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Jan. 28, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:26
2310 Self Interest and Ostracism
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Hello, hello, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
How you doing?
So today, this evening, yea, verily this very moment in time, I am desirous of chatting with you about self-interest.
Oh, it's a very, very, very interesting, deep and powerful idea.
Rational self-interest is considered to be the foundation of non-collectivist philosophies, the Aristotelian, Lockean, objectivist branch of philosophy, where it is, you know, the individual benefit to yourself that your actions should be bent towards.
And that sphere of benefit to the self should, of course, ideally include others around you, right?
So if you I have a daughter who really wants to play with daddy, and you really want to go and play World of Warcraft.
Hopefully, the happiness of your daughter is going to be included in your sphere of satisfying your own interests, and you will forego the World of Warcraft for the World of Childcraft, or being a parent.
On the other hand, There is the collectivist, platonic, socialist, communist, fascist, Nazi philosophy, which is that you exist to serve the group.
You exist to serve the collective.
You are a worker bee in the endless hive of social madness that is central planning.
Only for the group.
Only for the race.
Only for the class.
Only for the nation.
Only for the collective.
Now, of course, since there are There's no such thing as a collective or a race or a nation that has a voice.
It turns out, in the usual switcheroo, that you are told to obey or serve an abstraction.
That abstraction, yea, verily has no voice, and therefore you end up serving whoever it is who claims to be the voice of that collective.
The Fuhrer in Nazism The government in communism, the government in just about every other thing, whoever is the spokesperson for the race or the nation or whatever, that is who you end up serving, but your natural rebellion against serving a mere individual is diffused and bypassed by the creation of a magical universal deity called the collective.
This is, of course, also true in the realm of religion.
If the priest says, obey me, you'd kind of say, well, why?
But if the priest says, obey God, By the way, God speaks only through me.
Well, that's a different matter, right?
So, in traditional philosophical terms, there is self-interest and the interest of others, which is kind of subsumed in self-interest.
And then there is self-sacrifice, which is the surrender of your interests for the sake of the collective.
So, if a war is declared and there's a draft and you don't want to go to war...
Then self-sacrifice would be to go to war.
Self-interest would be, as hundreds of thousands of American men did in the First World War, to flee the draft or go to Canada in the Vietnam or whatever.
So the good of the collective versus the good of the individual, this has been the traditional dichotomy in the realm of ethics.
And trying to find some balance between these things has been considered to be one of the chief challenges of philosophy.
Now, selfishness as opposed to self-interest is a different matter.
Self-interest is that which is beneficial to the self.
Selfishness is that which is beneficial to the self, regardless of the expense towards others.
And, I mean, Ayn Rand's pretty devastating critique of the critique of selfishness is worth mentioning here.
You know, that which is of benefit to the self is good.
And because that's pretty sociopathic, I don't mean I ran on this argument, but only for the benefit of you doesn't really mean anything.
It doesn't mean anything to say what is to the benefit of you.
I mean, it's something that seems...
People kind of get this, so they have to sort of put in rational self-interest.
You know, what is your rational self-interest?
And so, the phrase of self-interest is really not very helpful.
I think it obscures a lot more than it clarifies.
So, to look at the question of self-interest, of what is beneficial to the self, clearly, if you're a sociopath or just a general nasty, greedy, evil, selfish person, Then you are very interested in that which is beneficial to you, and you really could care less, or you may even enjoy the fact that it is not to the benefit of other people, or is against their interests.
So, if you're a thief, you go steal something from people, of course it's a lot easier than working, and Since we have a lot more action movies about thieves than accountants, we all understand that not only is it a lot easier than working, but it's a lot more exciting.
I mean, there's a real thrill to going to steal something, to trying to get away with it.
There's a giddy excitement and joy and all that kind of good stuff when you have done that, when you're sort of going through it.
So for thrill-seekers who are kind of lazy and all that, I mean, it's to their interest.
So, self-interest is not really very helpful.
And that's why people put rational in front of it.
In other words, well, it's your rational self-interest because in the long run, you know, you won't have any skills, you won't have any stability, or whatever it is, right?
But, of course, this presupposes that you want skills and stability.
I mean, if you're a short-term thinker who's not looking for a long life, die young and leave a good-looking corpse as your philosophy, then, of course, your self-interest is...
To go and pursue these things.
As the great actor Tom Hulse said in a great and underrated movie, I think, called Parenthood, which has a fair amount of wisdom in it.
He's a gambler who has a child named Cool by a Vegas hooker who's vanished.
And he owes some gambling debts and he's kind of roughed up and all that.
And his dad says, don't worry, we'll pay off your debts.
