Does the model of human nature we embrace guide and shape everything else, from the economic system we prefer to the political system we support? Arthur C. Brooks and Peter Wehner seem to think so:
The American founders believed, and capitalism rests on the belief, that people are driven by “self-interest” and the desire to better our condition. Self-interest is not necessarily bad; in fact, Smith believed, and capitalism presupposes, that the general welfare depends on allowing an individual to pursue his self-interest “as long as he does not violate the laws of justice.” When a person acts in his own interest, “he frequently promotes [the interest] of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. ”7
Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur, among the first writers who attempted to explain the American frontier and the concept of the “American Dream” to a European audience, captured this view when he wrote:
The American ought therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement?8
Smith took for granted that people are driven by self-interest, by the desire to better their condition. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” is how he put it, “but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”9
Harnessed and channeled the right way, then, self-interest—when placed within certain rules and boundaries—can be good, leading to a more prosperous and humane society.
In Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Gordon Gecko famously argues, “greed […] is good.” But while Stone would have us view such a statement as an indictment — both of capitalism and of those who practice it most fiercely — to the founders it might seem rather a straightforward statement about the human condition.
Ayn Rand? Would have had it inked into a tramp stamp.
Discuss.
(thanks to sdferr)
Do politics — the essential ordering (or disordering, as usually eventually happens) of life on earth — parallel life? Of course. From an email I sent a friend this morning concerning Obama’s underlying disagreement with human nature:
Buddha mirrored greater Eastern spirituality as well as classical Western spirituality by holding sacred the human principles of property, responsibility, benevolence, cooperation, honor, honesty, independence and interdependency, and truth-telling, decency, and gratitude, which is what private behavior does when confronted by poverty and inequality.
Which assumes inequality is a problem, which it is not. In fact, having rightly observed that life is suffering, these spiritual principles also hold that adversity creates everything from innovation to character, other essentials of the human condition of survival on Earth. Socialism simply seeks to rearrange all virtue into one unique, central dispensary, thereby historically making all involuntary customers equally impoverished and owing to the class differences that we see arising even today on the road to such a two-class system, subject to a dogma not their own sooner rather than later – to have a subscription to the dispensary, you have to have been deemed suitable to hold it.
But our President has a better way: By asserting that freedom from adversity is a right (leaving aside the vast problem of who produces the goods to cause this ‘freedom’, naturally) he’ll short-circuit these virtues and principles and outcomes by inculcating all dependents into the usual thick morass of dependency, making them universally and equally miserable and promoting the dis-ease of greed, envy, theft, racialism, inequality, etc.
That’s the dependency of the central collective redistributionist State. Eventually it’s terminal, as the cycle of history shows every time. Collectivism is a parasite and cannot survive without a host.
Of course, this simple reality never makes the conversation, it having been shoved aside by the dogma of the heaven-on-earth collectives are presumed to always provide. Not one has ever provided anything of the sort, of course, instead preferring to run at some various level of failure between simple bankruptcy to outright democide — collectives killed 2.5M of their own people every year for the entire 20th Century while liberty-based republics killed none. This is what happens when you shunt away entire realms of human virtue.
So Barkie, as arguably the most incompetent little narcissist ever to pollute the office also has the religion of dependency. As my dad observed recently:
“Barkie is a journeyman politician, not distinguished in any way. Two years ago, the media ceaselessly touted him as ‘highly intelligent,’ ‘an exceptional dancer(!),’ a ‘brilliant orator,’ and what not.
“This in a man who speaks of his fond attendance at Cominsky (Comiskey) Park in Chicago, speaks of the Navy corpse (corps), refers to 57 states, told of the Austrians speaking Austrian, tried his hand at analogy (The economy was in the ditch and he and the Dems got down in the ditch ‘and it was hot and wet and dusty’). He’s so stupid; don’t you get these things right simply by listening and observing? Where’s his head been since college? Appointed editor of the Harvard Law Review, having never written one article for it. Editor! With his scanty, painful syntax and grammar?”
Etc., etc. Each of those points are objective, observed facts — reportage, and not assertion or projection. We’ve been duped, or rather the left, now waking up here and there, had been duped. He isn’t actually a Messiah, and as far as the rest of us were concerned, he never was simply because there was zero evidence to support the blind belief that he was. He can’t be for the reason of his utter lack of grasp on how humanity actually works and doesn’t work.
