Notes on egoism (Updated 03/21/2009)

Author's Note: This essay was largely a thought exercise to work out my reaction to the writing of Ayn Rand. The reader should take note that, although I start out trying to defend her position, the post becomes an apology for the contrary position.

I'm not telling anyone anything they don't already know when I say it is as individuals that we experience and move through the universe. We may be members of social groups--ranging in size from select close friends to nations--and those groups certainly have an affect on who we are and what we think--whether we're conscious of it or not--but even though in brief moments of euphoria and mania we may temporarily lose our autonomy to groupthink, it is as atoms--not as the whole we help in that moment to make up--that we act and perceive.

You are the one living your life. You are the body moving through the field of experience and the one who must face the results of your actions. Yet egoism, the commitment to satisfying one's needs and chasing one's happiness, is commonly a derogatory term.

"For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors--between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it." (Rand, 392).

Few people would willingly label themselves as egoists, largely because of the terms public reputation, but most of us are just that. We talk about the evils of capitalism and gorge ourselves on overpriced organic groceries. We talk about sacrifice for the greater good and then bask in the self-righteous joy only the morally superior can know.

What is wrong with seeking satisfaction? "[O]ne thing is needful: that a human being attain his satisfaction with himself... only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to revenge himself therefor; we others will be his victims, if only by always having to stand his ugly sight." (Nietzsche, The Gay Science)

I think the problem egoism runs into--and this goes as much as the people for it as those against it--is the assumption that individualism demands disregard for the well-being of others. My egoism rejects this view. Not because I have a responsibility to sacrifice myself for the sake of the less fortunate--"As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man's demand for your help. To demand is to claim that your life is his property..."(Rand, Atlas Shrugged)--but because it is in my own interest to look out for the well being of others.

To understand this it bears mentioning that total freedom, i.e. a life free of restriction, usually amounts to a total loss of freedom. I'll give a mundane and an extreme example. As agents of freedom we are free to lie in order to achieve whatever end we deem worthy of pursuit. The problem with lying is that once you've told it you're committed to thwarting any information or slipup that would reveal it as a lie. You've lost freedom because you must always be aware of how a chance meeting or a seemingly inconsequential utterance out of your mouth can bring the whole fiction down on your head.

The ancient Spartans provide the more extreme example. It's easy to assume that the Spartans chose their ultra-regimented lifestyle because of some logical process, i.e. that they freely recognized it as a better way to live. But Sparta's hyper-militarism was a reaction to their enslavement of surrounding areas. Once they made the decision to conquer their neighbors they had to gear their entire society to the upkeep of an elite war machine because they were now vastly outnumbered by their enslaved workforce. Sparta had to become Sparta because they were doomed otherwise.

Most people recognize that by sacrificing a little freedom we gain the potential to enjoy are remaining freedoms that much more. Libertarian- and classically liberal-types understand this, but for some mystifying reason think the buck's stops at government intrusion into economic affairs. The common platitude is that laissez faire capitalism is the only economic system congruent with individual rights. Perhaps this would be true in a small, local setting, and if we lived in a world void of greed, but the current economic crisis is THE example of how the careless decisions of a few can wreck the economic well being of an entire planet.

Free-market supporters cry 'deluded utopian vision' to communism's centralized everything, but free-marketism is just as utopian in its own vision. Communism thinks everything will be okay if there is one strong, yet benevolent central agency. Free-market capitalism thinks everything will be okay if we just don't touch anything. Why should the few be enslaved to the many? is just a legitimate question as to ask why the many should be enslaved to the few? which is precisely what tends to happen in unregulated markets.

Why the rich should help the poor--via taxation and restraint--is because it promotes social stability, which allows all of us to enjoy our freedoms more. It is in everyone's interest to alleviate--or at least battle--poverty based crime. (And you fight it most effectively, by the way, by fighting the source--poverty.) People like to talk about how communism never made it big in America because it goes against the grain of our culture, and to some extent that's true. But the bigger reason the proletariat revolution never came here is because of the rise of our middle class and labor laws. No revolution came because are workers were no longer subjected to oppressive work conditions and had a genuine chance at upward mobility. (Recent studies indicate, however, that American's chance to upward mobility has sunk to one of the lowest in the developed world.) Here again it's in the better interest of those who have to consider the have not because they otherwise must fear a populist upheaval.

