Tibor R. Machan

Because I am always eager to do well for myself–have done this for as long as I can recall, starting with wanting to succeed in school, on the athletic field, in trying to be healthy and fit, and wanting to escape the brutal Soviets when I was only 14–I always pay attention to people who denigrate selfishness. After all, I and most people I know well or even just a bit seem to me to be like me, are concerned to do well for themselves. None of them routinely wastes resources; none makes pointless sacrifices but tends, instead, to aim for good deals; and even those who are dedicated to helping their fellows pick and choose carefully–the reckless ones aren’t receiving much aid, nor the vicious ones, only those who have shown some concern for themselves but have met with obstacles not easy to overcome. In other words, even in being generous and charitable, those who try to do well for themselves tend to receive more than those who are literally unselfish.

So then why are so many who speak up about how we ought to act make a special effort to denigrate self-interested conduct?

One could be cynical and give the answer that of course it is of possible benefit to people to urge others to be generous and charitable and not care for themselves but for others, instead, including those doing the urging. They are, after all, among these others whom they implore that they should look out for. So, then, is it a kind of perverse selfishness that may motivate people who preach unselfishness?

Or there is the less cynical view that many people have a very narrow idea of themselves and all they seem to want to do is fulfill some momentary urges, not really enhance their lives properly. This may well be the view of selfishness that many condemn but it’s a very impoverished idea of the human self that’s involved here. Like the self of a drug addict or gluttonous person. Such people think of themselves as no more than a bundle of raw, irrational desires, never mind what ultimately would contribute to their lives, what would indeed be to their proper self-interest.

Another idea is that the self for many people belongs in this earthly life and what they really want is happiness for eternity–everlasting salvation. But that is actually quite selfish since such folks give up something they see as not very important for something else that they consider all important, their eternal spiritual selves. And it is all a great bargain, if you think about it: you give up joys and pleasures for about 65 years of your earthly life so as to obtain bliss forever. Not a bad deal, me thinks.

Now of course all this championing of selflessness or unselfishness and dissing of selfishness cannot be right. Nearly everyone tries to take decent care of himself or herself first. Then if there is time and stuff left, helping others can also become important. But only if those others are deserving and don’t waste the help, wont squander it. For most even here a bit of pitching in to try to set negligent folks on the straight path will be OK but not if it is futile. Other people, after all, are not unfamiliar to us and their struggles often generate sympathy, even empathy. Up to a point, after which they are digging their own holes of self-defeat. In other words, one can be generous and charitable to a fault! And one shouldn’t be.

Another reason a proper measure of self-regard is to be applauded is that people tend to know much more about what will enhance their own lives, or they at least are in the best position to find out, than do their fellows. So helping people comes down too often to meddling in their affairs, even creating messes for them with all that butting in. Here is where quite apart from whether it is their proper job, politicians and bureaucrats make much more trouble than they and their cheerleaders admit. It is not easy to know what will make someone’s life better, other than in some rare cases which amount to emergencies and very simple help. So urging people to be unselfish amounts, in many instances, to removing the best support they could get in their lives, namely, their own!

The drive to besmirch proper selfishness is a misanthropic one. It shows disdain for people, promotes their sense of ineptitude. So I recommend that everyone follow the motto I have made up as my bumper sticker: “Assert yourself, thoughtfully!”

Tibor R. Machan

Hardly anyone will dispute that most folks who chime in about ethics consider selfishness wrong. There have been exceptions in history and some of the most prominent ethical philosophers, such as Socrates and Aristotle, can even be said to have been ethical egoists or at least ones who championed the moral virtue of prudence as a vital one for living a good human life. But after some significant changes in how human nature began to be understood, being selfish or self-interested–or even prudent–started to be scoffed at, treated as a moral liability, not worthy of praise but of blame.

Of course, even after this, using one’s common sense showed that being selfish is what most of us are, normally, routinely, and quite benignly. When folks awake in the morning they proceed to begin to take good care of themselves before reaching out to help others, for example. (Just as that announcement would have it on air planes, first help yourself and then others in case there’s loss of oxygen.) But apart from such common sense support, selfishness gets little respect (other than perhaps from psychotherapists who usually don’t advise their clients not to care about themselves!).

So while selfishness is widely opposed by such official moralists as priests, ministers, politicians, and pundits, most people will choose to be selfish instead of selfless. And by this they do not intend to be mean toward others, only to put themselves first on the list of their priorities. And in that spirit, even if in opposition to the moralizers, I want to give support to the virtue of prudence or even selfishness (something only Ayn Rand had the courage to affirm in her book by that title). I am not interested here in developing a full blown morality or ethics only to point out that in times of virtually daily disaster stories from all corners of the globe near or far, it is a very good idea to keep being focused on what will benefit one’s life, how one can stay well and happy rather than distressed and frightened.

