The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises

[joeybee12]

in moral philosophy; that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

John Kenneth Galbraith

[brainshrub]

1. Ayn Rand thought she was inventing something new...

but she just invented another philosophical framework to justify the powerful to taking advantage of the weak.

[joeybee12]

4. She wasn't much of a philosopher, or writer, but she was one PUSHY

BROAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Atman]

2. Sorry, I thought you said oldest "professions."

Never mind.

[joeybee12]

5. Well, they're probably engaged in that also!!!!!!!!!!!!

[kitkatrose]

9. Ha! You saw that too? :)

[Skittles]

3. that is an EXCELLENT quote

so true. When I actually try to listen to conservatives, I am always struck by HOW F***ING SELFISH THEY ARE. Unless it's happening to THEM it JUST AIN'T HAPPENING.

[joeybee12]

6. And everything this particular lying conservative squatting in the

White House right now is done to endow those who already have way too much!

[skypilot]

7. That's my sig line.

*

[Squeech]

8. Yes, but selfishness is a fact of modern life

The question (for those of us who want to win elections, promote social justice and prosperity, etc) is how to deal with it.

What follows is a ramble, rather than a truly well thought out argument, because I'm at my day job. So take it in that spirit.

First of all, I believe we ought to recognize that self-interest is not a bad thing ipso facto. Indeed, to have no self-interest at all is not healthy-- think raving lunatic, or catatonic, or (I have to allow for this possibility) somebody in the throes of an overwhelming revelation, religious or drug-induced, or something like that. These are people who simply aren't functioning on the same plane as the rest of us.

So it seems to me that the point of human ethical systems is to show how an *enlightened* self-interest is different from selfishness, and how it's more effective in both getting you what you want and generating more happiness overall. To say "I got mine, Jack, and you can go suck an egg" is not only going to piss off Jack, but more to the point, it shows that you have no concept of how you got where you are-- the "born on third base and thinks he hit a triple" idea. But to say "I got mine *because* I was born white and male and middle-class and my parents could afford to send me to an Ivy League school where I made contacts and found my niche in a good company," or whatever your particular story is, is the very least that intellectual honesty compels you to say. And then, having said that, if you really do believe that capitalism is the best way to create wealth, then you owe it to all the people who didn't have your early advantages to help them get to where they can also enjoy meaningful participation in the economy: help them go to college, and/or form networks of non-white non-male workers (maybe even unions)... Because these people want to be your customers, and the more money they make, the more business you'll do.

The alternative is to act as if any advantage you enjoy can only work to your advantage if somebody else *doesn't* have it, like Gollum resenting Frodo over possession of the Precious. The term "zero-sum game" is often used for this, meaning that if you win something, somebody else has to lose it. It implies that the total amount of value in the world is unchangeable, that no amount of work can increase it. Which is a really crappy thing to believe.

Ayn Rand takes a lot of shit on this score, some of it undeserved. Her stuff made a big impression on me (when I was young and really impressionable) because she explained how Gollum-ness really worked in the business world, and in a certain kind of politics. That said, there were certain aspects of her model that didn't work so well, especially where she uses a definition of "selfishness" that's more like my notion of "enlightened self-interest."

But to me the thing that's really tragic about Smirky is how little faith he has in the aspects of capitalism that made America great. He doesn't see business as the creation of wealth, he sees it as an opportunity to take something away from somebody else-- he'll blow up Iraq and then give taxpayer money to Halliburton to (pretend to) rebuild it. Consider his hydrogen power initiative: he wants to set it up so the existing oil companies still run everything, and indeed, the way he proposes to make the hydrogen is to strip it off of hydrocarbons-- which means that the oil and natural gas business is still the ultimate energy source, and when we run out, we run out of hydrogen too! But then, this is the sort of logic you can expect of a man who accused Al Gore of fuzzy math...