Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello everyone. Welcome to the 299th episode of objectively Speaking. I'm Lawrence Olivo, Senior Project Manager here at the Atlas Society. Jennifer Grossman has the week off, but I'm excited because I have with me Atlas Society Senior Fellow Robert Jasinski for a webinar exploring enlightened self interest, why so many people get it wrong, and why rational long term thinking is the true foundation for a free and civilized society.
So before I pass it over to Rob, let me just remind all of you, be sure to ask your questions in the comments section, whether you're on YouTube, Facebook, x Instagram, and we'll try to get to as many questions as we can. But with that, Rob, thank you so much for joining me.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Hi, thanks. Thanks, Lawrence.
Yeah, so I think the title that this webinar is given is the Real Cost of Short Term Thinking. But my original thought of the title was calling it Irrational Self Interest because Ayn Rand is known as an advocate of rational self interest. Which raises the kind of obvious question, well, what is irrational self interest? What is that contrasted to what would, what would irrational self interest look like? And how would you, how do you tell if you're, if your self interest is rational or irrational? And so I want to give a little bit of background to that and I've got a really great example to help us explain, explore this. An example, fairly recent example from the news.
So one of the things that that Objectives tend to do is we tend to emphasize the radicalism of Ayn Rand's morality of self interest. But I, I've got this sort of long term campaign of mine to emphasize the continuity of her idea of self interest, the continuity with what came before.
Because there is a long and well established tradition, I think Lawrence used the phrase along a well established tradition of enlightened self interest, or sometimes they would use the phrase self interest. Properly understood, this was like the standard moral theory of the Enlightenment and of the founding fathers with this idea of enlightened self interest.
And there are some differences between different views of enlightened self interest, but the basic gist is something like this, that it's okay to want to be happy and prosperous, but there are certain things and we, and we should be going out and doing, you know, starting businesses, starting farms, you know, doing the things that will make us, that will, that will add to our happiness and well being.
But at the same time there are certain things we do or refrain from doing for the public good.
But we do this because we think it will benefit ourselves over the long Term it will be in our enlightened self interest.
So examples of things that we would do would be volunteering as firefighters or volunteering to fight in the military, you know, like in the American Revolution, to throw off the yoke of British oppression, or engaging in some forms of charity that, that, you know, building things for your community that your community needs or helping people out. And the things we would refrain from would be fraud, you know, ripping off your friends and competitors, corruption, political corruption, bribing public officials, or, you know, robbing banks. All these sorts of things that tend to lead to your short term gain, but at the expense of eroding the fabric of the community in which you are. The, the, the orderliness and, and the, the safety of the community in which, in which you're living.
Now, there's some, like I said, there's some differences in different versions of this, but Ayn Rand is really in this tradition, except that she only, she defines more clearly what the enlightened self interest is enlightened by.
And that's where she gets to. Rational self interest, I think, is continuous with this older tradition. If it seems radical, or if it seemed radical when Iran started advocating for the virtue of selfishness in the 1960s, it seems radical because of its contrast to altruism.
Now, as originally conceived, altruism meant not just doing nice things for other people, which you could certainly doing nice things for other people, something you certainly do out of an enlightened self interest.
But altruism as originally described and coined, the person who actually created the word meant it to be something much more than that. It meant it to be a total self denial.
So the guy who invented the word was Auguste Comte, a French philosopher. And his, it was summed up by one of his sort of popularizers as the idea, quote, that we should endeavor to starve the whole of the desires which point to our personal satisfaction by denying them all gratification not strictly required by physical necessities, unquote. Now, notice the contradiction, by the way, because we're supposed to be doing this to, to live for others, to work for others, to help other people, to make other people happy.
But we ourselves are supposed to be denying ourselves all gratification and living like these sort of, you know, these monks.
And so the contradiction here that Ayn Rand pointed out is that, you know, how is it that happiness and having good things in life is, is good when you give it to others, but it's not good for yourself?
And, but, but this is this, this original idea of altruism was this very monk like you are a cog in the machinery of society, the machinery of the state. And you will have no desires for yourself and you'll sacrifice yourself fully and completely.
And the thing is that this philosophy became very dominant, coined in the, this term altruism was coined. The philosophy was created in the early 19th century, by the end of the 19th century, by the early 19th century it became very dominant. And I've got a, a, an article that I wanted Lawrence to post an academic article. I came up along, I came across a long time ago about how altruism came to America and the ways in which this was spread and popularized in the late 19th, early 20th century in America.
