3. INTEREST, EXPECTATION, RISK & ACTION. 3A. I KNEW THE ANSWER, BUT

3. INTEREST, EXPECTATION, RISK & ACTION

3A. I KNEW THE ANSWER, BUT THEN I LOST IT: The puzzle of self-interest.

3B. THE PLANET OF RIGHT AND WRONG.
An excursion into altruism; some stories of self-interest and self-sacrifice.
• Investing in our communities.
• Competition and cooperation in game theory.
• Giving more than they get.
• Suffering and sacrifice.
• Do it for the children.
• Sacrificing the labor force.
• Honor and dignity.
• The road to hell . . .
• Frankly, m' dear, I just don't give a damn.



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3A. I KNEW THE ANSWER, BUT THEN I LOST IT: The puzzle of self-interest.

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"Why is it that two-thirds of white, rural men voted Republican? Why? That's what we have to address. That's crazy. These people are working longer and longer hours. They can't afford to pay $3.50 for a gallon of gas. They're losing their jobs. So why do they vote for President Bush? And the Republican Party? We've got to address this.
"It's very easy to make fun of George Bush, but that ain't going to do it. What we have to do is knock on doors and go into communities where there are people who disagree with us on certain issues.
"And we have to talk to them. They're our friends. They're our allies. They're our co-workers. We can't see them as enemies.
"That's easier said than done" -- Bernie Sanders (Conniff 12/05 pp. 32-3).
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I was very impressed with the way ol Karl stuck it to the petty bourgeoisie. Marx figured it was the tradespeople and small shopkeepers who betrayed the revolutions of 1848. They whined about getting no respect from the lords and rich people, but even more they feared losing their tiny privileges and slipping as low as the common laborers they employed. Never trust 'm, Marx said, they'll take what they want from you and then throw you over for Napoleon III. I'm p.b. myself, you know, being at the retail end of the education business, but I appreciate the warning. Beware of people whose self-interest stops short of Revolution. The rich people and the middle class are doing fine under the death regime, they'll never opt for democracy. The lower middle class want a change, but you can't count on them; all they really want is to move up into the solid middle. To get there they'll ride the wave of revolt until it lands them, the lower middle folks, into positions of power. Then they'll lock the gates against the millions of pink and blue and no collar workers who are the real heart of the revolution.

I kept that in mind. I want to understand how come We Can't All Get Along. Seems like the most of the rest of the world makes different political choices than I do. It's vexing. Why can't they see what seems to me so clear? I need a simple rule of thumb to tell me who to work with* , who was the best bet to push for lasting change in this country, and who I didn't have to bother with. Unlike Pres. Halliburton I can't achieve my goals by random torture. I need to know who else wants what I want, and how much they are willing to risk for it. And I can't just rely on what people tell me; we so often lie to ourselves and each other. I need a lens to help me see clearly.

For me, the notion that we all pursue our own self-interest offers a sense of order; hope, even. What I mean by self-interest is what's good for me; in practice, it's the set of choices that will make my life better, the best outcome I can achieve in the circumstances I'm in. For a long time I figured that each of us has a unique, well-defined self-interest, and that knowing that is the key to organizing people around our common interests. Selfish bastard that I am, I'd love to think of selfishness as a virtue.

Virtuous self-interest is no new concept, of course. Way back in the Greeks & Romans Epicurus figured the best course was to seek pleasure and avoid pain, though for him seeking pleasure was more on the order of stamp-collecting than shop-till-you-drop. Then Thomas Aquinas went all medieval on us with his notion that doing good means just following our human nature, because after all God made us.

A couple centuries ago Adam Smith said the competition of every individual against every other, each pursuing her own interests, would automatically lead to a more prosperous society. The pressure of competition would force us to make the best use of our talents and resources, thus multiplying the total stock of wealth.

Not all the powdered-wig crowd were so optimistic. Smith's predecessor Thomas Hobbes figured that people are so ornery in general, we need a boss just to keep us from cutting each other up-- the "war of every man against every man." In this version, we operate not so much from self-interest as from a sort of unthinking selfishness. Beirut, Baghdad, many U.S. neighborhoods, we've seen places in such chaos it's easy to think the people there must be incapable of getting along with each other even when they desperately need to.

Many in George Washington's generation, threading their way through the labyrinth of state and sectional interests of the new United States, dreaded self-interested politics as the "spirit of faction" that must derail any chance of national unity and commonwealth.