You can get into my business, and Tom Hulse looks at his dad, Jason Robarts, I think, and says, oh, plumbing supplies.
You know, like, he just couldn't imagine anything more horrendous than not having a life of excitement and randomness, but instead getting into the ordering and delivery of plumbing supplies.
It's really, I'm sorry, I'm not spoiling anything, it's a really old movie, but it's well worth watching.
So, what is his self-interest?
Well, it's kind of tough to say.
Your self-interest, is it when you're 20, is your self-interest to get a really good education?
Tough to say.
Certainly not.
If you're not too bright, no, it's not in particular good to try and get a good education.
It's going to be a huge waste.
Right?
I think there's only a third of people who start college actually end up getting their degree because the standards have been lowered so much because of artificially cheap student loans and subsidies and all that.
So, is it in your interest to...
Go and get a good education?
Well, no.
Is it in your interest to go and get a good education if you're 20 and you've been diagnosed with a terminal disease that only gives you a couple of months or a year or two to live?
Well, no.
It's really not.
Is it in your interest to go back and get to get a good education if you're 90 and you're looking at trying to get a PhD which will take you 10 to 15 years?
Well, not really.
So, is it in your best interest to procrastinate?
Well, yeah, sometimes.
Sometimes it is.
Because procrastination pays off.
Hard work might pay off later, as the saying goes, but procrastination always pays off now.
Is it to your benefit to learn Sobo-Croatian as a language or Mandarin?
Well, yeah, I guess it could be, but at what cost, right?
So, I think the whole point of Of anarchism, of voluntarism, of a stateless society is the practical and frank reality that it's really hard to tell other people what is in their self-interest, what is beneficial to them.
I mean, I would argue that it's frankly pretty much impossible.
This is why I resolutely refuse to tell people what to do, as if that would mean anything, to tell people what to do.
In my show, hopefully I can provide a framework that might help them in making decisions about what to do, but You know, there's no point whatsoever trying to tell people what to do.
That assumes an arrogance of knowledge and an omniscience about the future and experience with all the variables that simply doesn't exist.
Should someone lose weight?
It's really hard to say.
It's really hard to say.
I don't know.
I guess if they're 15 and so on, then there's obviously some real benefits to losing weight.
But there will also be enormous costs to losing weight.
You know, is it 90% of people who try a diet end up gaining more weight back and end up unhealthier?
And I don't think it's because dieting is so hard.
I think it's because people's relationships tend to be...
For some people, their relationships tend not to be very pro-happiness, pro-growth, right?
I mean, if you're in a fat family and you lose weight, odds are that there's going to be a lot of subtle...
Urgings and sabotaging and undermining to gain the weight back and all that, right?
If you're in a community that is completely committed to you losing the weight and it's going to be 150% and make sure that there's no fatty snacks in the house and make sure that the food is always healthy and talk to you about the issues, then of course you're going to lose weight and almost certainly keep it off.
But if you're trying to deviate from a dysfunctional history, then most likely the people who have that dysfunction, unless they have a good degree of self-knowledge, are just going to Unconsciously, or maybe even consciously, undermine what it is that you're trying to do.
So, is it in someone's best interest?
Is it to their self-interest to lose weight?
Hard to say.
It's uncomfortable, causes a lot of social friction.
You might end up changing your friends, may challenge your family history, and odds are you're going to gain it all or more back.
Hard to say.
Is it to your benefit to quit smoking?
Hard to say.
You know, George Burns lived to be 100 as a smoker.
Should he have quit when he was 99?
Probably not.
Wouldn't make any difference in particular.
It would just deprive him of a pleasure without granting any potential health benefits.
It's not going to live long enough for his lungs to clear.
Hard to say.
All other things being equal, sure, lose weight, quit smoking, don't sleep around, whatever.
All other things being equal, but, of course, all other things never are equal, right?
They're never, ever equal.
So it's really hard.
I mean, I do think that people should suffer, so to speak, the costs and benefits of their own health decisions.
I mean, for the thousands of hours I've spent...
Sweating, working out, grinding my way through aerobics classes, dance classes, pushing weight, moving heavy iron in a dark room.
You know, I should hopefully gain the benefits of the better health and energy and strength that I have.
And I do, of course.
I mean, in the socialist healthcare system, that means that I have fewer sick days, pay more, and receive the same, if not worse, benefits.
I mean, I receive worse benefits because other people are sick, because they're clogging up all the machines that Lord help me, I might one day need.
So in a free society, you will accrue the costs and benefits of your own decisions, but I can't tell someone else for sure that it is going to be beneficial for them to lose weight.
I don't know.
They might diet pretty hard for a miserable month and then get hit by a bus.