And it's a very interesting sort of, it's sort of a sketch more than a thorough history. I think there's a whole book that can be written about this. It would be very fascinating.
But basically the guy concludes that altruism comes as, not just as a moral movement, as a political movement and very much this sort of you are a cog in the wheel of the state kind of outlook.
And it, it eventually gets absorbed as a separate political movement. It gets absorbed as a left wing form that got absorbed into socialism and communism which really took seriously, you know, you are here to serve the interests of the state and to serve the collective and the proletariat.
And then it also got absorbed into a right wing, more traditionalist form that got absorbed into the churches and the idea that, you know, the religion and the religious view that your job is to sacrifice your desires completely for the sake of, of religious, traditional viewpoints.
And by the way, this is different from, this was a, this was a change from traditional American religion which was very Enlightenment influenced and very much in the Founders era and up through the early 19th century. We have lots of sources showing that the American religion very much embraced this idea of, of, of enlightened self interest. But it's a change that, that, that the religious views became more strictly and more thoroughly altruistic and hostile to any form of self interest.
And so if that's the dominant viewpoint that's set up that and it's taking over it and accept widely accepted in the early 20th century. You can see how Ayn Rand seemed very radical compared to that. But also the 20th century shows us all the problems with this really consistent, really hardcore form of altruism because we had whole societies that were based on the idea of, you know, the individual has no rights, he exists only to serve the state, he's there to be sacrificed to the state. We had that in the Soviet Union. We had that in Nazi Germany. Different variations on that same theme. And we saw the horrible results that come from that. That.
But if we look at this sort of wider context of what came before that, the history of enlightened self interest, one of the things that I want to explore here is we can see the opposite of rational self interest is not just altruism. There's another opposite of rational self interest. It's an opposite in a different direction or maybe along a different axis. And the opposite of rational self interest is irrational self interest.
So if we're going to understand what rational or enlightened self interest really consists of, we should take some time to understand its contrast to an irrational or unenlightened self interest.
And I happen to have. This is the next thing I want Lawrence to drop in here. I happen to have a great example of this that I came across recently.
And this is the New York Times article.
And so this is an article in the New York Times from trying to look at the date here. It's like for a month or so ago.
And this is a case that just happened.
It's based, this is a report, is based on prosecution filings against a guy named Josh Nass, a lawyer named Josh Nass. And the basic. Let me just sort of go through it. I give Lawrence, throw this into the comment, into the, into the comments field so you can, you can follow this link if you want. But I'm going to basically lay out this is like a case study in irrational self interest because there's a bunch of people trying to grab for as much as they can get, trying to make themselves rich, trying to get ahead and ending up just totally shooting themselves in the foot because they are not thinking about the larger context or consequences of their actions.
All right, so the background for this is there's a guy named Joseph Schwartz who was the background in this. He took a bunch of money to, that his family had made from selling an insurance business. As far as I know, the insurance business was legit. But then he took it and he bought this chain of nursing homes and then proceeded to do a whole bunch of shady things. So, for example, he created false names of false employees for the nursing homes and that and paid salaries to those employees. And that money was actually being funneled back to him, you know, outside, not. He wasn't taking it as profits, legitimate profits from the, and from the organization. He was funneling it back to him, sort of embezzling it away from the company. By funneling it to a fake employee. And then at the same time, to make up for the money he was taking out of the organization, he was doing things like not paying the payroll taxes or the insurance, health insurance for his employees that he promised to pay and not telling them that he wasn't paying it. So they thought their. Their stuff was being paid for, and then discovering that it wasn't paid for because he was pocketing that money for himself as this whole list of, you know, basically fraud and embezzlement that this guy was doing.
And of course, he got caught. You know, of course the whole thing eventually fell. Fell through that it was all discovered, and he was caught and he was prosecuted. And so one of the things that, you know, my background as a journalist, one things we journalists would normally do when talking about a case like this is we use words like alleged, where it is claimed that he did this. And that's what we say when charges have been filed against the person. But it hasn't yet gone to court. I don't have to say anything about that, about Joseph Schwartz, because it went to court. All these things were brought out in court. They were brought out in the full blaze of jurisprudence. And he was convicted and sentenced to go to jail.
That's where the next part of our story begins.
So he's convicted, sentenced to go to jail. So he goes and he hires a shady attorney, a guy named Josh Nassau.
