3C. CALCULATING SELF-INTEREST

3C. CALCULATING SELF-INTEREST (OR NOT)

Prioritizing needs and goals.
• Balancing short- and long-term interests.
• Picking the best path to reach our goals.
• Shuffling goals.
• Sustaining stories.
• We simplify our choices to reflect long-term strategies more than short-term gain.

Our expectations shape our politics.
• Some common expectations.
• Lots of ways to calculate risk and reward.
"Class is a set of expectations and explanations. "
• Let justice roll down like dice: expectations of fairness.
• Pfooey on Ptolemy: my kitchen is not the world.
• Miracles await: unrealistic expectations.
# Sometimes we expect too much from ourselves and each other.
# Sometimes we expect too little.
# Sometimes we can imagine a better world but not how to get there.

Mutual or collective self-interest is even harder to figure.
• Elite-serving systems of cooperation.
# Clientelism.
# The Good King.
# The Lord is King.

• What we expect of ourselves and each other; the roots of trust and dis-.
# We can misread our neighbors’ self-interest.
# It’s easy to mislead and misunderstand each other.
# We start with different models of human nature.
# Some of us walk around in disguise, or hide in dark corners.
# In a top-down but mobile society, we have little leverage with our neighbors.
# Some people making a living by sowing distrust.
# Misplaced trust can lead to distrusting everyone.
# Defining our community is necessary, risky, and insufficient.
# Sometimes, though, our stories of distrust are nothing more than rationalizations after the fact.

• Recognizing stakeholders: interest and expertise confer standing.
# Stakeholders in democratic movements and organizations.
# Self-interest, knowledge and democratic decisions.

Our stories of self-interest help us understand each other and find common ground.


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3C. CALCULATING SELF-INTEREST (OR NOT)

So, for me, the stories of good, evil and apathy just don't cut it. They don't really explain why we act the way we do, or point to how we can act together. Instead, let's find out what a person gets out of his action, or would have, had it worked out. Most consistently, we try to do good for ourselves, even if we don't always admit it.

Because I don't trust people to always know or tell the truth, I thought I could just bypass what others say about their aims and look to their "real" interests, as if those are somehow separate from their understanding. But that turns out not to be the case. For sure, there is a real world, and courses of action that can really hurt or help us. But figuring out what helps or hurts depends on what we want in the first place, and even then it's hard to tell the best way to get what we want.

So I made some big mistakes in assuming I knew what other people wanted and how to join their interests to mine. I didn't pay enough attention to their stories, or my own.


Prioritizing needs and goals.
It's not easy to figure out self-interest. Think of the variables we take into account when we're choosing a course of action. We have to weigh what's good for us in the short- and long-term. We consider different ways to meet our needs. Sometimes we change our goals, depending on what our expectations of the world tell us is achievable. And all the while, we have to respond to other people's goals and actions.

• Balancing short- and long-term interests.
Years ago Maslow posited a hierarchy of needs, ranging from food and water to security, love and artistic expression. We need all of these things to be fully functioning human beings, but some we need a lot quicker than others. Just as certain vitamins can't be absorbed unless other vitamins are present, so we can't fully meet some needs unless others are met first. We try to take care of immediate needs while keeping in mind what we'll need next year. The trouble is, we don't know much about next year, or ten years down the road, so it's hard to prepare.

I work very hard so I'll have enough money at retirement. I assume I'll live long enough to use it. I'll be mighty annoyed if I drop dead at work. But many of us are in no position to look for long term risks and payoffs. We may live from paycheck to paycheck, from dose to dose, from beating to beating or bomb to bomb. When we have no confidence in what may happen tomorrow, never mind next year, a college degree, lung cancer or save the whales may be way down the list of concerns.

Other times the short- and long-term goals conflict. Pursue the home-town romance or your art in the big city. Have the kid now, while you've got health insurance, or wait till you've got a better partner. Nab the chance to get fragments of labor law reform through Congress, or save your big guns for a comprehensive package and work like hell to elect better Reps. Businesses run through the cycle over and over as they're bought and traded like hogs: decimate the work force to squeeze out every dime from employee paychecks, then painfully rebuild the tottering remains. The savings and loan crisis, the dot.com bubble, the housing bubble, oil speculation, these were all caused or intensified by capitalism's imperative to grab the loot and run. Smother the economy with high oil prices, or wipe the environment for future generations. So many of our technological wonders are merely new ways to steal unpriced goods, like air. Poor Adolf 1941: sit back and enjoy the plunder from half of Europe, or go for his boyhood dream of destroying Russia? What to do, what to do?

