Selfishness vs. "Selfishness" 
or ... The "Scare and Switch" Con

BUT… if I said, "I've found the intellectual defenders of private property and laissez-faire capitalism whom I've met to be generally warm and generous, while the so-called "liberal" defenders of the welfare state I've found to be often cynical, mean and tight-fisted in their personal lives," would THAT seem likely to be true?

Think about it. Well, it's also true, and to me anyway, logical, natural, and a matter "of course!"

Well, it's a matter of semantics, or word choice; both sentences say exactly the same thing and describe my actual personal experience (and I've met literally thousands of people of all kinds). If you don't see that, possibly you just haven't met enough different people from each of enough different walks of life.

Perhaps you can see it more clearly if we modified the second statement like this:

"The intellectual defenders of private property and laissez-faire capitalism I've met I've found to be civil, courteous and generally cheerfully generous, and even confident most others are like that normally (EXCEPT when they or their fellow citizens are forced to be), while the liberal defenders of the welfare state, while loudly proclaiming themselves champions of 'compassion' (by belligerently advocating the in-your-face forced redistribution of wealth), I've found to be usually cynical and often secretly mean and tight-fisted, and sometimes even larcenous, in their personal lives and apparently expecting virtually everyone else to be just like themselves." Ayn Rand has commented on the underlying meanness of such people.  Wayne Dunn says, "The fact that most people think that being selfish means harming one's fellow man, that pursuing one's own self-interest equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a 'psychological confession' on their part.  In fact it is against one's own long-term self-interest to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact opposite of selfish -- they're self-destructive." (Emphasis added.  Criminals and other sociopaths do not think in terms of  how their actions affect the society around them and set bad examples for others.  Nor do they empathize with others, certainly not their victims.  And they certainly don't feel the pride of honest achievement or of helping to build civilization.)

Now that it's rephrased, it's easier to see it makes sense, right? But it wasn't at first, was it? Why is this so? It's because of one of the oldest con-games (going back thousands of years) ever perpetrated: the cultural fear of the accusation, "You're selfish!"

I'm selfish? Am I supposed to quiver in fear of being so accused? Yeah, right. Oh, horrors, and all that. Give me a break.

Last time I checked, we'd already grown out of the barbarous tribal times when superstitions and religions and scare stories about vengeful gods were invented to frighten all the short-sighted perpetrators of constant violence into submission. Nowadays superstitions are for children to invent for the fun of it (As for me, I step on cracks all the time. Unless there's a hapless worm in one. Then, of course, I usually pick it up and restore it to the dirt where it belongs. Doesn't everybody?).

You've heard of the "bait-and-switch" con? Well, guess what? This is the "scare-and-switch" con: "Selfish" has two entirely different meanings. One is: "taking advantage of people against their will." The other is: "taking care of yourself and your family first and foremost and to whatever degree YOU deem appropriate."   Obviously, the latter is a virtue, and the former is a vice. But if you fail to distinguish between the meanings you're prey to being suckered by con artists of either the deliberate variety* or of the more common unwitting, unthinking "disease carrier" kind.

First they make you extremely fearful of ever being seen to take advantage of anyone unwilling, and then they twist it with the sneakiness of a magician and the cleverness of a lawyer to make you ashamed of ever being seen to take care of yourself and your family first.

Then, while trying to get you to accept the ridiculous notion that every kind of "selfishness," even just making money in the private sector (earning a living and growing a nest egg) is morally vicious,** they also try to get you to accept the even more absurd idea that the accumulating of political power by government employees and politicians (and their legal machinations to steal or control the property of others) is morally good. This is sold along with an implicit demand that their professed concern for "others" be accepted without question at face value, together with an implicit threat: "Don't you DARE point out that grasping for and accumulating political power definitely IS a kind of 'selfishness,' only this time it's the bad kind, the vicious taking-unwilling-advantage kind, the kind that's the hallmark of  criminals, politicians, their intellectual excuse-makers and other aggressive parasites." ***

Perhaps now you can appreciate how so many people can get caught up in the fashions of the moment, as popularized by today's politicians, journalists, entertainers and educators. And/or how people don't have (or don't use) enough of their logical, critical abilities or a world-view large enough in terms of both time and geography. If so, I encourage you to question authority, apply logic, and think for yourself from now on. Look at the forest, not the trees. And the centuries, not the months. Or you might risk being lead willingly, as a sheep, to the slaughter.  And always remember, as Ayn Rand said with the piercing clarity of her insightful wisdom, "Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive." And here she said, "The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind."

Further, now that you recognize the "scare-and-switch" con, I'm sure you won't fall for it any more. And for freedom's (and honesty's) sake, please don't use it.

It's hard to find another word or concept that has two meanings which are not only vastly different from one another, but where one is a virtue and the other is a vice.  Such a word can be a pretty powerful and evil weapon in the hands (mouth?) of a politician, con artist, clergyman, parent, teacher, or celebrity or journalist with an agenda, right? Especially when they get you to accept the vice as a virtue and the virtue as a vice. That's how they get the unthinking many to sacrifice so much so willingly to the conniving few, actually getting them to feel guilty about the virtue of taking care of themselves and their families first! If you've ever wondered why the American housewife has marched quietly into the workplace because she had to (not because she wanted to) now that it takes two incomes to maintain the same standard of living that one income provided before, well, now you know.