And that's where the next. The part of the story that's being reported by the New York Times come from. He hires this guy, Josh Nass, who says, I've got connections in the administration, I've got political connections. Pay me a bunch of money, paid like a hundred thousand dollars. Pay me a bunch of money, and I'll make sure that I get your case presented to the right people, presented in the right way, and you'll get a pardon.
And Schwartz did this. He put a bunch of money to Josh Nasty, put money to some other people who said they could do the same thing. And lo and behold, he got a pardon.
And so. And this, you know, not only got him off the hook from going to jail, I think he spent like a week in jail. And suddenly he sprung out. Not only this get. Get off the hook for going to jail, but it also got off the hook for having to pay back reparations to some of the people he ripped off or damages for some of the people. You know, they're people whose parents died in the nursing home because they were getting. They're being neglected because he wasn't paying the bills.
He got off from having to, to, to make reparations or make payments back to those people.
So, you know, ends happily for him, right? Well, not quite. Because here's what the New York Times story is about, which is he hires this guy, Josh Nass, gets the pardon. Nass comes back to him, says, oh, you owe me another $500,000 because I successfully got this pardon for you. And Joseph Schwartz says, no, I'm not going to pay you. He stiffs the guy.
And then Josh Nast turns around and says, well, how am I going to collect this money?
So he hires a thug.
And it's mentioned in here that the guy's Russian.
So he hires a Russian mobster basically to go kidnap or threaten Joseph Schwartz and his son in order to shake them down to get this money that he's owed. And the best part, because this is like a turducken of short term thinking and irrational self interest. The best part about this is the Russian mobster he hires immediately goes around, sells everybody out to the feds, makes a deal with the FBI, with, with prosecutors to tell everything about this, the scheme, in exchange for getting his own immigration status fixed. And there's a whole irony on the immigration aspect of this as well.
All right, so this is, I mean, this whole thing is like, it's like I described as being like a David Mamet play. It's like one of these films where you have somebody engages in a criminal scheme and then the whole thing falls apart because everybody, everybody else starts trying to figure out how they can stab it, a knife in the back of the person next to them and the whole thing falls apart in his web of recriminations and double dealing and betrayals.
If this doesn't come out as a movie, I'd be very disappointed because it is perfect material for that, for that kind of thing.
But what can we. The question here is what kind of lessons can we draw from this?
And so I did. I'm going to mention if Lawrence could put this link in there. I did an article on this a few weeks ago drawing some of the lessons from that about irrational self interest. So I want to point out a couple things about this story that this is our case study that we're going to draw on to say what is irrational self interest.
So the first thing I want to note is let's start with Joseph Schwartz, the guy who has the corrupt nursing home organization.
Here he is, he's out.
He's got plenty of money to begin with. He starts with like $20 million that he has to invest to start this thing. So this is a guy who could be, you know, running a legitimate business, doing well for himself, could, could be living a perfectly good life.
But he has to go for how can I, you know, get a short term gain out of this? Instead of getting the long term benefit of running the business successfully getting the legitimate profits from out of the business. He has to go for how can I get the short term gain out of this and how do I get the short term gain in a way that is easily, you know, rationally projected is going to cause problems later. It's going to cause these servicing homes to run short of money. It's going to cause the standard of care to go down, it's going to cause lawsuits, it's going to cause regulators to come in and in several cases, they actually had to come in and take over these nursing homes for the good of the, you know, for the protection of the, of the people who are being treated there.
Because literally in one case, the lights were about to be, the electricity is about to be cut off because this guy wasn't paying the bills and there were people attached to the machines that were keeping them alive. So the state had to come in and state regulars had to come in and say, okay, we're taking this thing over.
So this guy wrecks his business and gets himself and a whole lot of legal liability and, and criminal liability based on this, on wanting to go for this short term grab for cash. So that's the first level of irrational self interest to it. Now the second level is he finds himself in big legal trouble. So he goes to a shady lawyer who's promising to, to basically to, to make a dishonest deal to buy him a pardon. And so, you know, you already know from the very basis of this thing that you are not dealing with an honest person. You're not dealing with someone who's above board. You are making a shady deal to begin with.
And then I love the fact that, you know, Schwartz can't help himself. He's got some sort of mental block, some sort of problem. So of course, you know, having Gage in a shady business where he was not paying people, he then doesn't pay the guy who gets him the pardon.
