SELFISHNESS

by Howard S. Katz
11-17-08

“Ever since I arrived at manhood and acquainted myself with the general history of mankind, I have felt a sincere passion for liberty. The history of nations, doomed to perpetual slavery, in consequence of yielding up to tyrants their natural-born liberties, I read with a sort of philosophical horror.”

Ethan Allen (leader of the Green Mountain Boys
and founder of the state of Vermont), as quoted in
Builders of New England, by Shirley Barker,
(New York, Dodd, Mead, 1965), p. 158.

I agree with Ethan Allen. Those nations which have liberty pretty much have it all. Those nations which do not have liberty live below the level of animals. The automobile was given to us by liberty. So was the computer, the books we have to read, the medicines we take when we are sick. Liberty gave us the courts of law so that we can resolve our disputes by reason instead of violence. It gave us an army so powerful that no enemy has landed on our shores since 1814. So why does everyone not recognize the great virtue of liberty?

A good part of my life was taken up with three cities, Providence, R.I., where I was born and raised, Boston, MA, where I went to college, and Plymouth, MA, where I lived for 15 years. The 3 cities form sort of an equilateral triangle and are only 40 miles apart. These three cities played important roles in the early history of America, having been founded by the very earliest settlers. I have often traveled among them. And yet, in the days of the first settlers it was impossible to go from Plymouth to Providence or Boston (or any combination thereof). The difficulty was not the lack of roads or the lack of automobiles. Those difficulties would eventually be supplied. The difficulty was that Providence was in the land of the Narragansetts. Boston was in the land of the Massachusetts. And Plymouth was in the land of the Wampanoag. To travel through the territory of any one of these tribes you had to be their friend. Otherwise they would grab you, tie each of your legs to a strong, young birch tree which had been bent over, cut the ropes holding the trees down and let them fly apart leaving half of your body attached to each tree.

The problem was that to be a friend of the Wampanoag automatically made you an enemy of the Narragansetts and the Massachusetts. If you could travel safely through Wampanoag territory, you were a birch tree decoration in the territory of the other two tribes. This was not because the various Indian tribes hated the white man. They actually liked the white man. They hated each other. If you were a friend of an enemy tribe, you were an enemy.

Today we get on an airplane and for the value of a week’s wages fly 3,000 miles from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast in comfort and with pleasant stewardesses to attend to our needs. The Indians on the Atlantic coast did not know that there was a Pacific coast (and vice versa). The difference is freedom.

From my earliest political thinking, I agreed with Ethan Allen. With freedom, we get to have a cornucopia of good things in life. Without freedom, we human beings fall below the level of animals. That is the lesson that history teaches, again and again and again.

Then, why do people take freedom so lightly? Why are they so willing to give it up? The answer has to do with the concept of selfishness.

What is the first thing that anyone thinks of when freedom is mentioned? “Hey, if I have freedom, I can do what I want.” In this case, what is not to like? What is the argument against freedom?

The argument is that freedom is selfish. The argument is precisely, “If you are free, you can do what you want.” The enemies of freedom conjure up a world in which people are running around foaming at the mouth and committing all sorts of atrocities against each other. A simple example would be the phrase “cutthroat competition” (used as an argument against freedom of enterprise). Have you ever seen one businessman cut another’s throat? No, but we have seen many communists cut each other’s throat. Stalin cut Trotsky’s throat. John D. Rockefeller, on the other hand, cut the price of kerosene. Henry Ford cut the price of automobiles.

Adam Smith’s defense of economic freedom is based on an incredibly important idea, an idea which none of his critics have understood. Smith saw the essential harmony of men’s interests.

Now short term, there can be many conflicts of interest. The crowds at the mall slow you down and make your shopping trip more difficult. You go to a job interview, and there are 10 other guys all trying to get that same job. First, you need to take a long view. If there were no crowds, the mall shops would go out of business, and there would be no mall. You couldn’t shop at all. It is in your long range interest to have those other people in the crowd doing their thing. If there were not an ample labor market in the community, the employer would not have located there. Those other fellows competing with you for the job are making the job possible. It was considerations such as these which led Adam Smith to conclude that, although interests appear to conflict in the short run, in the long run there is a harmony, and other human beings make your life better and help you to achieve your goals. No one in our society envies a hermit.

Second, you need a certain type of society. In a hunting and gathering society, there is always a shortage of food. There is a lake in Massachusetts famous for being the longest word in the English language. Its Indian name means: You fish on your side; we’ll fish on our side; and nobody fish in the middle. Obviously there was a tribal war over fishing rights, and this was the resolution. Hunting and gathering people are always fighting over hunting territory, and human interests conflict. In a communist economic system, the conflict is not as severe. There are 100 villagers working on the communal farm. For each villager, it is in his interest to do less work than the other fellow because he gets the same reward. So a competition developed to see who could do the least work.

In a society based on the self-sufficient farm, there is no conflict of interest. Each family grows its own food and provides its other needs. People can be friendly if they care to, but there is no positive force impelling them in this direction. It is only in an exchange economy (made possible by money) that people have a strong, positive interest in associating with each other. If you run a business (invest in a business, work for a business), then you need customers. To get the business started, you may need investors. To get your daily shopping done, you need several of these businesses. It was precisely this kind of a society (19th century America) which created the slogan, “It never hurts to be polite” and which led the world in the creation of new charities.

What Adam Smith showed was that in the field of economics it is possible to create the type of society (where everyone’s rights are protected) in which there is a harmony of men’s interests. That was a dramatic discovery, and it changed the course of human history.