In which case, well, you just spent your last month hungry and cranky and sleeping badly and all that.
So, I cannot say for sure that someone should lose weight.
That they should go on a diet.
I can't.
I don't know.
You know, maybe they have a lot of LSD stored in their fat cells and they'll have a really bad trip in the middle of a business meeting, lose their job, end up home.
I don't know.
You don't know.
Really, really hard to say.
In fact, kind of impossible.
So, self-interest is something that is kind of meaningless.
There are costs and benefits and we weigh the chances, the opportunities, the maybes and all that.
And, you know, I think that there are generally some decisions that all other things being equal are likely to end up Better than others?
Yeah, yeah, okay, fine, but so what?
Self-interest just doesn't really matter.
It's not a useful thing to talk about.
The other thing, too, is that self-interest creates a false unity, right?
So, collective good is a false unity, right?
Because there is no such thing as collective good.
Good is something that is a potential attribute of the individual, but if you're aware of the wonderfully nuanced word Ambivalence, right, which means you have strong feelings, pro and con, or multiple feelings about a particular thought, idea, proposition, happenstance or whatever, then even within an individual, how is it possible to say, this is to the interest of myself, right?
I mean, if you are overweight, then obviously you ended up overweight for a variety of reasons.
Those reasons still exist.
If you lose weight, it's going to be very confrontational physically, emotionally, Obviously, psychologically and so on.
So, part of you wants to lose weight and part of you doesn't want to lose weight when it comes to dealing with personal issues.
Tens of thousands of dollars and years and years in therapy.
And if, you know, that was really painful, really difficult.
All the time that I've spent exercising, unpleasant, painful.
I've ended up with injuries sometimes, which are difficult and painful.
And so, is it to my benefit to have these?
I don't know.
So far, it's paid off pretty well.
Good, yeah.
But there was no guarantee of any of that.
And so, it's really hard to say whether...
It's a good idea or not a good idea to gain or lose weight.
Even with an individual, what does self-interest mean?
What does self-interest mean?
Well, obviously, you know, there's things that you want that are going to require short-term sacrifices, you know, like lost income, going to school, and all that kind of stuff.
And so, part of you wants to go out and get a job and make money now, and part of you wants to get a good education, maybe, if that's in your interest, and defer all of that.
You see an attractive woman, you're already in a relationship, part of you wants to go have sex with the new woman or man, and part of you wants to not, and hopefully it's a small part of you that wants to go, not the only one that thinks and is the defining right for bad decisions.
So, what is your self-interest if you're in a relationship and attracted to someone else?
Well, it's multiple.
It's dual.
So, even within an individual, there's pros and cons to just about everything.
So, what does self-interest mean?
There is no unity within the self.
The self is an ecosystem, right?
As I call it, an ecosystem that I am a competition of balancing interests.
What is the self-interest of a forest?
Well, it's a balance, right?
I mean, there's no self-interest because the forest contains denizens that win and lose based on each other.
If the part of you that wants to die it wins, the part of you that doesn't want to die it loses.
Vice versa.
It's a win-lose within the self.
So what does self-interest mean?
I just don't know that the term has any utility whatsoever.
So, you know, self-interest is, I don't think, a particularly valuable or viable thing to say.
Because it indicates a unity where there is no unity.
There's short-term interest, medium-term interest, long-term interest.
There's various interests in various different phases in life.
If you are a young single person and you want to date, it is your interest to go to a bar and try and meet people or find some club and try and meet people.
If you're dating, it's not.
If you're married, it's really not.
If it is appropriate to have fantasy play with your children when they're four, I just I spent, like, two hours today pretending to rescue kittens from Smorg, the kitten-stealing dragon with my daughter.
But if you do that without a child around, it's really not the height of mental health.
So...
I don't know.
I don't know what self-interest really means.
To me, it's just another one of these words like rights that almost creates more problems than it pretends to solve.
So...
I think where it comes from is the desperate need to sell virtue.
And that's a big problem for philosophers, for moralists.
How the hell do you sell virtue?
It's a toughie.
It's a toughie.
Virtue is one of these things that It's not particularly in your self-interest in a corrupt society.
Virtue is something that the more who practice it, the more beneficial it is.
Conversely, of course, the fewer who practice it, the less beneficial it is.
So this is a big problem.
How do you sell virtue in a corrupt society?
How do you sell being anti-slavery in a society where literally one person in 10,000 rejects slavery?
How do you sell being anti-state in a society where not one person in 10,000 can even imagine, let alone morally approve of a society without a state at its center?
How do you do it?
It's really tough.
It's really tough.
So, how do you sell morality?