And you know, the guy who gets him the pardon. You have to look at it from his perspective to how irrational. This is also a key study in irrational self interest because here he is, he's representing a guy whose whole reason he's in trouble is he doesn't pay people what he owes them and then he delivers for the guy and doesn't get paid what he owes. But who could have predicted that, you know, so this is again, somebody thinking about this short term gain he can make. I can get all this money for getting this guy apart, a shady pardon, but at the same time not thinking, what kind of person am I dealing with? Can I really trust this person? And obviously you can't.
And then again, this is the. I called, I think I called this a turducken of irrational self interest because it's, you know, turducken is like, it's a, it's one thing inside of another. It's a Russian, I call it a Russian nesting doll because it involves a Russian mobster. So he goes to the Russian mobster and you know, makes a deal with him to shake down Schwartz to get the money, and the Russian mobster turns him in. And what do you expect when you're going to a Russian mobster? You know, there's an old saying, there's no honor among thieves. And that's definitely true here. Not a single one of these people was dealing honestly with any other person he was dealing with. And the thing is that when you look at it from a rational perspective, there was no reason for him ever to think that he was dealing with people who were honest and above board and were going to follow through on what they promised to do.
So this gives us all sorts of lessons to draw from on what irrational self interest is.
And the first thing I want to say is that there's an each of these, each of the cases here. There's this pattern among these people of short term thinking of going for the immediate short term gain. I can siphon off social source siphoned off like $5 million. I can siphon off $5 million in these payments to imaginary employees that go into my own account. I can siphon this money off and, and not thinking about what are the consequences of that going to be, what's going to find out what's going to happen when people notice this? What's going to happen when the lawsuits and the prosecutors start circling around and figure out what you've been doing?
Or the guy who's selling the pardon saying, hey look, I've got this great set up. I have friends in the White House or friends in Washington D.C.
i can get this guy's pardon pushed through and not thinking about what kind of people he's dealing with. So that's why I'm going to take it to the second level here. So it's not just the thing of, of going for the immediate gain without thinking about the possible consequences of what happens next. What are the consequences of that when this affects other people, when they start coming back to me to get what I've taken from them.
The second level is rational selfishness isn't just about projecting the immediate consequences of your actions.
It's also about projecting what kind of people you're working and dealing with making that larger level decision of. If I am dealing with honest people who are making an honest living, who are above board and following the rule of law, then I can rely on those people as stable and secure. I know that they're going to pay me the money they owe me. I know that they're not going to hire, hire somebody to break my kneecaps if, if, if they want to collect money from me. I know that they're not going to rat me out and try to get me thrown in jail in order to get, you know, something that they need.
So if you're dealing with rational, honest, above board people, you are suddenly in a, a world that is 10, 000 times more stable and secure than if you find yourself in this sort of David Mamet play of, of, of, of double dealing and double crossing that these guys got themselves into.
And then that leads to the last level of the concept of rational self interest or enlightened self interest. And this ties back to the whole sort of social and political ramification of, of enlightened self interest or rational self interest. And this is the version that the founding fathers talked a lot about, which is the idea that it's not just about dealing in your own life with honest, decent, law abiding people. It's also about living in a society in which the rule of law applies and in which people follow the laws in which the law is enforced, in which there's order and regularity and it's not just a constant smash and grab for whatever anybody can get in the short term because, you know, so societies exist. There are societies that are highly anarchic. I mean places like Somalia, which literally I, I don't know if they have a government now, but for a long time they didn't really have as a government, they just had warlords and, and you literally had them in a state of, of, of literal anarchy where there is no government and these are high and, and there are other places that aren't quite in that state of anarchy, but they're highly corrupt governments. Places in Eastern Europe, places in Central Europe you know, places where they never actually had really the rule of law.
And you have habitually have highly corrupt governments.
And you have that same problem of everything is insecure. Anything that you get can be taken away from you at any moment by some other guy who has better political connections or who pays a bigger bribe.
And those countries tend to be extremely poor countries. They tend to be countries where you can, you know, you might make a good living, but you're, it's a good living relative to the fact that you have an extreme, you know, it's a good living by the standards of an extremely poor country where there's relatively little, that there's less that your money can buy than if you're in a advanced, industrial and highly lawful society like you would find in Western Europe, or mostly these days in the United States.
So that's the level on which the Founding Fathers were thinking about enlightened self interest. That's the level in which Ayn Rand is thinking about rational self interest that it doesn't just include. You know, Ayn Rand thought a lot and wrote a lot about the necessity of judging the people you're dealing with and dealing with the honest and rational and orderly people, the people who are reliable and live up to their obligations. This is a huge important thing for her. It features heavily in her novels.
