The virtue of temperance

Contentment needs to be earned by exercising self-restraint. It is not merely a question of reaching the satiation point. Contentment is the result of what happens after enough is enough. 

If more is always better, then contentment is never possible. What makes contentment possible is the positive feeling one gets for having made something of value. That's not what happens when you have things, that's what happens when you take what you have and you decide how much of it you do need and how much you can use to give to others and to the world to make for themselves. 

Abundance is not about having more, it's about having enough so you can (a) do more; and then (b) help others to do more. When you cross over into the world of doing, it stops you from a concern with the having of more and pre-occupies you with the challenge of the making of more. Appetites arising from hunger put you into the frame of mind of wanting more and more; appreciation of what's been given to you, which arises from abundance, puts you in the frame of mind of wanting to give back. That process of giving back needs to happen by transforming the liquid into the illiquid, from the alienable to the inalienable, from consuming into producing. 

In order to appreciate you have to recognize the other and respect what's his that he gave to you. Contentment comes of learning self-restraint, and knowing when to stop trying to sate oneself and instead to start to redeem the excess one has acquired. The transformation of material abundance into the institutional strength and the character strength that fortifies a civilization requires a bleeding through of that character strength into the appetites that drive the acquisition of material bounty. 

The simplest expression of that bleeding through is the exercise of self-restraint in the pursuit of abundance, better known as the virtue of temperance. All the virtues have the same properties of requiring a measure of self-restraint as well as of the transformation of the material into the characterological. 

Contentment is the outcome of virtue, not of satiation. Virtue is the training of one's tastes and preferences to the purposes of caring and contentment. That training begins with the recognition of abundance and the appreciation of the other's role in achieving that abundance. Autonomy is what comes of having enough so that you can go make something of yourself. Autonomy is the ability to achieve contentment. The duty of legitimate authority is to harness social surplus to the broadest cultivation of autonomy possible in the society. 

The proper mechanism of an economic system is to create that quantity of surplus which could underwrite the political system's creation of the most autonomy possible at any given moment in a nation's history. 

The deepening of a people's character is reflected in the heightening of their values.