How do you sell being good?
It's a tough question.
I mean, there have been a bunch of answers that have been given as to why should you be good.
So, I mean, obviously there's go to heaven, go to hell, that nonsense.
And again, I'm not trying to make the case as to whether something is or isn't good.
It's just how is the goodness sold in any particular context.
Well, it's sold via punishment and rewards.
And self-interest...
Rational self-interest, whatever you want to call it.
That's just a secular version of heaven and hell, right?
So, you know, you'll be unhappy if you're immoral.
Your conscience will get you.
Jiminy Cricket will fly up your nose and make you sneeze evil for the rest of your life.
Well, I guess that's an argument.
I think it's a good argument because there are many people who are very happy to be bad.
You know, it makes them happy.
I mean, people who, like Obama, I mean, drone strikes, indefinite detention, NDAA, I mean, all this nonsense, right?
He really wants a second term.
These people, you know, they hang around politics.
They love it.
Bill Clinton, he's like herpes.
You can't get rid of him.
So there's lots of people who did some pretty seriously bad stuff all around.
And they want more.
You know, power is a drug.
Power, as Kissinger memorably said, is an aphrodisiac.
Power thrills.
Power commands.
Power gathers resources.
It's like, it's like humor.
I mean, Woody Allen, you know, is 98 pounds of strangely triangular, bushy-haired, can't-see neuroses, and has had access to the most beautiful women, some of the most beautiful women in the world, because of course he's funny and creative and all that, right?
That which is excellent for reproductive success Singing, public speaking, martial skill, coldness, the capacity to have so little empathy that you will rape out of pleasure.
These, tragically, are...
It's hard to say tragically, I mean, it just is what it is, right?
But these are conducive to reproductive success and eloquence, because you can gain a lot of resources with the thieving snares of language.
Eloquence is something that is bred for success.
It's selected for success in the reproductive sphere.
Brutality, eloquence, backstabbing, political power, intrigue, and all of this, and outright murder and rape, these things are selected for success.
So, it's kind of hard to say, well, What you should do, you see, is not do any bad things because it will make you feel bad.
Well, if a lot of the things that made you feel bad, sort of quote, made you feel bad, were in fact advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint, selected the genes, selected the genes for brutality, the genes...
I'm using the word...
I'm a big one for nurture over nature, but...
If you'll forgive me, the potentiality for the adaptation of the genes to a brutal environment responding to brutality in the pseudo-epigenetics phenomenon, right?
So, forgive my shorthand.
I hope this makes sense.
Just a mouthful every single time.
So, if there was evolutionarily advantageous behavior that was immoral, And because it was immoral, it would make people feel bad, then that would really tilt the scale in favor of those who didn't feel bad for these things, right?
So rape is obviously immoral, and if rape made everyone feel really bad, but one guy was born who didn't feel bad raping, in fact really liked it, then his genes would...
In a war-like environment, of course, he would try and provoke war because of that, then his genes would then spread, right?
I mean, a fair amount of human society and human structure is all around provoking the conditions for your genes to flourish, right?
So if your genes are war-like and all that, then you will try to provoke situations in which your Genes will flourish, right?
So, if you are a sort of rape-based survival, like rape-based strategist for your genetic reproduction, then you will try to provoke situations in which rape is going to be more commonplace, you know, like war and so on.
So, I don't see how just evolutionary biology could possibly coincide with...
The good and evil of a good conscience and a bad conscience.
Because not having a conscience is, under certain conditions, far more valuable evolutionarily than having a conscience.
If you're in a situation of war and chaos and famine and so on, then not having empathy, imposing your will, taking by force, raping, pillaging, murdering, you name it, I would imagine is going to be significantly advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint.
And nature doesn't tend to make things that are evolutionarily advantageous feel bad.
Because nature wants to encourage these things in you if they are advantageous for your genes.
Then nature wants you to do more of that stuff, so it's not going to make you feel bad.
And this is why there is a savage joy in battle.
And hunting, and war, and even in rape, and so on.
I mean, there's a savage joy in it.
And not to put too much weight on the men, because of course it's impossible for...
I mean, outside of rape, it's impossible for these genes to be transmitted without women choosing these men.
In a time of aggression, Which is more than just war.
I mean, we live in a time of significant aggression at the moment, even though it's not direct warfare, right?
I mean, the feeding frenzy of resource consumption that characterizes a late-stage, intraspecies, self-predatory democracy is clearly quite aggressive, but it's not directly violent.
It's sort of cat burglar violent, so to speak, in that it steals mostly from the unborn and the disenfranchised.
So, to get resources in a public sector union, you have to steal and all of that, but it's all very abstract and there's no direct mugging.