But also what the Founding Fathers wrote about was that. And what Ayn Rad wrote about to some extent as well, was the necessity for having a whole society in which you have the rule of law, in which you have, you have an orderly system in which property rights are secure and in which people follow their obligations, in which everyone isn't trying to chisel and cheat the person next to them at all times. And that's what actually enables us to have a much more advanced, a much wealthier society and also one that's much more secure so we don't end up like these guys, NASA and Schwartz, these, these guys, and I don't know the name of the Russian mobster, but these guys who were constantly stabbing each other in the back and selling each other out.
And so that's the need for the concept of rational self interest. Now, one last element I would talk about here. When I say rational self interest, what we mean is a consideration of the long term and larger consequences of your actions, not focusing immediately on the short term thinking and immediately on, oh, there's that prize there that people may have heard of. There's a, a very famous psychology experience called the marshmallow psychology experiment, called the Marshmallow test. And this is where they, they have kids and this testing the kids ability to have to, to, to accept deferred gratification. Right. So the idea is that they say we put out a marshmallow in the middle of the table and these are kids like 8, 10 years old.
And they, I think more like 8, 5 to 8 years old and they put a marshmallow in the middle of the table. So you could take that marshmallow now or if you can wait one minute, you'll get two marshmallows and then this has to see, does the kid grab the marshmallow right now or is the kid able to exercise and self control to wait a couple ever? If it's one minute or three minutes or something like that, does the kid have the self control to wait a couple of minutes to get the second marshmallow as well? He'll get a greater advantage, but he has to wait, wait, he has to control his impulses and not grab for the immediate thing.
And that ended up being this, this, this, this, this marshmallow test has become sort of a, a watchword for this idea of impulse control, of being able to think long term, of being able to exercise the self control, not to grab for something immediately in order to get a greater benefit later on. And that's, I think the whole essence of rational self interest is this idea of looking to the long term, looking to the bigger picture, including the big picture of what does our whole society look like, how is it structured, and then using that as the basis for pursuing your self interest as opposed to the short term sort of smash and grab. All right, so that's the big example I wanted to go over. That's our case study. That's the less overall lessons I want to draw out from it. But I want to leave some time here, a fair bit of time actually, for, for questions and comments and drawing more implications out of that.
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Great, thanks, Rob. So just to the comment that you just made with this case study with the marshmallow example, there's a question a little bit earlier on that was asking about, you know, that question of how much time do we think forward ahead? Sort of like that. Yeah, to the question in hand, it was saying like a week, a month, several years. How do we really categorize that? Or is there probably a better way we should be thinking about that way of framing things?
[00:27:00] Speaker B: Well, so Ayn Rand used some interesting formulation where she talks about the whole lifespan of a human being, you know, human beings this way. I just turned 57 recently.
So human beings live a long time and you, you actually got to appreciate that when you start getting out there on the farther end of things. Now I'm not, you know, I'm not ancient, I'm, I'm, I've got a lot of years left, but I've, I can, I can I now the sort of the thing, or I can look back at decisions I made as an adult and see consequences that came from them 30, 35 years later. Right. And that gives you a different perspective on life, of how long a game life is.
And so I think, you know, you have to be taking on a, you know, for planning your life and certainly for, for coming up with moral principles and principles of how to run a society. We need to be thinking on a decades long timescale in terms of now. It doesn't mean obviously that you defer all gratification because, you know, you don't want to live like a monk. You're not going to, the point is not to live like a monk until you're 70 and then really live up life. You, there's always a balance that you're making between the short, you know, there's a. How much you allocate to, to your short term needs, the needs of not just providing for yourself, you know, food and shelter, but also enjoying life on the immediate short term versus how much do you then, you know, plan for what's going to happen a decade or two decades or three decades from now. But the point is that, you know, so there's a balance you always have to make because life is actually lived and enjoyed in the immediate moment and in the short term. And you always have to balance the needs of the short term and, and not which includes the needs for enjoying life in the short term.
You know, you don't want to be at the point where you're constantly deferring enjoyment and never actually getting to it. But so you have to, you have to balance the needs of the short term against the long term. But the point is that you're thinking about that, you're making rational decisions about that and, and, and you're aware of the issue and you're, you're, you're planning that out. So yeah, human beings live, you know, 70, 80 years in advanced industrial societies.