By asserting dependency as the preferred condition, Our President, speaking for us to the globe, just spit on history and basically every noble spirituality ever devised.
He isn’t actually a Messiah
I take it you’ve never seen Hamlet II Jho?
…and excellent post Jeff. Self interest should trump racism as well. When you fulfill a need for someone with great value, the person with self interest will disregard skin color because it’s the benefit to self that’s important and nothing else. Obama, as he makes fun of Boehner’s skin color, is not bright enough to grasp this.
Oh well, maybe Michelle coaches him over the complicated spots.
I don’t think (actually I don’t intuit, haven’t really thought about it) greed is the same thing as self-interest. irrational self-interest perhaps?
And I’m pretty sure Rand’s tramp stamp read “proud selfish bitch”
irrational self-interest perhaps?
How about enthusiastic self-interest?
You can be enthusiastic about your self-interest and rational at the same time, can’t you?
You can be enthusiastic about your self-interest and rational at the same time, can’t you?
Not if you start off with a defective persona. Then self interest can get caught in a vicious logic loop. Pedophiles and other addicts come to mind.
My analytical abilities shorted out as soon as you put into my head the image of Ayn Rand with a set of ass antlers.
Cripes, people. “Greed” and “self-interest” are not synonymous.
“Self-interest” means that I get up and go to work every day so that I can pay the mortgage, the utilities, and put food on the table.
“Greed” means that I’m obsessed with having more and more and more, way beyond what I need, because the incessant accumulation of stuff is really heady and I love the adrenaline rush.
J.K. Rowling became a billionaire not because she was greedy but because she wrote books that everyone wanted to buy. However, these morons on the left would look at her bank account and call it greed because of all the zeroes.
Cluebat: The poor who steal your stereo so that they can buy more bling are greedy; billionaire John Huntsman Sr.–who made his fortune by inventing styrofoam packaging for Big Macs and eggs–and who is determined to die broke, having given all his money away, is not.
But in the context of Capitalism, di, greed is very good indeed. Necessary even.
Sen. Bernie Sanders is very greedy. He can’t ever get enough of other people’s stuff.
You can make a decent, albeit a bit solipsistic, argument that there isn’t anything but self-interest, and no such thing as true altruism.
You might give to charity merely to look charitable. There’s plenty that give only when people are looking.
But even if you give to charity annonymously with ‘nothing to gain’, doesn’t that make you feel good and benevolent to do so?
So what are feelings of benevolence, kindness, virtue and moral adequacy worth to you, exactly?
Are you GIVING that homeless bum a dollar, or are you purchasing peace of mind from him? You think if Walgreens was selling a pill that made you feel good about you for a dollar it wouldn’t have buyers? The catholic church once had quite a business selling indulgences that granted freedom from guilt.
Makes no difference to me. Acting in the interest of others merely for the warm fuzzies of feeling selfless and charitable is good enough and just compensation, and is a difference without any distinction from the noumenon of true ‘charity‘.
Personally, that’s why I hate panhandlers and never give them cash anymore. Because I feel they are mugging people. Because while they offer you happy feelings in exchange for cash, if you DON’T give them cash, you feel guilty and selfish. I’m fine with it, as I feel quite justified in stiffing them because the last thing they need is truly $2.43 – if that was going to remotely help them they wouldn’t still be homeless bums – but my opinion is the emotional bullies are mugging the weak minded into financing their parasitic lifestyle with the threat of misplaced guilt.
At any rate, I’ve yet to ever see anyone do anything that they didn’t have any interest to do, given the context, at least so far as I’m concerned. No healthy organism ever truly acts against itself for anything – including others. They must believe they’re better off for it. If not materially, emotionally, or spiritually. Motives are just complicated, nuanced, and often hidden. Self interest simply is. ‘Selfishness’ comes with a subjective value judgement at no extra cost and is by definition rationalized as a ‘bad’ example of self interest. Certain Quixotic characters like Rand or Gecko trying to co-opt it (probably with horrible effect, were they actually successful) not withstanding.
greed is very good indeed
Depending on how you define ‘greed’.