For one thing, “follow my old recipe”–to quote Socrates in a similar discussion–when it comes to checking out the daily news. Once having gotten through the half hour or hour long newscasts–via TV, radio or some other source–and having perused the newspapers and magazines, all of which have a pretty predictable tendency to be filled with reports of horror and misery, one should spend maybe at least a half hour checking out TV’s best offering, namely, the Travel Channel. I do.

The Travel Channel, you see, reliably reports and depicts only good things happening everywhere. Be it Iceland or Greece, from which only bad news has emanated lately, or California, Louisiana or New York City, when the people from the Travel Channel go there they will unfailingly bring their viewers good news. This would be news of wonderful beaches, great hotels, opportunities for quirky adventure, the best cuisine, outstanding shopping, health and fitness options and similar positive things everyone can use, or at least use to learn about, when the official news reports from every mainstream source give us virtually nothing but heartache.

I have for a long time assumed that the practice of official news outfits of any sort is to try to scare us to death, to make us pay attention by telling us that we are all doomed, no matter what, no matter who one is. The politicians, of course, love this because they can then proceed to offer their magic to have it all fixed for us in a jiffy, never mind that it is mostly lies and more lies.

So there is, as I see it, a severely negative bias in the news. Just consider, as a test, that even if there is a horrible plane crash someplace or a bomb scare, thousands of other places are safe and millions and millions of people get to where they wanted to go without a hitch. But this is never mentioned on “the news,” perhaps understandably. But it does produce major distortions in reports of how the world is doing.

So as a corrective, one needs the discipline and personal initiative to seek out some good news, some antidote to all the reports of crises. A little of this is achieve when one encounters advertisements, of course, since ads also focus on what is good about life, hoping that this will stimulate some interest in the products and services being offered for sale. The bottom line, though, is simple. Make sure that you know of good stuff, that as much as possible you make room for it in your life.

This is my pitch for rational selfishness today, even while I know that it is not the full story. But I recommend that it be a significant portion of it for everyone.

Tibor R. Machan

So Tiger Woods apologized for his “selfish behavior.” Of course, what he did was to dishonor himself, his human self that is, not benefit it at all. Indeed, this allegedly selfish conduct of Mr. Woods has produced a few hours of sensual pleasure at the expense of his very own happiness at home, millions of dollars, a stellar reputation, etc., and so froth. Nothing really selfish about it, if you think it over responsibly.

Dr. Nathaniel Branden, the well known psychologist and reported father of the self-esteem movement in his discipline–he wrote The Psychology of Self-Esteem back in 1969 (Nash Publishing)–wrote a wonderful book in which this stuff about the alleged selfishness of cads like Woods is ably cleared up once and for all. The very apt title of this work is Honoring the Self (Bantam 1985). It discusses extensively and brilliantly just how the concept of the human self became debased in modern intellectual history.

Consider, for example, what the world famous ancient Greek philosopher Socrates told his pupil Crito (in his dialogue Phadeo) about the way his students could best please him–meaning live up to his ethical expectations–namely: “follow my old recipe, my friend: do yourselves concern yourselves with your own true self-interest; then you will oblige me, and mine and yourself too.” The reason Socrates believed that following one’s self-interest is morally proper is that he held a view of the human self that included honorable attributes, traits the development of which would make for someone who is practicing the highest virtues. Human nature, for Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many early thinkers–some of them those detested “dead white males”–amounted to having the potential for excellence, even greatness. While this did include generosity and liberality as praiseworthy ways to be, it was, first and foremost, a matter of being rational, of thinking about one’s life and acting by the guidance of that thinking rather than haphazardly, recklessly. That’s the way to living a successful human life!

It all changed with the very influential English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, not to mention the Italian Niccolo Machiavelli. For these thinkers people were mostly potentially bad, power-seeking, driving by untamed passions like brutal animals in the wilds. Even the influence of Christianity enhanced a lowly view of the human self, what with the stress on original sin, on how once Adam and Eve tasted the apple of the tree of knowledge, they became sinners and we have all inherited their sin and need to be purged of it (e.g., by being baptized).

Then came, a bit later, Sigmund Freud, the notorious father of psychoanalysis for whom deep down we are all driven by a death wish and by other unsavory motives. No wonder the human self acquired a lousy reputation. How could something so constituted act for oneself and exhibit any virtues at all? By such a conception of the human self Tiger Woods and members of the Mafia and all the other vicious people are indeed selfish. They are servicing, after all, something loathsome. This modern idea breads one of the most prominent views in our time, namely, rank misanthrope, hatred for humanity, including oneself.