Our long term thinking has to be out on the scale of decades. You know, we have to be, I like to put it, we have to be 30 year mortgage person people. I've got a 30 year mortgage that I'm in the last year of. So you know, this is, you have to be a 30 year mortgage person. You have to think in terms of making that commitment and knowing what, know how that, that you're doing something that's going to take 30 years to come to completion and making those decisions.
But yes, in terms of what about short term versus long term? There's always the, the trade off between the two. That is a necessity.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: Well, and let's talk about another question. This comes from a comment from Candice Morena and I think a conversation that was happening in the chat. Can we talk a bit about the more of the intrinsic versus the extra motivation regards the interest. A conversation that's happened in the chat is this perspective that many people seem to have. Well, people in politics or in these higher positions seem to be getting away with corrupt activities. So. And if we take pages from Atlas Shrugged with Dagny trying to be really productive with her company and then all these people in Washington sort of just trying to take care of themselves, maybe we can talk a little bit more about that.
[00:30:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
One of the things I want to, one of the things I want to say is that all this talk about, you know, corruption in high places and corrupt businessmen, it could seem kind of left wing coded.
But you know, if you look at Atlas Shrugged, you know, I'd read writing about this. Who are all of our top villains? Well, they're corrupt politically connected, corrupt businessmen.
And, and, and you know, some of the villains are the, are the, the people on the other side of the corrupt bargains. The, the, the bureaucrats and the regulators who are in bed with the corrupt businessmen and trading favors back and forth.
So you know, this is not a left versus right thing. I don't think it's even a capitalist versus anti capitalist thing. So one digging a little, little soapbox I want to get on because I think because of the, you know, I grew up in the later decades of the 20th century because of the 20th century context which still sort of hangs over everything. It's certainly the context in which Ayn Rand was writing.
There was the sense that the big, the big conflict of the era was between capitalism versus socialism. And we still tend to think of that way that the enemy of capitalism is the socialist, the left winger who's going to, you know, who wants state control over everything.
And there's, but there's an older tradition before that. So I, I like to talk about the Locofocos. Locofocus are my favorite. Probably nobody knows who they are. They're my favorite obscure political movement from, they're from the early 19th century.
And they. It's a funny name. It sounds like I'm swearing at you in Italian. Loco Foco. But that was their nickname there.
The long story behind the, how they got the nickname. But the point is they were free marketers like circa 1835. And they didn't see the enemy of the free market as being socialism because socialism barely, I mean, didn't really exist in America at that time.
They were like a few little communities, a few little experiments. The term socialism had just been invented a few years earlier in France.
Really come here. So they didn't see the enemy of capital, of free markets or capitalism as socialism.
They saw the enemy of free markets as being special privileges for entrenched businessmen. And then they, they went after monopolies and, and cases where you had these. They were famously corrupt group politicians in New York City.
It's called the Tammany Hall Group. And there was, you know, there was a political boss at the center of it and they all had bribes and government contracts and, and special favors and everything going around and special favors for businesses. And they saw the enemy of free markets as being, you know, these government officials coming in, making corrupt idea, making corrupt deals, taking bribes, entrenching existing interests. And they saw that as the enemy of capitalism. And I think Ayn Rand is very much in that tradition because I said an Atlas Shrugged. The villains are mostly exactly that type of person.
So again, it's the irrational self interest of creating a highly corrupt system rather than a more productive, more innovative and more secure free market economy where you actually have the rule of law that supports the free market.
[00:33:39] Speaker A: Great. We have a few more questions here coming in. So let me get to a couple of those. Let's get into this one here from Robert Lankenheath, who's asked who states our national legislative and executive branches seem to operate in short term interest.
Is that a flaw in our Constitution? If so, how do we correct it?
[00:34:00] Speaker B: Yeah, so that's funny because I'm, I'm actually running for office right now. So this is, I don't, I don't, I can't talk about politics here. They have to keep these things separate. But I will say I keep it theoretical.
Just say that I'm immersed in the, in the nuts and bolts of seeing how this work, how this happens. But, and seeing the people for to whom it happens, let's put it that way. But leaving that to one side, let's talk about the theoretical and the constitutional issues. I think it is, I don't Think it's a constitutional problem per se because we have a constitution that was actually built around that. And that one of the genius, the genius, the, the, the ideas, great ideas of the founding fathers and especially James Madison was that the, the. They thought about, they built the system around that they built around the expectation that politicians are going to be preening jerks.