If you simply label it as any self-interest, as some misguided people might, then yes.
But you run into problems that label you a Rand style provacateur because by definition, that word means bad. And you’re arguing that bad is good.
It’s like ‘murder’. Murder MEANS wrongful unjustified killing. You can have justified killings, but you can’t have justified murder – it’s oxymoronic by definition.
So the concept of ‘greed is good’ suggests that there can be NO extreme or limit to the justifications of self interest, which inevitably winds up arguing for an extreme social darwinism that ignores even the concept of human rights, if it were taken literally at any rate.
Rand was very cogniscient of the fact that she was arguing for an entirely different moral framework then that typically understood throughout all of western society.
And she was kind of a nujob. Brilliant, but also, quite nuts. Like Nietzche, for instance. So very very right about some things, but all the more remarkably and horrifically wrong on others.
Eh? Did I kill the thread?
Yes, the thread is dead. Dead as a doornail.
the thread is dead.
Long live the thread.
I’d argue that Greed is self-interest taken to an unhealthy extreme. Back in my Sunday School days, one of the wiser teachers explained the Seven Deadly Sins in terms of “too much of a good thing.”
Enjoying one’s food is one of life’s pleasures, but taken to the extreme it becomes gluttony. An afternoon of leisure is a wonderful thing, but a lifetime of it is sloth. Admiring a neighbor’s new toy is just fine, but admiring it to the point where you want to take it from him is envy. Et cetera.
I think that providing a comfortable existence for oneself and one’s loved ones is admirable, and I doubt very many would disapprove. But at some point, you slide up the scale to where you just want stuff for stuff’s sake, and you worry less about providing for your family and more about status-seeking and one-upping your peers. At some point, you actually wind up destroying your family because you’re so fixated on beating the neighbors that you forget about why you started working in the first place. Or you’re so preoccupied with getting “stuff” for your kids that you neglect to actually care for them; you forgo the spiritual aspects in lieu of the material ones.
The problem is that it’s not always easy to see the line where self-interest goes bad. There’s even an argument to be made that a certain amount of excess can be a positive thing. It’s kinda like speeding: doing the limit plus 10% gets everyone home quicker, but doing the limit plus 100% just gets people killed. In that light, it’s not so hard to see where people might think “a little greed” is a good thing. They’re not thinking about doing 75 in a school zone; they’re thinking about doing 75 on the Interstate.
Speed is good!
(Yes — I’m a thread necrophiliac. I admit it.)
how’s no one talks about gov’t greed?
how’s come no one talks about gov’t greed?
But in the context of Capitalism, di, greed is very good indeed. Necessary even.
Ambition, maybe, but not greed. Ambition means you’re pursuing a goal that may or may not pay off in big bux. Greed is the base scrabbling for stuff so that the other guy doesn’t get it first.
I used to teach Sunday school to three-year-olds and I’d bring toys for the second half of the lesson time because their attention spans were so short. One of the girls heaped a bunch of toys in her skirt and walked around clutching the hem. She wasn’t playing with the toys, but by gum nobody else was going to, either.
Greed is not a deadly sin by mistake. It rots the soul and gives us Microsoft products as the de facto standard for office work.*
Think about it, won’t you?
* Gates doesn’t want to run the best software company in the world; he wants to run the only software company in the world. So he bundled his dreck with the OS and threatened commercial death to the hardware manufacturers who dared offer a different OS (much less different word processor or spreadsheet or netware) on their machines. And no, I will not admire him for his oh-so-clever cutthroat sales techniques any more than I’ll admire Adolf Hitler for his rhetorical skills.
But even if you give to charity annonymously with “nothing to gain,” doesn’t that make you feel good and benevolent to do so?
Not if you have clinical depression: then nothing makes you feel better, but you do it anyway because you recognize that somebody needs something you have and if your positions were reversed, you’d sure like someone to help YOU. Even if there’s no guarantee that someone will.
Sometimes people do the right thing even when it costs them dearly, e.g., soldiers fighting and dying for freedom, martyrs standing their ground.
Are you GIVING that homeless bum a dollar, or are you purchasing peace of mind from him?