But is this idea right? Are people by their basic nature evil and loathsome? No. They have to become either good or evil but have no predilection toward either to start with although at first they are mostly innocent, gentle and lovable–just recall most any baby you have met! And if they are taught to acquire pleasant attributes rather than detestable ones, these babies are very likely to grow up pretty nice, if not out and out admirable.

Sadly, the dogma of the mean and nasty human self is widespread. Among other things, it aids and abets those among us who are eager to rule others, who spread the lie that it is only with their intervention that people can be made likable. (Politicians and the clergy love this idea!) In fact, however, Tiger Woods was anything but properly selfish. He caused himself immense harm, as well as those who loved or even just liked him. Shame on him.

Tibor R. Machan

The idea that everyone is always acting selfishly comes from Thomas Hobbes, mostly, though others have voiced it too. For Hobbes we are all moved by passions, such as for power or wealth or such, and this is merely the human version of the way matter behaves in the world. Everything moves forward unless stopped by something. The normal process is to go forward.

This idea was taken over by political economists, including in some measure by Adam Smith. They held that we are all eagerly motivated to gain wealth, to prosper. It is what has come to be known as the profit motive and one learns of it in Economics 101. Also goes by the name “utility maximization,” to drive to increase to as much as possible what one wants or desires.

All of this isn’t really up to us, it’s automatic or instinctual, not something anyone can choose or refuse to do, any more than one’s blood choses to circulate or hair chooses to grow or fall out. Many believe in something like this as they try to make sense of human affairs. It seems former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan did, along with many economists, along with the notion that when this forward movement, this utility maximization process, proceeds undisturbed, the economy would just purr along nicely, correcting itself when veering on some missteps, just as everything else in the biological, zoological, or physiological realms does.

Clearly such a picture of human affairs precludes freedom of choice. Just as many, many natural and social scientists, and a good many philosophers, believe in our day and have believed before. Free will had been and still is mostly something religious people believe, except for some who believe that nature includes some (few) beings with that capacity. (This is my view.) And thus the idea the we are all selfish is really something that starts with very basic assumptions about the world, ones worked out by classical physicists, and is the exported to how people need to be understood.

But is this correct? Well, common sense would dispute it, of course, since millions of human beings quite evidently act contrary to their best interest, quite unselfishly or, rather, self-destructively. People often abuse their bodies, their psyche, undermine their marriages or careers and get into intractable conflicts with their fellows on all fronts which certainly does them no good. Selfish? Quite the contrary, it seems.

So why does this not convince? After all, newspapers, books, magazines, TV broadcasts and many others sources of reports about human life, including the bulk of history, seem to give evidence of how unbelievably self-destructive people are, how they mess up instead of proceeding nicely forward in life. Why then the persistence in the view by so many, especially in the discipline of economics, that everyone is selfish?

Maybe it is because the belief isn’t based on evidence but on a powerful and promising theory that holds out hope that applying it will render everything clear and simple. Reducing all human affairs to appear as if they were just the same as the movements of atoms in space could serve the purpose of helping us explain ourselves more simply than the more involved psychological, moral, political and similar explanations seem to do. And this idea is both very ancient and contemporary–all that exists are atoms or their equivalent–say tiny strings–the rest is merely illusion, sort like those sand objects on the beach that have different shapes but come to nothing more than sand.

Take this small case: I once drove across an intersection and noticed myself speeding up to help those behind me make the green light. Simple but not consistent with the selfishness idea. Why would I care? These people following me were not family, friends, and so forth. But I seemed to have acted generously toward them by speeding up so they wouldn’t get caught by the next red light. I won’t even go into all the help some give to those in dire straits.

Yet the “everybody is always selfish” view makes no sense of this except by some torturous reasoning–”I did it so in the future when I find myself following others, they would move and let me go through, etc., etc. Or I did it to feel good.” But I didn’t. I monitor myself well enough to know. (And if one wants to be skeptical about that, one will have to discount all testimony of witnesses or reports to doctors about one’s pains and aches and memories, etc. It’s too much to give up to save a dubious theory!) Moreover, millions of people show generosity, charity, kindness, considerateness toward others, even if only once they have taken reasonably good care of their own affairs, so the “always” in that idea of Hobbes goes counter to what we know well enough about ourselves and other people.

People have many and different motives for what they do and advancing their own interest is just one among these, even if perhaps it ought to be the main one since, to begin with, otherwise they will risk neglecting something only they can really work on. Still, the notion that everyone is always selfish just doesn’t cut it.