They knew this because of course, you know, they, well, they knew this for two reasons. Why. One is they knew this because they had dealt with the, the corrupt administrations sent for the. That that built up around the royal governors before the revolution. So before the Revolution you had these royal governors who were sent and given all this power and all those privileges and often had this very corrupt circle around them who were fate trading favors and all that. So they knew these are preening jerks who got out for themselves.
And then of course, you know, after the revolution they're forming their own government. So they're engaged in their neck deep in politics and often fighting each other. And so they also do from dealing with their fellow politicians of the age, these are preening jerks who are just out for themselves. And you know, some of them are out for attention, some of them are out for, you know, for the status and position and some of them are out for money.
And so when they built the Constitution, they sort of did it in a way saying, well, we're going to try to harness that sense of ambition and try to make it so that every branch of government has an interest in checking every other branch of government and being in being a counterbalance to every other branch of government.
And I, you know, it's, it's so that, you know, the, if the, the guys who go to Congress have an interest in finding a way to stand up against the, the, the president or stand up the exact. Against the executive and guard their own power against overreach by the executive, while the courts have an interest in being a check on the other two branches by asserting the rule of law, again asserting the laws against them.
And every branch will have at every level of government, the states governments will have their own interests that they assert against the federal government, the federal government against the states. So they tried to build this whole system where the whole reason why nobody has power, the whole reason that we're not going to have a king, the whole reason we're not going to have a dictator, we're not going to have any one person with too much power is because if people are preening, if politicians are printing jerks who are out for themselves, then, then we should have the power distributed among a bunch of them who will always be working against each other and limiting each other. And that's the way the system's supposed to work. And I think it's worked, you know, fabulously well for most of America's history. I think it has. It's in need of a little restoration and repair and refurbishing right now because there are some parts of it that are not performing this function right now. And that's how you get this. But somebody also said, has it always been this way? Yes, it has always been this way.
It has always been this way that there's somebody out there doing this. There's somebody out here, out there looking for that short term interest.
And sometimes it's a big business and sometimes it's the guy, you know, who, who lives down the, down, down the hall in your apartment building or the, the. I think the most notorious guys are the guys who are the head of the, of the homeowners association in your subdivision who are often, you know, very status seeking and power seeking.
But this is a constant feature that, that you know, people want to pursue their self interest but some people have that problem of trying to do it in the smash and grab short term way and we're always trying to deal with that. And the solution is you create a social system where you have those checks and balances and those ways of trying to, trying to enforce the rule of law and enforce. And you set up rules that are in the long term benefit of everyone and those rules primarily being, you know, individual rights, individual liberties, protection for, for, for your rights and, and the rule of law that's applied equally to everyone. You try to set up those rules and enforce those rules and create a system where again the ambitions of, of, of one set of politicians is set off against the ambitions of another set of politicians and, and hopefully helps to, to keep the system working as long as possible.
[00:38:55] Speaker A: Great. So going back to a question that happened a little bit earlier up, this one is from I like numbers. Maybe it's more psychology than anything else, but I like numbers. Ask. Don't people often start with what they want then rationalize why it's in their long term self interest. So maybe we can talk about some of the pitfalls that people make when they're going through this process of figuring out what's best for them.
[00:39:19] Speaker B: All right, so somebody else also asked and I think I can deal with these together. I see one is the failure of enlightened self interest today. And I won't Say it's not just today. This is a constant feature.
I can find you equal examples of this from the time of the founders, from the time of 19. It's, it's everywhere. You know, now it can be better and worse in terms of the general level at which it's tolerated. But, you know, one of the big comp. I want to point out, one of the big accomplishments of the late 19th century is a major focus of politics after the Civil War in the US Was cracking down on rampant corruption in the federal government. So this is a problem that was a major. It was a problem, a huge problem in like the 1880s, 1870s and 1880s. And it was limited by the fact that the federal government was relatively small back then compared to today.
But it was a major focus of national politics, was clamping down on that corruption and having civil service rules that would make it not be just a. You know, when your faction gets in power, there's an old. It was called the spoil system because the idea is to the victor goes the spoils, meaning your faction gets in power, you get to loot the federal government. And they really clamped down on that in this 1870s and 1880s. A major story that we don't know about today because we take it for granted. The system's been in place for over 100 years.
There's still corruption, but it's not flagrant and rampant like it was because some of those rules are put in place. But what I want to say about that is what's the thinking process? And yes, absolutely, the, the way. So, you know, in Engine, if you're an engineer, you, you would look at things that say, you know, for every part you design in a system, you'd say, what's the failure mode of that part? And it doesn't mean it's a bad part. It doesn't mean that it's a bad design. But you have to know if there's some tool, something you need to use. It's important to know how does it fail and in what way is this going to fail? So that you can then design the system around, you know, avoiding and preventing that failure or limiting the damage of that failure.
