This is a faithful translation crafted with the help of AI . The original was written in French.
Hobbes once wrote that man is a wolf to man. A phrase often echoed in circles of power to justify competition, mistrust, and the instinct to dominate. It evokes a world where one must bite before being bitten, negotiate before being betrayed, persuade before even listening. In the realm of entrepreneurship, this Hobbesian wolf is never far: it shows up in deals that seem too good to be true, in partners who turn into rivals, or in investors who vanish at the first dip in a curve.
But the wolf is not always what we think. In other cultures, it is an animal of silence and loyalty—a guardian of its own. Loyal to its pack, loyal to itself, it embodies a raw yet restrained strength, a power not driven by the hunt, but by balance. These two archetypes sometimes clash within us, quietly: the predator and the protector. Lately, this duality has struck me. And then, last night, a voice whispered something different. A pure heart wrote to me:
“The wolf may sniff, scratch, or hesitate… But it is not the moon that tames. It is time, patience, and the desire to truly meet—beyond instinct.”
A simple phrase, but one that realigned my path.
In that same inner landscape, a concept caught up with me: The Impartial Spectator. Not a character from a novel, nor a hidden camera, but a philosophical idea developed by Adam Smith—long before his name became synonymous with the mechanics of the market.
Smith distinguishes two spaces within us: the actor who acts, and the spectator who observes. That spectator is internal. It sees our actions, our hesitations, our calculations. It does not always speak, but it knows. It judges without judging. It asks: Would I be proud of myself if I saw my life as a stranger would? Would my actions still stand if a fair and disinterested mind were watching?
In business, that gaze is a lighthouse. It keeps us from drifting off course unnoticed. It helps resist tempting shortcuts, ego disguised as vision, soulless partnerships. It calls for a quiet ethics—not one shouted in slogans, but one that shapes gestures and underlies transactions.
This holds true in contracts. It holds true in silence. And it holds true in love.
Even there, in intimacy, a kind of symbolic economy lingers. Roland Barthes noted it in A Lover’s Discourse, when he wrote: “Do you love me enough?” In that question lies a market dynamic: an expectation, a response, an implicit balance between gift and return. It is not about reducing love to a transaction, but recognizing that all relationships—personal or professional—are anchored in a sense of fairness.
A subtle sense of equity, where each person hopes to be seen, understood, respected. And maybe what we call the “third eye” is just that: a sensitivity to when the bond feels just, when the attention given meets the attention received, and love, too, rediscovers its moral ground.
This is why the ethics of the Impartial Spectator is not a luxury—it is a foundation. It doesn’t guarantee victory, but it preserves coherence. It doesn’t suppress instinct, but teaches it patience.
Yes, there will still be moments of struggle, of decisions that leave scratches, of compromises that feel slippery. But each of us still holds the power to choose which wolf to invoke: the one that devours, or the one that watches. Hobbes’s wolf, or the one born of fire. For even in the storm of our instincts, it remains possible to anchor our steps, to scratch the earth with our own claws, and move forward—not toward prey, but toward loyalty. To the path. To the fire. To the other.
