Recently I set up a Google Alert for mentions of Ayn Rand and I receive several emails each day about articles that mention her name. On August 2nd one popped up for an article on the Christian Science Monitor website. The title of the article is “Selfish traits no good: Nice guys finish first, evolution researchers say.” The first couple paragraphs set the tone for the whole article.
Nature is cold, hard, and ruthless, and only the most aggressive – and selfish – survive and pass along their genes. So would suggest one standing school of thought about the nature of the world, a philosophy that plays itself out in the writings of authors like Ayn Rand, who elevated selfishness to high ideal, the most powerful force of creativity and industry possessed by humankind.
As it turns out, this isn’t merely an oversimplification of the natural order of things – it’s probably mostly wrong. A team from Michigan State University used a logic model to demonstrate that exhibiting only selfish traits would have spelled the end of the human race a long time ago, and that cooperation and mutual benefit are, in fact, core to our success.
The explicit definition of selfish is “devoted to or caring only for oneself; concerned primarily with one’s own interests, benefits, welfare, etc., regardless of others.” The implicit definition is essentially the sense this article, and the BBC news article it drew from, is that of acting to achieve the desire of the moment by whatever means necessary including violating the rights of others. These two definitions of selfish lead to the rather odd situation where a man who works hard and saves his money to open his own business, but doesn’t give to charity, and a man who defrauds his customers to maintain a lavish lifestyle are both deemed to be selfish. This tars the man who saves his money with the same brush as the man who steals it from someone else.
Ayn Rand’s view of selfishness goes back to the dictionary definition but explicitly adds something that I think is implicit, the idea that it needs to be considered in a rational and long term context. So in this view, being selfish is making choices based on what will improve your life but in the context of your entire life, not just short term pleasure.
So given this, is it really “selfish” to lie, steal, and cheat? Obviously not, since it will not be to your long term interest to do so, for exactly the reasons mentioned in the two articles.
As the BBC article says, “Being mean can give you an advantage on a short timescale but certainly not in the long run – you would go extinct.”
The Christian Science Monitor article says the same, “Communication and memory mean that short-term boons gained by trickery and selfishness tend to poison the community to the detriment of all – and disrupt potentially positive cooperation.”
Lying, stealing, cheating, and so forth are not selfish. They are self-destructive.
This view of selfishness also does not prevent you from cooperating with others. It simply means that your decision of whether or not to cooperate is based on your own long term, rational interests. The same would apply for giving to charity. So for example, you might willingly invest money (a form of cooperation) in a company that is going to build roads. You see the long term benefit for yourself in having a way for your customers to get to you and for you to get to the places you want to go.
So what about the claim given at the beginning that consistent selfish behavior would have led to the end of our species? What would happen if people were consistently selfish, with selfish being properly understood as Ayn Rand understood it?
People would work to support themselves and save for the future and for emergencies. They would trade fairly with others to obtain the things they needed but could not produce themselves, or could not produce as efficiently as another. They would cooperate with others to accomplish projects that were of mutual benefit that an individual could not complete alone while refusing to support projects that did not benefit them in some way. They would give to charity in cases where it did not harm them (i.e. they would not give to charity if they could not make their mortgage payment) and the charity was something they believed added value to their lives.
Sounds pretty good to me.