Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them. The challenge of large-organization-designers (governments, companies, etc.) is how to design a system that 1) leverages this behavior; ie maximize the value of ambition to the system, and 2) is not vulnerable to this behavior; ie checks & balances
Small organizations can get around this because outcomes are easier to share, and selecting people who aren't selfish is possible.
We can do our best to put guidelines around selfishness, but history tells us this is hard
I don't think that assumption holds. People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives, gamble, smoke, don't exercise, some people even don't brush their teeth.
On the other hand, there's as many examples of people being selfless as of people being selfish.
Human behavior is much more complex.
Reminds me of debating Bentham in high school. If the feeling of self-interest of a murderer acts upon is greater than the self-interest of someone not to be murdered, etc...
Maybe the point is not to reduce judgment to one qualitative idea.
It’s also subjective and dependent on the persons values, beliefs, etc.
The broader point is that self-interest is not purely logical because humans are not purely logical beings.
What act exactly do people believe to be in their self-interest? Why are you claiming it's the anti-social ones and not the pro-social if the believe is not rooted on reality?
Humans are intrinsically irrational. That is a plain and simple fact. Humans operate exclusively on what they think is true instead of what is objective fact. Subjectively an individual human acts in ways that are roughly rational and coherent within their belief system and world view. The problem is that this frame of reference is entirely subjective and is only tangentially related to consensus objective reality. Assuming that you can apply your own reasoning and logic to all other humans is fallacy.
You must accept the fact that other people do not share your world view and will not act with what you, personally deem to be rationality.
Yes
> That is a plain and simple fact
No
You've not examined the cognitive resources required to properly locate "fact" when humans have other interests, like staying alive and providing for their families. The mechanism seems to encourage directional stances rather than comprehensive ones.
* I wave some sort of unreal RFC 2119 wand at you *
a) Internet privacy is in one's self-interest
b) Many erroneously believe privacy on the internet to be goal of terrorists, hackers, etc.
c) A subset of these people then act against their own self-interest by vocally supporting mass surveillance, or voting in candidates who do so, in the name of the apparent self-interest of safety
I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people... different person.
"People act to their own benefit" is an empty generalization that adds no useful information by itself and free of context like that only serves to mislead people. It's only true if "benefit" is explicitly undefined, and only useful if you contextualize it to an specific action and benefit that you can empirically determine it's validity, like in the article.
> I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people
The article, and the entire discussion is about pro/antisocial behavior.
I think it is a useful generalization when you possess a theory of mind, however. In low-trust environments, assuming criminal self-interest is often what keeps people safe... if you're basing your decision on a lack of information, wariness is warranted. Not every social environment is a conversational environment.
At any given decision point, people are more likely to pick the option that provides some benefit to them. That looks very different from consistently picking the choice that is eventually best for them.
I largely agree with you, but I would tweak it to say "Humans are decent at doing what's best for them given their own values and knowledge".
^as in any situation, there is always the <1% of outliers
"Stupid people are the most dangerous people" -- Carlos Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
https://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs19...
"All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die" Says the man next to me out of nowhere It's apropos of nothing, he says his name is William I'm sure he's Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy And he's plain ugly to me And I wonder if he's ever had a day of fun in his whole life We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday In a bar that faces a giant car wash The good people of the world Are washing their cars on their lunch break Hosing and scrubbing as best they can in skirts in suits
These are regularly rich and at upper echelons of politics.
Having actual ethical limitations is what limits enrichment and gain of power. And while most gamblers loose, some win big and then gain power.
This is a line I see often by people (not you, just to be clear) puzzled because somebody didn't "vote for their own self interest" or at least that is the perception of the person making the statement. I've seen variations of it for at least 30 years. You'd often see it around pressure campaigns to unionize especially.
The shock about the perception is always funny to me, because it reads as shock that someone refused a bribe or was not easily manipulated.
So when someone "votes against their self-interest", this person tends to think of those others as malfunctioning. Perhaps they're too stupid to correctly deduce the path to achieving the results they want. Though he might be willing to consider they're mentally ill.
If he were forced (somehow) to consider that other people want things different from what he wants, it could be some sort of existential crisis as far as he's concerned. How could two competing interests even exist in a sane or fair universe, and which should prevail if they are mutually exclusive? What if, somehow, his own interests were destined to lose out?
There are examples where "what he wants them to do" can actually be for them to vote to help themselves.
For example, people voting to give themselves, their family, and their friends better access to health care; instead many people prevent themselves from getting better health care because if they did that would mean other people (and specifically the 'wrong kind' of other people) would also get it:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness
So people are screwing themselves/family to screw other folks over. They are actively harming themselves out of spite.