Tibor R. Machan

The beauty of free market capitalism is that it does not require anything more than ruthless self-interest from its most ruthless self-interested citizens. When the system works properly they enrich us all by enriching themselves without giving the matter a great deal of thought. If that is no longer true it is a sign not that they are less moral, but that the invisible link between private gain and the public good has been severed. (Michael Lewis, “Lend the Money and Run,” The New Republic, December 7, 1992)
This observation, made in a review essay of books by Nicholas von Hoffman, Capitalist Fools: Tales of American Business, from Carnegie to Forbes to the Milken Gang [Doubleday, 1992], and James Grant, Money of the Mind: Borrowing and Lending in America from the Civil War to Michael Milken [Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1992], has several questionable assumptions embedded in it. And they are all worthy of some scrutiny. For although some economists who champion the free market embrace some version of the idea Lewis relates, even their use of it does not quite fit Lewis’ characterization.
First, Lewis assumes we all understand what “self-interest” means. But from the time of Plato to ours there has been a serious debate as to whether self-interest means “doing what one wants” “doing what is of concern to one,” or “doing what one actually benefits from (by some objective standard of what benefits a person).” There is nothing remotely “ruthless” about doing the latter, while the former borders on being tautologi¬cal when understood as many economist understand it. But it is the latter sense that critics of the market focus upon, claiming that such selfishness is callous, amoral and can produce high untoward consequences. They then derive from this a moral critique of the free market, forgetting that there are other sense of self-interest that may well escape such criticism and that even in their criticism they fail to acknowledge the most important element of morality to which free markets do homage.
The self-interest thesis critics attribute to economists amounts to the view that people act because they want to act, so invoking it as a characterization of what they do makes little sense unless they smuggle in some objective standard of what benefits oneself. In other words, the self-interest referred to in economic analysis is really what Milton Friedman said it is in his Nobel Prize acceptance address, namely, “The private [i.e., self] interest is whatever it is that drives an individual. (Milton Friedman, “The Line we Dare Not Cross,” Encounter, November 1976, p. 11) By this account, both Michael Milken and Mother Teresa act from self-interest. But what is true is that both have their own motives from which they act. Those motives, however, may be very different and to understand their conduct it is this difference that is most interesting. Knowing that they both want to do what they are doing isn’t going to tell us a lot. Yet that is all that being “self-interested” seems to mean here.
Second, the claim assumes we know what it means for some system of political economy to work properly. But there is a great deal of dispute about that. Does a system work properly if it enhances justice? Or economic prosperity? Or equality of well-being? Or stability? Or peace? Or all of these? Or God’s purposes for us by reference to Scripture, the Torah, or some other good book?
Indeed, those who talk along these lines may well have some hidden idea–even from themselves–of what “works” means, usually, advancing some ideal they hope they share with their readers. But that is just what is mistaken, especially in this age of multiculturalism: There are too many competing social ideals and by some accounts we aren’t even supposed to ask which is better, which has greater validity.
Yet without addressing that issue, there simply is no way to determine what system of political economy works. For example, it needs to be shown that a system that achieves equality of opportunity or aggregate prosperity or the protection of individual rights or spiritual enlight¬enment is to be preferred over ones that achieve some other objective instead. Yet when public discussion ensues concerning what kind of system works, it often seems that these matters are left untouched.
Third the claim assumes that being moral consists of doing things not for oneself but for the public interest, understood in some fashion or another. We find in the remark a necessary schism between private gain and the public good.
Just why are we to assume that this is what it is to be moral? After all, if the public is worth benefiting, why would not private citizens also be worth benefiting? Just because the public is large? But that assumes that mere numbers make something worthy. Yet a lot of scoundrels are worse than one good individual. Indeed, even in simple altruism, whereby benefiting others is good but oneself is at best morally irrelevant, why should this be so? After all, the agent is also a person who has needs and wants and why would serving those needs and wants rate lower than serving the needs and wants of others?
There are probably other assumptions involved here but these are of direct interest to us. The unabashed invocation of the Smithian doctrine, expressed so aptly by Bernard Mandeville, namely, “private vice, public benefits,” is instructive. It shows that we still embrace the conflict between the individual and common good that gave rise to many of our troubles. By this doc¬trine, people can only exonerate themselves morally when doing something that is to their benefit if this is done so that others also benefit. Moreover, even than one isn’t gaining moral credit, only escaping moral blame. For if one does not benefit others while benefiting oneself, one’s action lacks redeeming moral worth. The reason is that the agent is never taken to be worthy of benefit¬ing from his or her actions, only others are. Yet, that makes very little sense–why would other people be worthy of concern but not the agent who acts?
Not only does this view condemn many people in business to lacking in all moral worth–all those, namely, who are not guilty of moral wrongs but possess no positive moral achievement either by virtue of their business successes–but nearly all artists, scientists, educators, athletes, etc., who do what they do because they deem it to be to their own benefit, something they themselves value or find fulfilling. Most great artists do not set out to serve other persons but create their works because they have a vision they want to realize. The greatest scientists do not usually engage in their work because they want to benefit humanity but because they are intrigued by some problem.
The same view of what is moral that condemns people in business to moral irrelevance also condemns nearly everyone who isn’t a martyr or saint. Which is already enough to call it into question.
So instead of such sloppy approach to a vital problem, what needs to be addressed is just what kind of political economic system should human beings establish and maintain.

