individual selfishness

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

[though this essayette is extremely idealist in method, it's got some
interesting points.]

This cynical ideology of individual selfishness is a relic of the cold war

The idea that we are like billiard balls bumping into each other
without any common interest has created violent chaos

Madeleine Bunting
Monday March 12, 2007
The Guardian

What will define the 21st century? When the question was put to a wide
range of thinkers by Prospect magazine, the answers read like the
horsemen of the apocalypse - disease, disaster, mayhem. Not cheerful
bedtime reading then. The comments of philosopher, Jonathan Rée seemed
to sum it all up: at the beginning of the 20th century, "the main
emotion behind most people's politics was hope: hope for science, for
free trade, for social democracy, for national efficiency, for world
government". That sentiment has now been replaced, he argued, by
indignation. "People are more interested in bearing witness to their
personal moral righteousness" than in engaging in open-minded debate.

Optimism and a belief in progress are now the implausible preserve of
Labour party apparatchiks who are regarded as at best deluded, at
worst as cynically trying to preserve their own legitimacy. The rest
of us have little faith in the capacity of human beings for
self-sacrifice or cooperation to avert climate change or any of the
other predicted catastrophes that fill the media.

Gloomy thoughts for a Monday morning. Last night the BBC television
series The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom began, claiming
to explain how we have managed to land ourselves in this miasma of
misery. Its director, Adam Curtis, has built a reputation on tracing
how ideas shape political and social trends. This series, though his
most dense, could be his most important yet. Ultimately, its message
is optimistic - better understanding of the trap we're in will help us
find a way out.

The central tenet of the argument is that during the cold war an
understanding of human nature as suspicious, distrustful and always
operating out of self-interest came to dominate political thinking.
> From that emerged a narrow definition of freedom as "giving people the
ability to get whatever they wanted". This kind of freedom has become
the central political idea of the past 25 years, but it's a corrosive
form of pessimism rooted in a bleak, simplistic view of human nature.

It all goes back to the bizarre world of cold-war strategists in
America developing sophisticated ways to achieve the "delicate balance
of terror". They seized upon game theory that originated in poker
playing as a way of rationally calculating your opponent's moves and
therefore your own. How many Soviet cities would you have to nuke to
deter the Soviets from nuking New York? The theory was that the
suspicious distrustfulness of both sides in the cold war created a
kind of stability.

[doesn't market competition encourage individualistic selfishness more
strongly than such GT ideology does?]

If that was the case for nuclear weapons, perhaps the model could be
applied elsewhere? John Nash, a mathematical genius at the US
thinktank Rand and subject of the film A Beautiful Mind, took game
theory further and developed the Nash equilibrium, which argued that
the rational pursuit of self-interest by human beings could lead to a
kind of social order. Selfishness didn't have to lead to social
breakdown.

[but isn't mutual defection -- and mutual destruction -- the Nash
equilibrium in a Prisoner's Dilemma game?]

For the economist Friedrich von Hayek (Thatcher's inspiration) this
was vindication of his belief that individual selfishness creates,
spontaneously, "a self-directed automatic system". He told an
interviewer, "altruism doesn't come into it"; just free up people's
ability to pursue their self-interest and that will ultimately benefit
everyone.

By the 70s, these ideas were being applied to politics by theorist
James Buchanan, who argued that the notion of public duty was a sham
used by bureaucracies and politicians to mask their own self-interest.
There was no such thing as public good, he claimed, because that meant
shared goals based on self-sacrifice, when what motivated people was
their self-interest. The TV comedy series Yes Minister was based on
Buchanan's public-choice theory, revealing a world of politics as pure
calculation, spin and self-interest - which we now take for granted.

Initially, Buchanan's ideas offered politicians a new legitimacy.
Three British prime ministers have used them to promise their
electorates an illusion of more freedom. They have all offered to
sweep away the self-interested elites who govern the country. Blair
described Labour's goal in one conference speech: "To liberate people
from old class divisions, old structures, old ways of working that
will not do in this new world of change." This anti-elitism was
seductive, the promise of individual freedom tempting - greater choice
and greater autonomy have become the lodestar of politics of both left
and right.

Just as public-choice theory was gaining ground in politics on both
sides of the Atlantic, powerful reinforcement of its basic premise
about the nature of human beings came from an unexpected quarter:
genetics. Human beings were driven by genes, programmed for survival,
Richard Dawkins's 1976 book The Selfish Gene argued. As Dawkins put
it, "our DNA is an encoded description of the worlds in which our
ancestors lived". We are blind creatures driven by genetic information
millions of years old derived from short, brutish lives.

It doesn't get much more grim. In one telling clip in his series,
Curtis asks Buchanan about where idealism comes in. "What do you mean
by that?" Buchanan asks. "I can't get a handle on that."

This reading of human nature has ended up destroying the legitimacy of
the political class that has espoused it, hollowing politics and all
collective life out with the cynicism that we are like billiard balls
bumping into each other without any common interest or capacity for
collaboration. It's an ideology of freedom that has also created
violent chaos. In Iraq, the US believed it had only to remove Saddam
Hussein and liberate the people, and order would spontaneously emerge.

The original propagator of game theory, John Nash, has had second
thoughts. In 1959 he developed paranoid schizophrenia and spent 10
years in mental hospitals. Now recovered, he admits he overemphasised
the rationality of human beings and that not all behaviour is
self-interested. Genetics is now moving into analysis of how cells
select and edit DNA according to their environment; the idea that we
are simply machines driven by DNA software is redundant.

There is always a time-lag between the world of ideas and politics,
and we are still trapped in the cold-war mythology of human beings as
rational and self-interested. We have lost faith in ourselves, in our
humanity. But Curtis is optimistic. He believes the banality of the
freedom that politicians have offered us for a generation is becoming
clear - Iraq has painfully illustrated its absurdity to a global
audience, while the freedom of the market has delivered growing
inequality - and that will prompt a re-examination. But he
acknowledges that one of the beneficiaries of our disillusionment with
individual freedom will be a renaissance of conservative ideologies
such as Islamism or Russian nationalism.

Such is the grip of cold-war mythology over our thinking that it's
hard to share Curtis's optimism - the disillusionment is evident but
not yet the new thinking that can overturn it. His diagnosis of our
plight is riveting. Freedom - that cherished ideal so bankrupted by
the frequent use of politicians and advertisers - needs to be
reimagined.

m.bunting@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
--
Jim Devine / "The truth is more important than the facts." -- Frank Lloyd Wright