This simply isn't the case. It presupposes that you should know what the other person wants. You don't... and even when you know it (because they've told you), you ignore it because it's not what you would prefer that they want. It's a really simply concept, but you're probably incapable of conceiving of it. Other people in the world around you are props that the universe invented so the world could be as you envision it.
>For example, people voting to give themselves, their family, and their friends better access to health care;
I don't want "better access to health care". I know what you mean by that phrase, but I do not want this. My brain doesn't work like yours, I do not have the same preferences or desires that you do. I am not "voting against my interests", it's just that my interests are alien to you. I understand your preferences quite well (to a degree, at least) and I acknowledge that those are different than my own. You, though, can't acknowledge the same of me... the best you can come up with is that I'm somehow mistaken, confused, or brainwashed. Even this comment is likely incomprehensible.
>So people are screwing themselves/family to screw other folks over.
My family wouldn't be better off from this... we're not cattle for the farmer to provide health care for. It is not harming me or mine, we're up to the challenge.
> This simply isn't the case. It presupposes that you should know what the other person wants. You don't... and even when you know it (because they've told you), you ignore it because it's not what you would prefer that they want.
I'm not ignoring it. I do know it (in certain cases) because they've said so: they want to see certain people(s) suffering:
* http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/...
They often don't want to suffer themselves and are indignant when things come back and bite them in the ass:
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Leopards_Eating_People%27s_Fa...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkeys_voting_for_Christmas
Though some don't care how much it costs them as long as it costs someone else more (or perceived as such by them):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
But someone's interests/desires of what they believe to be good, and what is actually good can be two different things. (And even if choosing between things that are actually good, one can choose a good that is not as good as what one could choose.)
Invoking Godwin's law: what the Nazis did was not objectively "bad", but simply something you do not agree with.
What? Left-leaning folks are stereotypically more secular and less likely to believe in the supernatural, so as materialists would have less of a foundation for any kind of "objective" morality.
Sorry, but sometimes people really do just vote against there own interests because they've been convinced of things that are wrong, or they misunderstand something. I expect you could even think of some examples if you tried.
And your whole post is just wildly making assumptions about someone you don't know: - "thinks of others as robots..." - "Everyone in the world must, as some precondition of the universe, be interested in all the same things" - "He cannot imagine that people external to himself have any real interests at all" - "this person tends to think of those others as malfunctioning" - "...it could be some sort of existential crisis as far as he's concerned" - "How could two competing interests even exist in a sane or fair universe" -
Perhaps you could have some faith? I doubt you've never voted for something you came to regret.
Incorrect. I do recognize their differences of preference. They do not want the same thing as me. The reverse isn't true. I do not think they're idiots because they want different things than me... you've mischaracterized what I've said. They are idiots because, they (and you) can't recognize that I want something different than what they (and you) want.
And, in your convoluted way of thinking, you can't even get the argument right. You stoop to accusing me of misunderstanding.
>And your whole post is just wildly making assumptions
What exactly is wild about it? You didn't hear me screaming this, mouth frothing, as 6 cops try to drag me to the ground from where I'd perched up on some platform with a bullhorn. No violence occurred. Nothing uncivilized, just carefully chosen words. My "assumptions" if they can even be called that at all, required decades to form. Nothing wild about that. Really, they were boring words, maybe even timid. I'd be wrong and I would know it if you hadn't even chosen to respond. But it itches in the back of your mind somehow, doesn't it? Just couldn't let it go?
>Perhaps you could have some faith? I
I would like that. I would want to have faith so very much. It's all I've ever wanted, even before I knew to articulate it as that. Why does everyone make that so impossible though?
"But it itches in the back of your mind somehow, doesn't it? Just couldn't let it go?" You think you're so damn clever don't you?
Every time I comment on any form of social media, I remember why I usually don't. Good day.
The point is, that the 'Right' are living in a bubble of cognitive dissonance, fantasy, simulacrum. Barely able to put one foot in front of the other as far as logic goes...
Literally the same group that were convinced by rich land owners that the having a Civil War for the land owners benefit, was a good idea. Going against their own self interest.
Bush, Obama, Biden. All the same, can't really tell the difference.
This time, it is different. Accepting a Jumbo Jet bribe? with no questions? Manipulating Oil Markets with a war? Having the IRS setup a 1.7 billion fund to pay off friends from a coup attempt?
This is the end.
The bubble is not a one side issue.
More false equivalences. Oh no, Hunter Biden had some Porn. That totally justifies going to war to distract from Epstein, and just as a bonus, its ok to make money on manipulating oil markets and make that mooola.
