort about that is vanity.
The deists shared this posture toward belief, which is what makes Franklin’s version coherent instead of just cynical. They asked of a doctrine not “is this the inherited truth” but “does it hold up to reason and produce good results.” They cut miracles not out of spite but because miracles didn’t do anything you could verify or build on. Same test Franklin ran on virtues, inventions, institutions: strip the prestige and the tradition, ask what it actually produces. A belief that changes no behavior and predicts no outcome was, to these men, just decoration.
I’ve made this my own filter and it’s saved me from a lot of expensive beauty. When I’m attached to an approach I interrogate the attachment: do I want this because it works, or because it’s elegant and choosing it makes me feel like a sophisticated person. Completely different reasons, and only the first gets to win. The second has cost me weeks I’ll never get back — gold-plating, premature abstraction, the lovely general solution to a problem that needed a crude specific one. Every hour of it was me optimizing for how the work made me feel rather than what it did.
There’s a humility in pragmatism the elegance-lovers mistake for crudeness. It takes more ego, not less, to insist on the beautiful approach against the evidence — you’re trusting your taste over reality. Franklin trusted reality over his taste. He’d ship the boring thing, watch it work, and feel no loss, because his pride lived in the outcome and not the cleverness. That’s the move. Relocate your pride from the elegance of your method to the usefulness of your result, and most of your worst decisions just stop being tempting.
Does it work. That was Franklin’s whole test. Run it on your next clever idea and watch how many fail it.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.