Tibor R. Machan

Nearly every time Alan Greenspan is written about in the media, his early association with Ayn Rand is remarked upon. The impression is often left that Greenspan holds the same views as Rand did, especially about the ethics of egoism or selfishness.

Some will no doubt remember that Ayn Rand wrote a little book, The Virtue of Selfishness, A New Concept of Egoism, in which she defended the idea that everyone has a moral responsibility to strive to live successfully, to achieve happiness in life. (Not all that different from Aristotle’s eudaimonism.) This does include one’s economic flourishing but is by no means confined to it. And one implication of Randian egoism is that everyone must first discover what would make him or her happy as a human being and then seek to attain that goal.

When economists talk of self-interest—the way Alan Greenspan spoke of it in his testimony on October 23rd to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform—they have something very different in mind. What most mean by self-interest is a supposed inner drive we all have to seek to further what we like, what pleases us, including, of course, our prosperity. From this view they derive many of their conclusions regarding the way people conduct themselves in the market place. So, for example, Greenspan said that “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.” To Representative Henry Waxman’s question of whether his ideology pushed him to flawed thinking that has contributed to the current financial fiasco, Greenspan replied “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”

What exactly is the ideology that Waxman had in mind that supposedly “pushed [Greenspan] to make decisions that you wish you hadn’t made”? It was not made clear either by Waxman, Greenspan, or those who reported the exchange in The New York Times. But it is fairly evident from the context that they had in mind the standard neo-classical economic notion that everyone always, automatically, pursues his or her self-interest which has a substantial economic component to it. And this is supposed to be especially so with Wall Street firms, including “lending institutions.”

In a less unnatural language the idea Greenspan gave voice to means roughly that those who work in the lending industry would be motivated by their professional responsibility to serve their clients properly, not unlike it is expected that doctors, attorneys, psychiatrists or other professionals do. But it is not part of this language that professionals are driven to serve their clients competently, conscientiously. No, outside of the social science of economics it is pretty much understood that professionals can carry on properly, ethically, or fail to do so. Indeed, their self-interest as professionals may well be neglected and they may yield to the temptation to promote other objectives, some of them at times induced by various political pressures and contingencies.

For example, if politicians establish regulations that violate the laws of sound economics, this can promote irresponsible conduct on the part of professionals in lending institutions and throughout the widely integrated market place. And this possibility was not at all touched upon by Greenspan and others at the hearings although it was raised at an earlier time and has received some coverage since.

It is true that the professional interests or objectives of lenders would tend, in the main, to coincide with the best interest of their clients, as this is true in other professional-client relationships (doctors/patients, teachers/students), except when various bureaucratic and political objectives interfere. But when President Clinton and many others in Washington, D.C., insisted that lenders ignore the standards of proper lending because adherence to them would leave out a pretty sizable segment of the voting population from among those who would receive loans to purchase homes, this changed the economic dynamics considerably. It created incentives for both lenders and buyers to act imprudently, rashly, wildly even, and the overall effect of it all came to be the current fiasco just as had been forecast at the time (and reported by, you guessed it, The New York Times—see Stephen A. Holmes’ report on September 30, 1999, for example).

The ideology that Greenspan seems to have embraced is not what Ayn Rand taught. Rand advised that we be prudent, strive for success, including in our economic lives. She didn’t believe, as Greenspan and others seem to have, that people, including “lending institutions,” will necessarily pursue their self-interest. Had market agents followed Rand’s advice, this fiasco would have been avoided. Greenspan himself should have studied Rand more carefully.

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Machan is the author of Ayn Rand (Peter Lang, 2001) and teaches at Chapman University, Orange, CA 92866. He also wrote, among other works, A Primer on Ethics (U. of Oklahoma Press, 1990).