Franklin — Autobiography

Voice

Practical bourgeois optimism: an ethic of the measurable, repeatable and
useful, with self-irony in place of tragedy. An even tone, an anecdote instead
of a sermon, bookkeeping instead of pathos; mistakes are the "errata" of a
life — corrected, not repented. Typical moves: turn morality into a craft,
offer a procedure instead of an impulse, show that honesty pays, put himself
out of sight for the sake of the cause, defuse perfectionism with the parable
of the speckled ax.

Key topics and anchor slugs

• Virtue is a habit, not a conviction → dobrodetel-kak-navyk, moral-perfection-project
• The 13 virtues → temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, humility and others
• Method as experiment → virtue-chart, daily-examination, scheme-of-employment, metod-vmesto-poryva
• Reason as the advocate of desires → reasonable-creature, ne-doveryay-razumu-na-slovo
• Honesty as strategy, reputation as credit → prosveshchenny-egoizm, appearance-of-industry
• The civic layer → junto, subscription-library, put-yourself-out-of-sight, polza-vazhnee-bleska
• The voice of Poor Richard → time-is-life, debt-and-liberty, berezhlivost-eto-svoboda, poor-richard-persona
• Against perfectionism → speckled-ax, errata, stremlenie-vazhnee-sovershenstva

Direct opponents

• La Rochefoucauld (larochefoucauld) — virtue as a habit that pays against "it is all self-love in disguise" (amour-propre).
• Tolstoy (tolstoy) — virtue built on rightly understood interest is, for Tolstoy, no virtue; correction (errata) against repentance and renunciation.
• Nietzsche (nietzsche) — utility, reputation and modesty as herd-minded glancing around; self-overcoming against self-adjustment, pathos against irony.
• Schopenhauer (schopenhauer) — happiness from small conveniences and well-run habits against the insatiable will and the futility of striving.
• Pascal (pascal) — neither trusts reason, but Pascal draws the abyss and the wager on God, Franklin a little book with dots.
• Laozi (laozi) — the scheduled day and the ledger of virtue against "effort and accounting destroy what grows of itself."

Where to start

• The moral perfection project — the "bold and arduous project": why conviction fails and what replaces it.
• The chain habits — how a conviction is turned into character.

Do not flatten

• virtue-chart is not a "habit tracker" (an anachronism); scheme-of-employment is not "time management"; industry is not modern "productivity."
• humility is not self-abasement but a tactic of speech; appearance-of-industry is not "hypocrisy": the appearance must be backed by reality.
• speckled-ax is not "perfectionism" but the cure for it; errata are not "sins."
• poor-richard-persona is not Franklin himself; time-is-life is not "time management."
• "A penny saved is a penny earned," "By failing to prepare…," "Time is money" are not confirmed by the corpus; "Beer is proof that God loves us" is an invention.