Selfishness and self-interest

It is easy to confuse 'selfish' with 'self-interest'. Apart from the fact that the two words sound similar, under actually existing capitalism their elision serves an important ideological purpose. An individual acts selfishly when their behaviour secures for them the main part of a limited resource at the expense of other parties. The selfish individual aims at maximising his (it is a feature of political thought that it is dominanted by masculine personal pronouns) gains and to seek to win. This type of 'individual' is the the 'rational' unit at the centre of choice theory and liberal political thought, from Lockle to Rawls. It is the main idea at the centre of neo-liberalism. The term 'self-interest' is used synonymously. But it is relatively straightforward to see that this is at root a philosophical error. Self-interest is something that we ought to always act upon. Don't drink alcohol, don't smoke, do more exercise etc. The self's interest is, fundamentally, to endure and to flourish.

The idea of 'flourishing' is a political idea that by extension includes others.

One cannot flourish independently of others. Firstly, selves are immeditaly thrown into relations with others - in villages, towns, communities, unions and so on. The success or otherwise of these organisations largely determines the success or flourishing of the individual selves that it is made up from. Whilst there are 'heroes' that escape their historical conditions (see 'The Poor List' below), these individuals are not indicative, not everyone can 'make it' and their success only serves to haunt the contexts they escaped from (take a trip round Liverpool and see the ghostly remnants of The Beatles, for instance - whose members never returned to the city that they came from).

Secondly, individuals flourish in joint efforts with others. An element of flourishing stems from the recognition of other selves. The other's interpretation of your actions - in Sartrean terms to those others you owe justification for your actions to - is an indispensable part of a self's interest. Not to be interested in the reacions of anybody else would be a lonely place indeed. The self is implicitly bound up in the intersts of others, your actions and your socially perceived well-being are of concern to others - if no one is interested in you, then, again, you would occupy a lonely and unflourishing world. Finally, self-interest inescapbly involves the idea of social conflict. What is in the interests of your village, community or union is going to involve the equal loss to other likeminded organisations. A team wins - one team has to lose, a strike is won, shareholders are forced to share some of their illgotten gains, but the individuals that constitute these organisations act against their self-interests in so far as they act selfishly.

I go to a party and drink all the beer, eat all the food and am copiously sick outside. I am never invited to a party in the town again and I am shunned by mine hosts. I have acted selfishly but not in my self-interest (being invited to parties is, of course, part of self-flourishing). Members of a union pay their dues to their organisation - in a way, they act selflessly - they attract no immediate gain from this - yet their solidarity (unless they are condemned to be part of the British and French union system for ever) ultimately triumphs. A wholly selfish life is unsustainable.

Under derilict capitalism, it is sound, from an elite perspective, that these two ideas are conflated. The self, imagined on its own, cannot be thought to have a collective aspect nor be seen to take part in struggles not obviously in its immediate interest. To have imposed the thought that to buy SUV's, electronic goods and luxury items by the ton and to think, at the same time, that this is in your self-interest, is to play a role in the hijack of a conceptual term that is fundamental to the way we think about politics and society. We erroneously think that to consume is to flourish, yet wonder why the dead congealed things we end up with make us feel depressed. (Try it, take a look at the computer you had ten years ago, under the stairs or the old mobile in the drawer).