Further, our self-interest changes as circumstances change. Take an organizing situation. At first, it may be very risky for me to join a group resisting the boss. The penalties are severe and any future payoff very unlikely. Since the new group is very weak the boss sees no reason to offer extra incentives to buy me off. As the insurgency grows, its success becomes a little more likely, and more employees are emboldened to join. But at this point suck-ups become more valuable to the boss, and he has to make a lot of promises to keep them in line. Toward the end of a successful campaign, the balance of costs and benefits may shift to the insurgents, and it may become riskier to defy the insurgency than to resist the boss. On the other hand, by now the price for brown-nosing is thirty pieces of silver, because brown-nosers are in such short supply. What action should I take, and when? How do I understand my self-interest? A lot of people try to hedge their bets and keep a foot in both camps.

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“What conclusions may be drawn from our account of collaboration [with Nazis in the occupied countries during World War II]. . . ?
“First, that individuals, nations, and authorities in Hitler’s Europe tended to behave in a highly erratic way. Some collaborated with varying degrees of reservation, others wholeheartedly, others for purely tactical reasons, and others while simultaneously offering active resistance. . . .
“Second, it is apparent that the various behavior patterns cannot be precisely differentiated. The intervening boundaries are blurred. In place of them we find broad, twilit, transitional zones where quite as much took place as in the bright light of firm commitment. . . .
“Third, it is noticeable that these ill-defined transitional zones left plenty of scope for irrational behavior, which the stresses and strains of war rendered commonplace. . . .
“Fourth and last . . . . Everyone had to show his true colors sometime-- at the latest when Stalingrad marked a turning point in the war. When that happened, volatile behavior gradually ceased” (Rings 148).


“'Over time Iraqis became disappointed,' said David Dunford, a retired foreign service officer who helped set up the new Iraqi ministry of foreign affairs. 'Each Iraqi owed it to himself and his family to decide whether it made more sense to cooperate with us or to cooperate with somebody else, the insurgents. Unfortunately, because of our incompetence, more and more Iraqis have made the decision that their interests don't lie with us'" (Ricks 325-6).
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There is a similar progression of calculations for career opportunists. Movements collect them as they grow, and may be hijacked by careerists. Even folks who start with the greater good in mind end up doing more good for themselves*. As activists and the general public grow more cynical and distrustful, liberation projects fall apart or morph into ritual expressions of fantasies of power.

Once in a while you come across folks who cling to strategies that worked for them at one time, but hold them back now. I remember a couple teens I had in GED class whose distrust and reflexive resistance surely helped protect them when they were being ridiculed, raped and beaten as children, but also make it very hard for them to become independent adults. I tried, with only minor effect, to help them see that changed possibilities call for new strategies.

Some people take a really long view, foregoing earthly pleasure for the promise of eternal bliss. That's the basis of Pascal's Wager, and compelling at first glance: even if we're not sure there's a heaven, it's got to be stupid to choose a lifetime of sin over even the remote possibility of infinite love, on the one hand, and eternal hellfire on the other. Presumably suicide bombers make some such calculation. The end-of-the-world folks believe an especially intense form of this calculation: since the Second Coming is around the corner, any attempt to make this world a better place has to be the utmost waste of time. Raygun's Secretary of the Interior James Watt was just such an apocalyptic, to which fact some observers attributed his hell-for-leather determination to turn public lands over to corporate looters. Who cares? We'll meet again in A Better Place, buyin buy.

Of course, if all we've got is this earthly existence, my lifetime is eternity, the only one I'll ever experience, and a damn’ shame to throw away for wishful thinking. Keynes had it right: in the long run, we are all dead.


• Picking the best path to reach our goals. There are lots of ways to get what we want. Some serve the common interest and others do not. Do you wanna be loved? Having people love and praise you because you're on TV or a NASCAR champion or a dictator can be every bit as fulfilling as receiving love and praise because you help people. (Do you question my experience?) There's rarely just one path to getting what we want.

* Melissa Fay Greene's account of the civil rights movement in McIntosh Co., Georgia, describes one such case. She quotes Emory U. psychologist John Pani's observation: "A lot of people who came up through the civil rights movement were rules-breakers; they had to be; if they'd have toed the line, they'd still be down on the plantation or wherever. But when do you stop breaking the rules? It's not always so easy to switch gears, to say, okay, this is it, I've made it. It's not easy to know when to change, and it's less easy to change" (286-7).