If you’re acting out of guilt, you’re pretty likely to do the wrong thing. When your morbidly obese mother tells you you’re a bad son if you don’t go get her another box of Ding-Dongs–and you stupidly do it–you’re an enabler, not a beneficient soul and certainly not a good son.
Oh, I bet we can think of some political analogs–can we not?–of people supporting programs and other policies in order to assuage their guilt, but that actually do harm to the people they purport to help?
I have sometimes been the unfortunate recipient of enthusiastic “helping out” wherein people were eager as hell to give service because they love love love that warm fuzzy. Unfortunately, they were more concerned with “helping” than they were with finding out what I actually needed, and the services provided were either useless to me, added to my burdens, or just depressed me because I knew that I wasn’t the true object of their charity.
Altruism? Don’t know why we need to go looking for it. People should do the right thing because they are committed to doing the right thing for the sake of the right thing being done.
Because it’s right: not because it will make you feel good.
I’ve yet to ever see anyone do anything that they didn’t have any interest to do.
I would argue that the ultimate motive for every action is that the actor believes that it is in his/her best interest to perform the act.
The guy who throws himself on a grenade to save his buddies doesn’t think it’s in his self-interest to NOT do so and then have his whole unit decimated, for example. Maybe he figures he couldn’t live with himself (in this life or the next) if he didn’t at least TRY to save them all.
And the moron who shoplifts an iPod figures it’s in his best interest to get away with the theft, because then he’ll have this groovy iPod; the fact that he miscalculates and gets caught, then has a criminal record dogging him for the rest of his life, speaks only to his short-sightedness and stupidity, not his best-interest motive.
Di, I think you’re missing my point.
“Feeling good” is but one example, and certainly not the only one. I can think of several others, and you offer one benefit to charity yourself – reciprocity and cooperation. If you give to others because you have an expectation or even hope that others will give to you when you need – gauranteed or not, most things in life aren’t – you clearly stand to benefit and have rationalized a self-interest in being charitable. So in the sense I’ve described it’s not truly selfless.
You give to charity because you hope that it will encourage others to give to you when you are in need of it. That’s an insurance policy, not true ‘altruism’ as it is concieved by most.
My argument certainly was not that people should do things to feel good or anything like that. It is just an example of how one may benefit oneself from being ‘charitable’. The point was merely that no healthy organism acts against itself or independant of (what it sees as) it’s interests. There are no truly selfless acts.
I would argue that the ultimate motive for every action is that the actor believes that it is in his/her best interest to perform the act.
Well then we agree.
The guy who throws himself on a grenade to save his buddies doesn’t think it’s in his self-interest to NOT do so and then have his whole unit decimated, for example. Maybe he figures he couldn’t live with himself (in this life or the next) if he didn’t at least TRY to save them all.
Yup. Exactly what I’m thinking of.
i’ve posted this before..forgive big minds..’
as i exit the convenience store, or the dunky donuts..
and i got purchases-in my tiny hands..
and paper receipts..and dimes and nickels and pennies
adding to the confusion..
i throw them metal coinage up in the air
and they make that ‘coin’ sound on the pavement
and my friends just look at me and say..
‘did u just throw money away?”
yup- get in the car, u want a ride/
call a cab
have sometimes been the unfortunate recipient of enthusiastic “helping out” wherein people were eager as hell to give service because they love love love that warm fuzzy.
Preaching to the choir sister.
Like I said – I won’t give the bum $1.00, not even to impress my date who now thinks I’m a jerk. Cuz he doesn’t really have need of $1.00 in my estimation. He needs [an attitude adjustment/AA/drug rehab/pyschiatric evaluation and care/etc]. $1.00 just enables his ass to continue being destitute and needy.
plus alturistic- i thinky of a lil spothead finding a dime
on the pavement..he’d be smiling! look-a dime!
plus- i got reams of change and i’m lazy-who rolls dimes?or nickels?., or pennies?
yup. im a big bong American..
got quarters in my pockets..
and an ear for ur complaints..
dont mind the begging
it’s the convuluted stories..
hey, got a smoke?
my cousin just took the bus to cash my check, and he’ll
be back..{”
save it-here-heres a smoke
breathe deeply
You give to charity because you hope that it will encourage others to give to you when you are in need of it.