Within a few decades, however, citizens of the early republic saw self-interest as the key to collective action. DeTocqueville, one a those Zarkawi-coddling Frenchmen can't even talk right, stopped by in the 1830s and found gringos remarkably individualistic but still community-minded:

Americans . . . complacently show how the enlightened love of themselves constantly brings them to aid each other and disposes them willingly to sacrifice a part of their time and their wealth to the good of the state. . . .
The doctrine of self-interest well understood does not produce great devotion; but it suggests little sacrifices each day; by itself it cannot make a man virtuous; but it forms a multitude of citizens who are regulated, temperate, moderate, farsighted, masters of themselves; and if it does not lead directly to virtue through the will, it brings them near to it insensibly though habits (deTocqueville 502).

Here's a different sort of promise than Smith's; here, self-interest leads us to consciously cooperate for the common good.

To me, self-interest is the heart of rational behavior, whether personal or political. To say that we each pursue our own best interests means that we are not crazy, that our society is not a chaos of random conflicts, but a readable, orderable set of relationships. We can make sense of our neighbors' actions because we do reliably strive to better ourselves; and we can organize because we share many common interests (sometimes, common enemies). The idea of self-interest is a theory of motivation; we need it to understand each other.

What's more, and contrary to what the preachers tell us, self-interest is not the same as unbridled appetite. Since only the Osamas and Halliburtons profit from the Hobbesian "war of all against all", each of us has a built-in incentive to restrain our selfish impulses. Past a certain threshold, selfishness is a disorder; it actually hurts my chances of surviving.

There is yet one more hope I read into the pursuit of self-interest. I grew up in the decades of nationalist revolutions, and I read about them in school. Self-interest seemed to draw the lines very clearly: the desperate billions against a few hundred fantastically wealthy corporations and their captive governments. I figured the great majority of us had nothing to lose and everything to gain from resistance and revolution. I thought the calculus of self-interest must lead us inevitably to band together to forge a better society.

In truth, I find the model very convenient, too. I hate to confront the people I disagree with. It's so much easier to simply label them as not worth my attention.

You know how bird watchers, Christians, Yalies and Mafiosi pick each other out in a crowd the raised eyebrow, the obscure reference, the secret handshake? I run my own invisible checklist of potential colleagues. I won't give the time of day to someone who looks awfully satisfied, or too full of themselves to play well with others.

By consigning whole classes to the outer darkness (right: deLeon banishes the tacky rich from his august presence) I save myself the trouble of trying to persuade or challenge them as individuals. Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, and all that. With a few exceptions (including some of those whose donations paid my salary for fifteen years), rich folks will not fundamentally oppose a system which benefits them so very greatly. It's a matter of priorities. When you're trying to stop a lynching, you don't waste time arguing with the KKK. Fight 'm. Don't bother trying to organize them. They'll always disappoint. Expecting the worst, I've never been wrong.

Never started no revolutions, neither.

In retrospect, it was silly to assume I could know what is in other people's self-interest, or that there is a one-to-one correspondence between self-interest and behavior. Why do U.S. kids sign up to kill Arabs, and vice-versa? Why do we sometimes stay in abusive relationships? Why do we let the bosses set immigrants and local-born workers at each others' throats? Why do millions of white collar workers in state and corporate bureaucracies so meekly suffer lay-offs, speed-ups, wage cuts? For that matter, why do middle class gringas sometimes risk their lives to help people in war zones here and abroad? How do some people dare to speak out against drug lords and warlords, despite the near certainty of being murdered for their trouble? Contrarily, if we are all so intent on pursuing our own best interests, how do we get situations like Bosnia or Baghdad or any number of U.S. neighborhoods where no one benefits from out of control violence. Don't hardly seem to make no sense.

Yup, handy as it is, the rational self-interest thesis has a lot of 'splainin to do.
Is there really such a thing as self-interest, anyhow --that is, some course of action that's good for us whether we know it or not -- or is it just a name for whatever judgment we make at a particular point in time? How can we tell what's good for us in the first place? Do we always act in our self-interest, or even sometimes? And is it in our self-interest to build a just society?

It's the old question of motivation that's bedeviled politicians and playwrights since the first humans quarreled over a carcass. Underlying motives are simple and universal: the search for love & power (to the extent that these are separable). But we all start from different positions and so we have different strategies to get these. How can we orchestrate our desires so that we can help each other instead of trying to bash each other's brains out?

The self-interest story gets very twisty and tangled. Self-interest is still a radical idea, and much opposed to the stories more commonly told. But before we look at it more closely, let's check out the competition. Probably more than any other story, we explain how we act in terms of good and evil.

* Naturally, by who I work with I mean who I see as the folks ready for political change. Can't say the people I serve, since the #1 person I serve is me. I don't want to say it's who I work for, because that too baldly gives the lie to my professional middle-class conceit that I'm basically a free agent, picking and choosing among employers for the interesting projects they might have to offer. Who I work with in the normal sense of the phrase, my professonal colleagues, is other middle class people.