You just get these benefits that are going to be paid off in 20 years when you retire, or 10 years.
And it's going to be mostly paid for through inflation of the money supply, debt or increased taxes and so on.
So there is aggression, but because there is compliance and acceptance, there's not outright violence.
That's sort of important to understand as well.
So in a situation where aggression rather than trade is the dominant form of interaction, and it is Increasingly the dominant form of interaction in the West, to the point where you could really argue that more than half of the transactions are aggressive rather than trade-based, rather than voluntary.
I mean, taxes, debt, regulations, and all of that, I mean, there's a huge amount of, even if you count IP and patents and all that, copyright, a huge amount of aggression.
In modern interactions, economic interactions, then women are going to be drawn to power rather than virtue.
If you're in a trade-based society, then women in general will be drawn more to virtue rather than to aggression.
Because aggression in a trade-based society is punished through ostracism and Tragically, a trade in an aggressive-based society is punished through theft or through taxation and through control.
So women, of course, are primed to choose their mates from those who have the greatest success reproductively, reproductive chances of success.
And I'm talking very generally, of course, right?
I'd say broadly, but the jokes are too obvious.
And so in a society of aggression, Then women are drawn more towards sociopathic tendencies.
In a society of trade, women are drawn more towards the traditional virtues of honor, integrity, and so on.
Truthfulness.
These things are all beneficial.
In a trade-based society, they are negatives over time in an aggression-based society.
And this tends to escalate over time, because if women are selecting for aggression, in other words, if women are selecting for a lack of empathy, then the children are more likely to be unempathetic.
And as they grow up, then they will select for less empathy.
So empathy tends to get quite quickly bred out of the General population.
It lies dormant and so on, latent, so to speak, waiting for conditions to change when it will re-emerge.
Which is one of the reasons I say ostracize evil.
Otherwise it's going to breed and spread and grow.
In a trade-based society, aggression doesn't do you any good because interactions are voluntary.
So you can't make anyone do anything.
You can only entice them.
So, I mean, that'd be some petty fraud, I'm sure.
But for the most part, aggression would be selected out of the sexual pool, right?
A guy who yelled at customers would get fired.
A waiter who snorted at people would get fired.
A salesman who was passive-aggressive wouldn't make any sales.
Somebody who lied, who cheated, they would get fired.
And so women's very subtle tuning fork which says, given the current society, which type of male It has the best chance of success.
That subtle tuning fork that runs the loiny juicing machine Well, that is going to be tuned in a peaceful society to those who have honor, integrity, virtue, and so on, because they're going to self-select as those who have the greatest chance of accumulating resources and relationships and so on.
But that's because the relationships are voluntary.
And in order to, in general, woo people into interacting with you repetitively in a voluntary society, you must appeal to their greed.
Dare I say self-interest, I guess I dare.
But you have to...
It has to be win-win.
And so win-win requires empathy.
Win-win requires...
Integrity, honor, decency, compassion, right?
I mean, the idea that if you know someone who's going to do business with you again, or you want them to do business with you again, then overcharging them is not a good idea, right?
Whereas if it's someone you're never going to do business again, overcharging with them is...
Not such a great idea, because if they find out about it, then they won't do business with you again.
They'll tell other people, oh, this guy overcharged me and didn't even tell me, or whatever.
But if they're just passing through, who cares, right?
And so, a voluntary society changes the gene pool.
This is really my argument.
It changes...
And by gene pool, again, I don't mean the stuff you're born with, I mean, because that's all just...
Not most of its potentiality when it comes to personality.
But it changes the gene pool because the epigenetics come into play.
Women select...
So if you go from an aggressive to a voluntary society, a violence to a voluntary society, coercive to negotiating society, a status to an anarchist society...
Then aggressive, dominant, typical silverback alpha male jerkozoids will not be appealing to women because they'll go, okay, well, this guy got fired like five times last year.
He obviously can't hold down a job.
Nobody likes him.
He's got no friends.
His family doesn't want to have anything to do with him.
So she looks at that and says, okay, well, he's not going to be able to get me enough resources to raise kids, and there's not enough of a community there.
To help me raise my children.
So, that's bad.
So, you know, she might have a fling with him, but she's going to make sure that diaphragm is, you know, snugger than a used modeling paint bottle.
I say that as reference to Izzy and I have been building model airplanes.
Could not open that paint jar today.
And so, what we want, of course, is for women to be attracted to virtue.
But in order to have that, it's a catch-22, right?
Women will be attracted to virtue when there's a peaceful society.
But because we're in an increasingly aggressive society, women are decreasingly attracted to virtue and more increasingly attracted to aggression.