I was making an argument from empathy, not from hoped-for reciprocity. “Do unto others as you’d have them do to you.” Empathy is the gauge you use to determine what is right, not what will help you in the future.
I was making an argument from empathy, not from hoped-for reciprocity. “Do unto others as you’d have them do to you.”
If “do unto others” represents empathy, what’s the difference?
– Then again, we all do things from time to time on impulse, depending mostly on our mood.
– No good deed goes unpunished.
If “do unto others” represents empathy, what’s the difference?
Between what and what?
Between empathy and the golden rule? There is no difference.
Between the golden rule and hoping for reciprocity?
Former Case—You decide what to do based on empathy; you imagine yourself in the other guy’s shoes and estimate the other guy’s needs and wants from there. You don’t take into account what might happen to you in the future.
Latter Case—You decide what to do based on your concept of the social compact: if I wash this guy’s back, maybe he will wash mine. Your act is meant to prompt a second act.
Actually, according to de Tocqueville, the concept is “enlightened” self-interest.
I suspect the motives are more interlinked then you give credit for dicentra.
I may use empathy to put myself in your shoes and understand what you want… but why would I use that empathy and first place, and then why would I act on it?
You may say “because it’s the right thing to do”. But…
Why do the right thing? ;)
I can think of multiple reasons but they all boil down to self interest – which you don’t seem to disagree with.
Some karmic sense that right is returned with right. Or a view that such actions, while not garaunteeing reciprocity, are all that one can do to encourage it and hope for it. Or a belief in a just reward for being kind (or escaping punishment for being wicked, either by God or by society). Or fullfilment of a self-validation of being a just person, a feeling of satisfaction and pride one derives from living up to a code of honor that imposes optional restrictions based on their view of what’s morally desirable (for whatever reasons they rationalize morals as having), and/or avoiding the cognitive dissonance, guilt and shame of having hypocritically violated it.
But whatever the justification(s) is, the underlying point is, a healthy organism cannot act against it’s own interest, nor act independant it’s percieved interest.
Selfishness contains a moral judgement within it. But self-interest simply is, and there is nothing else.
What if you’re just a fussbudget who wants to do the right thing for the same reasons one wants to use good grammar and spelling?
Morality through OCD!
It just goes to show that, at bottom, these problems are philosophical first and political second. It matters how one answers the question (first) “what kind of thing is this thing we call man?” (or human, if you prefer). You cannot start with being, or God, or knowing, etc. Once must start with the human being and then construct the decision tree from there, as it were. Barack Obama (thinks he) believes in the atheistic ‘perfectibility’ of the human animal that he’s been absorbing since his sad days laying on the beach in Hawaii wondering just who he really is. In fact, the marker of the lack of his education is that he’s not once in his lifetime ever been exposed to thinking that is not exactly like what he thinks right now. Someone asked earlier where his head has been “since college.” I’d contend that he a). never really went to school in the sense of having been educated and b). that his head is exactly where it has always been–on his shoulders, tilted forward and down, gazing at what he takes to be the umphalus of the world–his own belly-button.
The only flaws his materialism will allow him to consider are pathologies, congenital defects, and disases–all of which can be cured through medical interventions, gene malipulation, the right kind of breeding, and, in the end, (sadly) extermination. Hence, his proscriptions are prescriptions–first to education and reform (“change”) and then diet and exercise,etc. etc. If he’d read any history even he’d see where this all leads.
But his handlers shielded him from that, didn’t they?
* Gates doesn’t want to run the best software company in the world; he wants to run the only software company in the world. So he bundled his dreck with the OS and threatened commercial death to the hardware manufacturers who dared offer a different OS (much less different word processor or spreadsheet or netware) on their machines. And no, I will not admire him for his oh-so-clever cutthroat sales techniques any more than I’ll admire Adolf Hitler for his rhetorical skills.
Uh Huh. And what has Gates accomplished for society as a whole by his greed? His personal ends may be totally selfish, but he cannot accomplish those ends without other people or other institutions. Yes he is greedy and a billionaire, but he has made a lot of other people billionaires and millionaires along the way. His greed, not his philanthropy has spawned other businesses and communities and opportunities along the way. And any improvements to society have not cost the taxpayers anything.
The classic definition of charity would be the man sacrificing himself for his friends.