To the extent this is true, that is only because they believe those candidates will make their lives better. People often declare how their outgroup "votes against their own interests", and use it as some kind of indictment of those people's intelligence. But that is nothing more than a failure to understand people. Essentially nobody is out there voting for someone whom they believe will make their lives worse m
Calling voters selfish because they didn't vote for your candidate is just pure idiocy. Politics is a game of convincing and some strategies are more successful than others, one of the worse things you can do in politics is simply advocate (talking to others); which is why the majority of online discussions around politics revolves around advocacy, it's the cheapest and lowest impact thing an individual can do.
The GP did not call voters "selfish". It said
> People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives [...]
Now, I would personally reword that as "People routinely vote for candidates despite evidence that these candidates policies will worsen one or more aspects of their lives ...".
But nowhere is there the suggestion that "you didn't vote for my preferred candidate and therefore you are selfish".
It’s inherently an argument that democracy does not work.
Clearly, voters are not casting votes based on objective measurements of the things that some candidates believe are important to them (e.g. household income, life expectancy, health care quality etc).
But that means either that they are voting based on other issues that they consider important, or they are not voting based on likely outcomes of a candidate's policy preferences at all.
It's not trivial to differentiate these two (and of course, there may even be a mixture of all 2, or even all 3, reasons to vote).
And sure, people may vote for a candidate (implicitly, for a policy) that benefits society as a whole even if it negatively impacts them. It does stretch credibility, however, to try to make the case this is what is happening when people earning median incomes or below vote for candidates who cut taxes on the wealthiest in a society, as well as reducing the share of GDP going to labor, and claiming "well, those folks just think this candidate is doing a good job on <cultural issue>". I'm not suggesting it is impossible that this happens sometimes, but across the entirety of working class Republican voters (for example) ... I find it hard to believe.
The suggestion wasn't overt, it was kind of implicity - telling people that they don't know their own self interest, even when they manifestly don't, is not very ahh "politic" :)
There certainly people who are selfless but in the distribution of personalities selfless feels more rare. And their is always a question to what extent. I think what Hannah Arendt really is getting at is that is possible to build a system that reinforces small compromises for reasonable benefit that leads the system to meltdown when everyone starts making small compromises
Maybe in a welfare society centered around the community you'd see people naturally acting different.
That's without disputing the naturalization of an observation of state (people act this way so they must always act this way) which I think is also problematic.
There is always some selfishness in people but it is a choice to structure society and economic activity around it.
Survivorship Bias.
Humans that exhibit altruistic behavior get to stay around and make more history. When selfish behavior society collapses and that history is pruned, generally in some horrific event involving a lot of death and genocide.
Now, the mistake you are personally making is thinking you're going to make it because in general humans have stuck around after selfish people fucked everything up.
I agree that many traditional cultures engage in egalitarianism, but genocide and mass-rapes, wars and slavery campaigns, are baked into the anthropological history.
Economic activity, expressed in water and caloric access, is the root of numerous ongoing conflicts (“tribal” and national), and the cause of many historical eradications of competition.
Capitalism seeks to maximize capital, anthropology says life just as brutal as it was before we named and systematized it. Cost benefit doesn’t need dollars as a unit of measure to be effective.
Most of the coalitions you mentioned are, ultimately, born out of the realization that, sometimes, you have to give a little now, to gain more later. Even charity at its pure idealistic form requires the altruistic individual to feel they made the world better in their own view (psychic profit, thus ultimately selfish) to happen.
This isn't the "default capitalist view", this is praxeology, plain and simple.
1. Social pressures. Failing to care for others can result in social stigma, with increasing levels of alienation depending of culture/society; 2. Setting examples for reciprocity . One can help others today to set the expection to receive support later. All become old, sick and/or disabled at some point (if they don't die beforehand, immortals notwithstanding); 3. Friends and relatives are valuable in multiple ways; 4. Some just see value in helping others, either in the act or the results.
These are the examples I can state on top of my head. They all require each individual's evaluation scales to favor such motivations.
How these social pressures could arise if all people in society acts out of selfishness?
> 2. Setting examples for reciprocity
What kind of reciprocity exists if we talk about healthy adults taking care of disabled children that would likely die in few years?
> Some just see value in helping others, either in the act or the results.
Oh, how close it is to saying "people are often being selfless"!
Possibly due to point 2, for instance.
> What kind of reciprocity exists if we talk about healthy adults taking care of disabled children that would likely die in few years?
You do realize that people may become disabled in their lives, right? It's not just children.
In any case, that can also be explained by point 3.
> Oh, how close it is to saying "people are often being selfless"!
But it isn't, and that's the point. This is a case of self-actualization, the highest expression of the "self". Some may argue that this is "selflessness", but I argue that this is "selfishness" in its purest form: the pursuance of one's highly personal goal, i.e. psychic profit seeking.