Now, the only thing that's made this even possible to turn around is the fact that the greatest predation that is possible is possible through morality.
Through convincing people that something is virtuous, you can steal from them the most, right?
And so, because aggression has found its greatest weapon in morality, all aggressive people have adapted themselves to make moral claims, which means universal claims, which means philosophy.
And so, it's like Soren's Ring, right?
I mean, they have poured...
So much of their energy into this ring of power called morality that if they gain hold of that, they can rule the world and so on.
But if that ring is destroyed, they are destroyed with it.
The level of predation possible through convincing people that evil is good and good is evil is staggering.
It's infinitely larger almost than you could get any other way.
So all evil people have poured their resources into...
Promoting the value of philosophy while corrupting philosophy for their own ends.
Promoting virtue while corrupting virtue for their own ends.
Which is why the army is all about honor, code, dignity, and virtue.
Because that's how you really get people to obey you.
That's why Hitler made the soldiers swear an oath to him.
He turned it into a moral thing.
And so, if we are willing to actually take back philosophy, which is the most peaceful and powerful and permanent revolution that is possible, everyone thinks a revolution is about, I don't know, taking up arms and nonsense like that.
Well, that's ridiculous.
We don't need to.
But most people would rather choose to be dead than have integrity.
I mean, the draft shows that, right?
And the lack of willingness to ostracize In the libertarian community, it also shows that I would rather suffer catastrophic losses of freedoms and incomes rather than act with integrity according to the values that are proclaimed.
I mean, this is tragic, but it's an empirical fact that anybody who looks at things clearly has to accept.
So, the job of turning things around is going to be that of philosophers, that of people acting with integrity.
And to promote ethics, to promote UPB, to accept the universalization that is the essence of the power of ethics, and then to simply expand and extend that to not even its logical conclusion, but to the conclusion that is claimed already, which is that the propositions are ethical because they're universal.
Thou shalt not steal.
Oh, that means no taxation.
The most peaceful revolution is integrity, is accepting as universal that which is claimed to be universal.
That is, the most peaceful revolution is the only one that will fundamentally change anything.
And it's the hardest, of course, because it requires changing behavior and standing up to Immorality before catastrophe.
Once there's a catastrophe, rats will fight when cornered.
Once there's a catastrophe, which is almost always when it's too late, people will then start to act.
But beforehand, people will just bide their time and hope something happens, hope some miracle will occur and won't change their behavior, thus ensuring that they will end up cornered and will end up losing.
So, the idea of self-interest, I don't know, it's just hugely problematic.
Because what self is supposed to be interested?
Is it the genetic self, which wants to reproduce amorally, immorally if necessary?
Is it the conscience, which is overdeveloped in some people, leading to neurosis and paralysis, underdeveloped or non-existent in others, leading to Narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy.
No.
This is too much of a spectrum.
The sensitive are often preyed upon by the soulless.
And so, it's like saying the self-interest of a hungry lion and a gazelle.
Well...
Which is it?
There is no such thing as a self within the individual because we are so full of conflicting and shifting preferences, needs, rewards, punishments, you know, procrastinations, and so on, right?
Procrastination is sometimes a fantastic idea.
There are things that I've put off that turned out to no longer be necessary.
Oh, magnificent!
Sometimes, if you do wait, the problem does go away.
Oh, I need to see the doctor.
I'll wait a day or two.
Hey, look, I'm better.
Whatever, right?
So, even within an individual, there's no such thing as self-interest, which can be defined in any objective sense.
There's a wide variety of selves, of alter egos, all of which are making calculations in the short, medium, and long term.
There are things which benefit yourself at the cost of your relationships, like if you're in bad relationships, then improving is going to benefit yourself, but it's going to be at the expense of those relationships.
There are things that are to the Expense, to the benefit of those relationships, at the expense of yourself, right?
So, conforming to things that you find distasteful simply for the sake of making peace in your community or your family.
So, and all of these things are very complex things to decide upon.
You know, Ayn Rand's hero characters, notwithstanding, we are not made of stone and neither do we all, you know, neither are we all born without families.
You know, Ayn Rand's characters are like the ultimate defu because they never have any family.
Howard Rock's got no family.
John Galt has no family and so on.
Anyway, so, and the villains too often.
But we can't talk about self-interest even within an individual.
There's too much complexity, too much changes.
Can we talk about self-interest in a community?
Well, of course not.
Because human beings prey on each other.
We have predators, we have prey, we have the bystanders, we have the enablers, right?
The bullies prey upon the weak, and the majority of people look aside.