And if you'd previously thought it was an inexplicable paradox that some of the most self-serving people (far-sighted capitalists) have brought more blessings, opportunities and powerful tools of productivity to more people than anyone else, and that some of the most supposedly "compassionate" and "caring" people (socialists) have brought more misery and death to more people than anyone else, well now you know why.

It's important for your own personal clarity to reject any conception of selfishness which includes the thoughtless indulgence in random temptations or disregard of others' interests.  Those definitely do NOT represent genuinely self-interested behaviors, and people who think they do are hurting themselves in the long run.  Such thinking actually clouds their minds and restricts their thinking to an extremely narrow,  strictly altruist view of ethics, and the confusion and self-sabotage which ultimately results from that.****

Finally, there is no rational basis on earth for accepting altruism as your personal moral code.  It is so fundamentally foreign to life itself that it can only be smuggled into your psyche in the first place by peer pressure and blind faith.  Your enlightenment about that fact would be dramatically enhanced by reading THIS brief essay about "altruism ... the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization."

*Many of the deliberate con artists are the "true believers" of fanatical religious or political sects who actually accept the dogma that it is a mortal sin for you to take care of yourself and your family first and in any way exercise your right to the pursuit of happiness while their precious cause is in any way neglected, underfunded or even unaccepted.

**I thought it should have gone without saying, but judging from some of the inquiries I get, I guess it doesn't. So here goes:  NO, making money does NOT have to include ANY type of criminal or shady activity.  In fact, literally millions of people have generated a terrific living through totally honest work and trade.  If you have a hard time seeing that, it's YOUR motives and character which should be suspect, and no one else's.

***Always remember the difference between economic power and political power: You can refuse to hire someone's services or buy his products in the private sector and go somewhere else instead. In the public sector, though, if you refuse to accept a politician's or bureaucrat's product or services you go to jail. Ultimately, after all, all regulations are observed and all taxes are paid at gunpoint. I believe those few who can't even see that have been short-sighted sheep, and I suggest they learn how to think conceptually, develop consistency and grasp principles soon.

****For further elaboration on this cautionary admonition, see What does Ayn Rand mean when she describes selfishness as a virtue? HERE. And the context in which she says the concept of selfishness, in its exact and purest sense, is "concern with one's own interests ... It is not a concept that one can surrender to man's enemies, nor to the unthinking misconceptions, distortions, prejudices and fears of the ignorant and the irrational." HERE.

        "Why are Americans such big givers? Some say this generosity is merely the outgrowth of the spectacular success of capitalism at wealth creation. And no one should argue with capitalism's success in generating wealth, or that possessing wealth beyond that required to meet one's immediate needs makes contributing to humanitarian causes easier. 

        "But surely there is more to the link between capitalism and humanitarianism than wealth creation. After all, there are plenty of things one can do with one's wealth other than contribute it to meeting the needs of others. Humanitarianism rests not just on wealth but on an ethos. And two aspects of the ethos of capitalism - materialism and individualism - are what make humanitarianism possible.

        "Materialism is the belief that the quality of one's life on earth is important: that life should be more than a daily struggle to meet immediate needs. This is important, for if one does not believe that the material conditions of life are important, no value exists in meeting the material needs of others. 

        "The individuals who commandeered the aeroplanes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did not think the material conditions of life mattered. Indeed, they did not think life itself mattered. They willingly brought death to themselves and thousands of others and suffering to tens of thousands for a non-material purpose.

        "Indeed, their acts and the rhetoric of their leaders are not just non-material, but anti-material. They believe in tearing down. Capitalism, by contrast, is the ideology of building up; it is the best ethos for making our dreams and aspirations concrete that mankind has ever found." -- Lawrence Lindsey, "The generosity of capitalism: The US is the world's biggest giver because its ethos of individualism encourages humanitarianism" Financial Times, London, Nov 22, 2001

   "The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced." -- Ayn Rand

   "As the death toll mounts--as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on--the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century." -- Harvard University Press' review of The Black Book of Communism     "The myth of the well-intentioned founders--the good czar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs--has been laid to rest for good." -- Tony Judt, New York Times 

  "Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state.  That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals." -- Lew Rockwell

    "The three values which men held for centuries and which have now collapsed are: mysticism, collectivism, altruism.  Mysticism -- as a cultural power -- died at the time of the Renaissance.  Collectivism -- as a political ideal -- died in World War II.  As to altruism -- it has never been alive.  It is the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization, and men survived it only to the extent to which they neither believed nor practiced it. ..." -- Ayn Rand

     The Chinese are coming, and it's a good thing -- they'll make the pie bigger for all of us.  Once the free-market protections for contracts and private property are totally established in mainland China, their entrepreneurs will buy up the world unless we get our philosophical act together.  You see, entrepreneurial enthusiasm should be nothing to be ashamed of -- and the Chinese are not the slightest bit ashamed of it; they (and other far east Asians) have neither concepts of, words for, nor histories of  being ashamed of it.  Thus they do NOT suffer from that nagging, residual (and often crippling) self-doubt about whether their productive selfishness is a virtue, as so many Americans, Canadians and Europeans still do (but can no longer afford to in the face of this fierce competition).  Their business leaders, unlike American ones, don't get intimidated into funding public policy institutes, activists and politicians who act to cripple the economy so often. Look to the history of Hong Kong for inspiration -- and/or a warning.