Eventually we benefit from it in our old age and teach our grandkids to remember about it as they get older.
From this perspective, the main advantage of technology has been to increase how much a single person can do, leading to more capable small organizations. And this should also make us wonder whether an LLM-heavy org is going to be better or worse aligned than one that has just people and more predictable tech.
But I do sometimes hold those in contempt who I know have the means to not do evil and choose to anyway.
That is all to say, no it’s not just human nature.
That's why the article actually mentions it.
I gotta mention that Arendt relationship with actual NAZI ideologue Martin Heidegger might have somewhat colored her analysis of evil. I mean, she had a reason to dismiss the importance of ideas, propaganda and prominent intellectuals in creating "evil" regimes when she had a connection to such things (just as she and others covered up how much of an overt NAZI and antisemite Heidegger was, even Hitler took power).
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt#Marburg_(1924%E2...
And naturally this is a controversial take since Arendt and Heidegger have defenders to the present day.
Eichmann wasn't just some bureaucrat but wanted to be seen as just a cog in the system. She basically ate his act and now everyone has to bring her up whenever something evil happens which people seemingly don't seem to care about. In reality Eichmann was a man who had genuine ideology, was personally driven and extremely calculated.
Raul Hilberg holocaust expert is a better source for information on Eichmann, he wrote (one of) the best works on the holocaust and is a genuine historian, was one of the first people to write an extensive history of it . He's not exactly as promoted today (in the media/general public) as actually following his view would poke some holes in the 'holocaust industry' (this doesn't mean that I in any way minimize or doubt the holocaust and its cruelty).
When you're looking to get laid you don't ask a lot of questions about politics. Same goes when you're looking for a job. Soon enough, you -- or your offspring -- are part of the machine. And that's the banality of evil.
But moreover, Heidegger didn't just "turn brown". He saw NAZIism as a potential realization of his philosophy. Such a belief definitely influences my view of Heidegger. Any summary of Heidegger's philosophy and it's problem naturally either involves a lot of simplification or is book length. For book length critiques, I'd recommend The Jagon Of Authenticity by Adorno. My simplification of Heidegger's weakness is that he among a number of philosophers criticizing the lacking of authenticity/awareness/true-being/etc in the modern world in isolation. Such critiques tend to fall for political movements promising the violent reconstruction of tradition - such as NAZIism but limited to that. Michelle Foucault's despicable endorsement of Ayatollah Khomeini on the eve of the overthrow of the Shah is quite similar Heidegger's turn.
The point is that even someone as brilliant as Heidegger could be captured by insane ideology.
You are obviously also captured by an ideology,if you can see it or not.
And the idea that Hannah Arendt needs "defenders" because she had an affair with Heidegger is just bizarre.
Heidegger aimed to use the NAZI movement to promote his own ideology, which he viewed as compatible with and appropriate to the movement. It was different from other versions of NAZIism and they were different from each - only at point the NAZIs fully consolidated their state control and wielded top-down state propaganda did things become uniform. But the idea-point leading up to that point (say, about when Heidegger resigned his rectorship, after The Night Long Knives) should most simply and clearly be called "NAZI ideologues".
And yes, that's not something those who like Heidegger's writings like to hear.
This is not to say she got it wrong, I think the banality of evil absolutely holds up in a number of readings of historical events. I just don't think Eichmann was a good example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_trial
> When he took the stand in his own defense, he portrayed himself as a mid-level functionary following orders.[32] He repeatedly claimed he was "merely a little cog in the machinery" of genocide, not a policymaker.
Speer was tried in Nuremberg. He indeed played a "I was just an emotional artist and I never knew anything about the Holocaust" game during that trial. Given that they weren't able to disprove his assertion that he left the Posen Speech early (that was a speech in 1943 where Himmler openly discussed the Holocaust), he got away with his life, though not with his freedom. He got a 20 year sentence and served it in the Spandau Prison.
(Also, he was present at the Posen Speech, which he later acknowledged in a letter.)
Eichman, on the other hand, was only caught in Argentina a long time after the war, and everyone who came into contact with him described him as a pathetic mediocre personality with a strong tendency to suck up to everyone stronger, including the very Israeli commandos and jailers who held him in custody.
TFA mentions Hannah Arendt in the introduction and discusses the holocaust (if briefly, because most of its focus is on more modern regimes.
I understand that research needed to look for credible data in order to advance, but these conclusions are really close to what Hannah Arendt tells in the Banality of Evil: regular citizens trying to get their promotion and advance their careers, doing untold damage in the process because they happened to be working during an autocracy. It's nice though that data eventually corroborate what philosophy first observes, even if the observation doesn't necessarily directly prompts an investigation.