In my last post, I mentioned that the Monarch Fallacy implies that, assuming we were rational beings who pursued enlightened self interest and had access to good data, we would realize that it is in our own best interest to raise up society as a whole (an increase in absolute power) than to strive for an increase in relative power over others.
But, so far, there is no reason to believe that we should all be rational, self-interested people who have an interest in access to good data. I’ll try to cover why each of these three pillars (self-interest, rationality, good data) is so important below.
First, self-interest. Ayn Rand has a lot of faults – her novels are too long, they are contrived, she is totally wrong about sex and her insistence on moral absolutism is not backed up with a coherent argument; all this being said, she is right about self-interest. My own take on Rand’s arguement for the virtue of self-interest is as follows:
Imagine we were NOT self-interested beings and instead always worked for the betterment of the group. Each day, we would do our utmost to provide things for the group, often at the expense of ourselves, holding ourselves to the creed of “the most good for the most people”. Several points arise:
1. Who is “the group” if not a collection of individuals? If everyone sacrifices for the betterment of others, then NO ONE gets what they want.
2. The moment there is a single person who chooses to act in their own interests rather than the groups, the system falls apart since they can claim a greater and greater need than others and demand that others work to meet those needs.
3. People spend their time trying to demonstrate that their need is greater than the needs of the next person. This leads to a lot of wasted effort and also leads to the best beggars being rewarded rather than those with the most need. This reduces societal output.
4. In order to ensure fairness, we need to have planners to allocate resources and arbitrate between different needs. These planners come at a cost – they consume but do not produce anything, thus the output of society is lower than it could potentially be.
5. Trying to match everything so that everyone gets what they want, based on a prioritization of limited resources is damn near impossible – there is a huge computational complexity here (in many ways it’s a Knapsack Problem and thus NP-hard) nevermind the strange fact that as peoples “needs” are met, they suddenly develop new needs. Without prices for goods, which convey meaningful information about desire for an item versus demand for the item, there is no way to know how much people want one item more than another nor how mucheffort is involved in making this item.
Yes, this is something of a pro-market argument as well as a pro-self-interest argument but the points still stand. These points indicate, to me, that a lack of self-interest would be a bad thing, from the point of view both of the individual AND of society as a whole and thus self-interest is pretty important.
There are a number of other threads to this argument of course: we humans are products of natural selection based on selfishness. Those predators that chose NOT to hunt their prey died out Milena ago. In the words of Neal Stephenson, everything alive today is alive because they are a “stupendous badass” and so were their ancestors.
Evolution is alive today and this is a good thing. Not just of organisms, but of ideas – over time the best ideas flourish and the less good perish. It’s certainly not a perfect system – there are lots of good ideas that perish as well – but such a system at least has a chance to fix it’s mistakes. Without self-interest, our ancestors would have spend all of our time sacrificing ourselves for the betterment of others and never stayed alive long enough for us to become the supendous badasses that we are today.