And some enable the bullies by provoking them, and some will make mild shows of resistance to satisfy their own conscience, but not with the goal of escalating until the bullies are ejected or evicted.
Of course not, right?
Libertarianism has lots of bullies in the movement, and...
I mean, who does anything about it?
Not many people, to say the least.
So, you can't talk about self-interest in any universal sense.
Again, it's like talking about the self-interest of crocodiles in a river and the self-interest of the zebras crossing the river as if they are the same thing.
Right?
Well, no.
It's to the genetic, quote, rational self-interest of the crocodiles to eat the Zebras, so zebras, it's the interest of the zebras to not be eaten.
There is no commonality of their self-interest, and there's no commonality in the interest between the state and the citizens, and there's no commonality of interest between a farmer and his livestock, but I repeat myself, there's no commonality of interest between predator and prey, and so self-interest is a term that is just so out of place.
I mean, you can say something, you know, like in biological terms, you could say something as loosey and goosey as it is to the self-interest of each organism that its genes reproduce as effectively and efficiently as possible.
I mean, all that's so useless, right?
That has nothing to do with morality.
You could say of people it is to their self-interest to gather as many resources for as long a period of time as they can.
That doesn't have anything to do with morality.
I mean, if you steal and keep a A car, then you have added to your resources for a long period of time and at minimal cost.
As soon as you start talking about self-interest, you have to reduce it to a base biological standard that is common to all creatures and therefore has nothing to do with ethics or claims of virtue or anything like that.
But the moment you start to try to tie self-interest into virtue, you have a huge problem.
In fact, it's not a huge problem.
It's an impossibility.
There's too many conflicts with individuals, too many conflicts within society.
Self-interest doesn't mean anything.
And self-interest in a society that doesn't practice ostracism is entirely different from self-interest in a society that does practice ostracism.
So let's finish up this chat, and thanks for your patience.
Let's finish up this chat with...
The question of ostracism.
People freak out a little bit about ostracism like it's some weirdly foreign thing.
But ostracism, which is simply the act of nothing.
It's the act of not doing anything.
It's the action of inaction.
That's all ostracism is.
First thing to understand is that ostracism, which is obviously not interacting with someone, ostracism is almost without exception the universal attitude of mankind.
Like, we think ostracism is shunning someone actively, like, driving in front of their house and honking their horn till they're looking and then sticking your nose in the air or shouting into a youthful karaoke microphone, I'll be back for you later.
And it's not.
Ostracism is not interacting with someone.
And it is almost the universal attitude of mankind.
I ostracize all other women as sexual partners.
I don't care if you olive oil-soaked hussies continue to throw yourselves at me.
I am loyal to my wife.
So I'm ostracizing all other women.
I bought a coffee today.
I am therefore ostracizing every other human being who could have sold me anything for that dollar.
$1.50.
You see, ostracism is almost, almost universal.
You know, when you're having sex with someone, Generally, you're not having sex with anyone else in the known universe.
When you're sleeping, you're not chatting with anyone in the known universe.
If you take a job, you are rejecting every other job that you can possibly take until you quit.
By listening to this, you are ostracizing every other form of media known to mankind.
God bless you.
I mean, with the exception of the fellow who likes to play Civilization V with the music turned off and my voice yarrming in his ear.
Hope it helps!
I really do.
So, ostracism is the natural state of mankind.
Inertia.
Not interacting with someone.
In a sense, refusing to interact with someone.
When I turn in to go to sleep, I am ostracizing everyone on Skype.
I am not, like, people can ping me and I'm just going to ignore them.
I am ostracizing everyone.
And one of the great things about ostracism is that it can only be interrupted with the perception of a win-win negotiation.
And I'm just going to say with a win-win negotiation because, I mean, forget bias, remorse, and again, just please understand that that's sort of what I mean.
Yes, it could change after the fact, but you have to believe that it's a win-win negotiation in order to change your behavior.
So, in a voluntary relationship, in a voluntary society, the endless and almost universal ostracism of every single human being's every waking moment...
You know, if I'm eating a muffin, I'm automatically ostracizing every other piece of food and every other activity I could be doing at the moment.
I don't understand.
I'm shunning them.
And so, to interrupt ostracism...
You have to perceive a win-win negotiation, right?
So, I think about a little over a year ago, our TV started showing funny colors.
And so, we decided to cease our ostracism of television manufacturers and to go and we bought a TV. And we broke our ostracism.
We didn't buy anything else with the money we could have bought from that TV because we're not the government can't print randomly at will.
And so we really did cease our ostracism and now we have resumed our ostracism and hopefully will continue resuming our ostracism of all television manufacturers for another 10 or 15 years.