This isn't to suggest that the rich should be taxed in an effort to make everyone EQUAL. Far from it. I'm more concerned with the poor having a sufficient means to live on. When you have enough money the fact that others have more is of little concern. The measures it would take to ensure complete equality would be nothing short of monstrous, but the impossibility of utopia
doesn't mean the world can't be made better. The intelligent egoist will realize that success in life--be it in the economic, social, romantic, or artistic sense--almost always comes as a member of a community.

Update

Even the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, recognized that government intervention, though something to be skeptical of, was at times necessary. As economist Herbert Stein points out in his "Remembering Adam Smith," Smith allowed government the right to:

"--Impose tariffs on imports in order to bargain for reduction of tariffs by other countries.
"-- Punish, and take steps to prevent, dishonesty, violence and fraud. (Does this include the SEC, and would prevention of violence justify measures to assist ghetto youth?) [Parenthesis are Stein's]
"-- Establish indicators of quality of goods, such as the sterling mark for silver. (Does this justify the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission?)
"--Require employers to pay wages in cash rather than in kind.
"--Regulate banking.
"--Provide public goods, such as highways, harbors, bridges and canals. (What about railways, airlines?)
"--Require children to have a certain level of education.
"--Require the streets to be kept clean. (Environmentalism?)
"--Impose discriminatory taxation to deter improper or luxurious behavior."

To quote the British economist John Maynard Keynes (who ideas have seen a resurgence in so-called Obamanomics):

"Herein lay, in fact, the main justification of the capitalist system. If the rich had spent their new wealth on their own enjoyments, the world would long ago have found such a régime intolerable. But like bees they saved and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole community because they themselves held narrower ends in prospect . . . The capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice. The duty of 'saving' became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion."

Civil War is Coming

Fox News' War Room played out a scenario a couple weeks back where a disenfranchised and fed up American public, led by citizen militias, revolts against the Obama led government. A clip is linked below.




The laughs just keep coming over at Fox. Notice Stephen Moore's (Wall Street Journal) comment at the beginning of the scenario, that to pay for Obama's current spending plan would require tax rates in the 80-90% range, which is the catalyst for the imagined uprising. I have to agree with him, if income tax rates reached 90% then we probably would have a civil war on our hands, but come on. And while we're on the topic, how much would it cost the taxpayers to foot the bill for the Iraq war which is 4 times Obama's current budget proposal?


The best is by far Gerald Celente's comment that we would see cities overrun by "motorcycle marauders." I say best because its a plausible outcome if Obama keeps his tax and spend dance going. Being a point of authority on motorcycle marauders let me tell you something: they hate taxes, and it would take more than the US army to stop a bunch of revolutionary bikers. You'd have to take a cue from Detroit and bring a murdered cop back as a cyborg if you wanted to have any hope of stopping a two-wheel menace as serious as that.


Flame-fanning ridiculousness aside, Glenn Greenwald's blog posed an interesting question: where were all the Constitution rabid militias during the Bush years? They were all over the place during the Clinton administration, willing to fight and die, or so they said, to protect the Bill of Rights. Yet when Bush was at the helm--whose administration not only threatened but trampled the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments--our backwoods saviours were nowhere to be seen.* Now that Obama is president, however, they're grumbling again, as evidenced by the Fox piece. Here locally, a radio commercial for a gun show urges listener to enjoy their guns while they still can because "you never know what Washington is going to do these days." Like Greenwald, the only explanation I can come up with is that these citizen militias were less concerned the Bill of Rights and more concerned with ensuring White, protestant privilege.

*To be fair, Bush wasn't the first president to use warrantless wiretapping--Clinton did it too, under program Echelon. Unlike Bush, Clinton's wiretapping, though violating the spirit of the Constitution, wasn't technically illegal due to a loophole: he had the British conduct the wiretapping and report the results back to US, circumnavigating the 4th amendment. I suspect this may play a role in the Obama administration's reluctance to prosecute Bush era illegal wiretapping. It would be embarrassing, after all, to condemn a practice which had precedent thanks to the husband of the current Secretary of State.