It was Ayn Rand’s discovery that this idea of a harmony of men’s interests applied throughout human life, not merely in the field of economics. Economics was only a special case. If we create a society in which everyone’s rights are respected, then the harmony of men’s interests will dominate all human relationships.

But the people who came before Adam Smith did not understand the possibility of a harmony of men’s interests. They assumed that human interests were inherently in conflict, and there were only two choices to each person: sacrifice your interests to the other fellow, or sacrifice his interests to yours. The first relationship was called altruism. The second relationship was called selfishness. All of the literature we read from this period praises altruism as good and condemns selfishness as evil. (That is, the writer is urging you to sacrifice your interests to him.) But in that society, as soon as you publicly condemned anything as evil, everyone would rush to do it. If someone pointed out that this involved a great deal of hypocrisy, the average person would shrug his shoulders and say, “So I’m a hypocrite. Big deal. All men are sinners.” And he would hurry off to try to figure out some way to cheat his neighbor. “Hey, I’ll repent 2 minutes before I die. God forgives sinners. And then I’ll get to heaven.” And they were all so busy trying to do their neighbor that they never figured out that heaven itself was a giant scam intended to do them. (The papacy and the priesthood were the big money makers of the Middle Ages, raking it in from people who hoped by donating to get the help of the Church in getting into heaven.)

Ayn Rand was so caught up in this great idea, that men’s interests do not have to conflict, that she proclaimed a philosophy of self interest. She was also an in-your-face person and loved to aggravate people (as many intellectuals do), and so she called her philosophy the virtue of selfishness.

In this, Rand was wrong and violated her later ideas on correct defining. A definition must identify the essence of a concept. The concept exists in the minds of the people of the society. You can’t define a concept to be what you want. You have to define it according to what it is.

What is selfishness? Selfishness is the sacrifice of other people’s interests to yours. It is one of two possible actions if the world were such that human interests conflicted. But since human interests don’t conflict, since it is possible to have a harmony of interests, isn’t it much better to live in this kind of world, advance your own interests and advance the interests of other people as well?

For example, when Henry Ford figured out how to make cars very inexpensively, he advanced the interests of all who bought a Model T. He also made himself rich. There was a harmony. When Thomas Edison invented his many practical applications of electricity, he made the whole nation better off in many ways. He also made a lot of money for himself. He said, “Anything that won’t sell I don’t want to invent.”

This is a very powerful concept: a world where people cooperate and help each other while both advance their own interests. Because this concept is so new there is no single word for it in our language. But Ayn Rand was wrong in trying to make “selfishness” stand for this concept. Selfishness is an old fashioned concept from an age when people thought that their interests had to conflict with those of their fellow man. You can’t make it do a job it wasn’t meant to do.

The result was that most everyone condemned Rand and viewed her as the epitome of evil (and then ran out to buy her books).

Why do people turn against freedom? Because they do not understand the harmony of men’s interests. They think that one only has two choices in this life: sacrifice one’s self to others, or sacrifice others to one’s self. They conjure up wild scenarios of how (they think) people would act if they were given freedom: “unregulated free enterprise.”

But history shows such scenarios to be completely false, and the history which shows this most clearly is the history of England. The English, from the Roman withdrawal early in the 5th century, to the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, were as savage and brutal as the rest of Europe. This is well depicted in “Braveheart,” the movie by Mel Gibson depicting the fight of the Scottish hero William Wallace against King Edward I. Gibson exaggerates, but the basic impression is correct. The English of 1297 A.D. were not nice people. They were like all the rest of western Europe: preach altruism on Sunday, and stab your neighbor in the back on the other 6 days.

The English became nice people in the 17th century. There you can distinctly see the two kinds of man: the Puritan and the Cavalier. The Cavalier was the old-fashioned man. He supported the King and was trying to live in the manner of the previous thousand years. He fought; he got drunk; he chased women.. The Puritan was the new type of man. He was fighting for democracy and the concept that human beings had rights. He founded the early sciences. He made England the wealthiest country in Europe. He defeated the Spanish Armada. He produced minds like Isaac Newton, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham.

Now there have been (a few) great conquerors, and (many) would be conquerors in world history. Most of them went to a great deal of effort. in their attempt. But in the 18th century, Britain fell into a world empire “in a fit of absent-mindedness.” That is, Britain acquired its empire without intending to. What happened was that the British (after 1689) had rights. The other people in the world with whom the British came into contact wanted British rights. The way to do that was to become a British colony and have the British rule over them. The only setback the British suffered in their path to empire was when a conservative king tried to take from Americans the rights of Englishmen.

Where did freedom appear in the world? It appeared in 4 countries: Switzerland, Holland, England and Scotland. Then the population of England/Scotland expanded enormously and populated several other countries (the United States, Canada, Australia, et al). These countries are free today. How about the rest of the world? Well, there is a little freedom in the Asian Tigers and Japan because these countries imitated the United States. There is a little freedom in France/Belgium and Germany/Italy because these countries imitated England. But even Germany and Italy shocked the world a little over a half century ago as their populations turned in a massive rage against freedom and tried to make themselves “the master race.”

There is no freedom in Spain or Latin America and no freedom in Africa. There is no freedom in the Arab world (except what may have possibly been brought to Iraq by President Bush). There is a small hint of freedom in Eastern Europe. And Russia and China look as though they would like to have freedom but don’t know how. India has a little freedom.

Rate the countries where human life is the most pleasant. They are the countries with the most freedom. Rate the countries with the strongest armies. They are the countries with the most freedom. Rate the states within the U.S. where life is best. They are the states with the most freedom. When a state gives up freedom, its population moves out (Rhode Island). Freedom is the cause of all other human values. The battle for freedom is the central issue of our age.

Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.