And so, if I was forced to buy a TV every year, that's different, right?
So, there was a government mandate that said, you know, we're going to tax you and we're going to send you a TV every year.
I mean, in other words, if you were kind of in a situation of TVs as the British people are in the situation of TV licensing, right, to pay, then that would be a very different situation.
Because nobody would have to woo you to break ostracism because you would be forced to break ostracism by having things imposed upon you.
But if you think about sort of having a date, well, you're sort of, you know, sitting at home and whatever.
You're obviously comfortable and it's what you want to be doing because you're not doing something else, right?
Whatever you want to be doing is what you're doing because by definition you're doing it.
You may want to be doing something different but not enough to change what you're doing.
So, if you're sitting watching Oprah and eating Cheezys off your chest, you may say, well, I really want to be working out, but empiricism trumps theory, and therefore what you really want to be doing is eating Oprah while brushing and eating Cheezys off your chest.
So, if you want to break ostracism in a free society, if you want someone to, and this is, you know, well understood by anyone who's tried to sell something to anyone, You have to provide them something that's very appealing.
You have to work towards a win-win, which means you have to have some empathy.
You have to have some forethought.
You have to create or design or get involved with products that people want in a manner and form and content and price that is appealing and possible for them to achieve or get.
And so you have to have a lot of virtues, and particularly if it's an expensive item or an item which they can return, then you want to have...
The possibility of, in fact, you really want to have the actuality that they're going to be happy with their purchase, right?
You understand?
I mean, if you want the woman to come back on a second date with you, then you kind of got to hide the crazy.
You can hide it for a long time, trust me, 11 years.
But you kind of got to hide the crazy.
You've got to be nice, respectful, warm, gentlemanly, or whatever, right?
I mean, unless you're in a violent society, in which case, I don't know what you do, because I've never dated like that.
So, to break ostracism requires stimulating someone's desires, providing them a practical means to satisfy those desires...
You know, giving them access to credit to buy the car or whatever it is, the house.
So it requires integrity, you know, in its ideal form, and of course, that is promoted in the long run in a free society.
But to break ostracism requires that you really focus on win-win negotiations in the long term.
And that brings with it a whole host of very necessary and important psychological and emotional and moral skills.
I mean, good salespeople, they're not bullies.
They're not manipulators.
They genuinely try and find out what people want and genuinely try and find a way to have those people profitably achieve those desires.
You know, for an investment of $50,000, you can produce $150,000 more widgets a year.
I mean, you really are focusing on win-win as a salesman, saleswoman.
So, in a voluntary society, the virtues are promoted because it takes a lot of work to break the unnatural ostracism and almost universal ostracism of inertia and prior decisions.
So, I mean, every now and then, in fact, it seems like every day or two, I have some damn problem with my computer.
And I've heard that Macs are problem-free, so I'm leaning that way.
I mean, to really look into getting a Mac, which seems to be a lot less problematic than a Windows box.
A lot of the programs I need are available over there, too, so I would really like to give it a shot.
And...
So I have a lot of inertia, right?
And a lot of, you know, it'll be a learning curve and I have to buy more software that I already have licenses for and all that.
But in terms of, you know, just having stuff that works, yay!
Let's do it.
But there's a lot of inertia and a lot of investment in prior decisions.
And so to break that inertia, you really have to offer something...
Really good.
So it takes a lot of creativity, a lot of compassion, a lot of curiosity, a lot of market research, a lot of asking people, of course, the best way to get what they want, figure out what they want in the first place, and so on.
All of that is promoted in a free society and rewarded in a free society.
In a state of society where you use coercion as one of the most fundamental of social tools, ostracism doesn't count.
You can't ostracize the IRS. You can't ostracize your property taxes.
Otherwise, you'll end up ostracizing everyone from a jail cell.
So, ostracism is a really, really important thing.
It's not weird, it's not alien, it's not monstrous.
A divorce is ostracism.
I mean, that's not weird, that's depressingly common.
You know, friendships that you drift away from.
It doesn't have to be a big dramatic, I have no daughter, storm out of the house, and some cheesy fiddler on the roof scenario, but It is the most common human non-relationship, right?
It's like a lack of proximity is the most common aspect of an atom, right?
It's not proximate to everything else that it's not proximate to.
So I hope that this helps sort of understand both why ostracism is not to be feared, since it's almost a universal, and also...
How the automatic ostracism of voluntarism promotes the virtues which we really do want to have in society.
So, thank you so much for your time and attention as always, my friends.
I really appreciate having the opportunity to discuss these thoughts with you.
Look forward to your feedback.
Donations!
Oh, donations.
Always welcome at freedomainradio.com.
Thank you.
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