And if you talk about using reason as the basis of human life, you have to know what's the failure mode of reason.
When people are trying to use reason and they fail at it, what is most likely the. Usually the cause. And usually the cause is precisely that, that people have a tendency to decide what they want to do based on custom, based on prejudice, based on their feelings based on the, again the grabbing for the marshmallow, the immediate self interest.
They decide what they want to do and then they come up with reasoning to support that.
Rather than doing the reasoning and deciding what they're going to do, they cut, decide what they want to do and backfill the reasoning behind it. And this is so widely documented and psych. You know, psychologists have gone and done experiments on this about how people do this. It's so widely documented that some psychologists have concluded therefore reason is impossible. We don't, you know, human beings are really just rationalization machines. So rationalization is the failure mode of reasoning. And it's like that. You come up with a false, illusory chain of reasoning to match something, a pre, a predetermined conclusion.
And they, some people, psychologists have concluded, well, reasoning is impossible. We're all just rationalization machines. It doesn't happen. But we know that's not true. We know that's not true because you know, we've sent a man to the moon and we just sent some people back to the moon. We know that we can actually solve, you know, engage in a process of reason to solve these long term problems. Right. I just mentioned the US Constitution. We wrote the Constitution where we had people sit down and try to figure out how do you create a political system that will prevent some of these problems? And they actually managed to succeed at it. They did a good job. You know, it has its problems today. It has always been in danger. We fought a civil war, right? It's never been perfect. There have always been, it's always been falling apart in some way. There's always been threats that are dangerous to it. But it has worked tremendously well for 250 years.
So the problems are solvable. We are capable of creating a system in which people can pursue their long term self interest and make rational decisions.
So making rational decisions is possible. But it's important to know that this is the standard failure mode and always to, you know, so there, there are all sorts of methods and techniques you need to use to, and the main thing is to be aware of it, to be constantly questioning and to always be sort of have the habit of saying, wait a minute, why am I doing what I'm doing? And I think that the top skill for, for that, that people lack is introspection is simply the habit of. Introspection basically means observing the functioning and the operations of your own mind and constantly having the habit of asking why do I think that, why do I think this is true? What Is my argument for this. And constantly being self critical.
And you know, we all have a faculty of self criticism that's there, that's part of the human nature as well, you know. So in addition to this tendency in human nature to, to this, it's just the tendency of human nature to come up with rationalizations for what you want. You also have equally part of human nature, the faculty of self criticism. And sometimes it can get out of control and people will have self esteem problems or they'll, you know, they will be too self critical. But it is a tool that, a psychological and cognitive tool that you have to always be have the habit of subjecting yourself to review and saying is that really true?
And also I find it's useful, you know, as a practical matter of the, of, of in addition to the self criticism. It's a practical mat good as a practical matter to not surround yourself with yes men and not to drive away, you know, anybody who will ask too many questions. Being married is tremendously helpful for this.
You always have somebody who's going to be asking you wait, is that really true or should you be doing this? And you have somebody you have to explain things to and that helps. You have to have people in your life, friends, spouse, frankly, kids help sometimes too, especially as they get older. But people to whom you have to give an exploit, render an explanation, who are capable of asking critical questions and getting you to and to. And people who don't always agree with you, who gets you to think through and develop or refine the reasons for your actions even if you don't agree with them. You at least have to go through that process of self criticism. And that's a crucial part, that's a crucial aid to rational self interest.
Trying to catch up on more of these.
[00:46:04] Speaker A: No worries. I copied accidentally. I was pulling one over from Instagram, but this was from Martin Martin and he was asking do corrupt systems attract people with irrational self interest or do they create more of them? And the reason I also want to bring that up is because my modern g asked on YouTube how do we think about relationship between self interest, virtual virtue and social cooperation? So we talk about so much in the individual sense, but like you said, we talked about the founding of how they thought about the founders thought of the Constitution. So look about this more in that
[00:46:40] Speaker B: sort of government society scale, okay, so one thing is do corrupt systems attract people with irrational self interest or they create more of them? And the answer is yes, both, you know, los dos.
Yes, both of those things are true.
So when you have a system that is not just, you know, where people are getting away. Not just that it's corrupt, that people are getting away with corruption. And people see that, you know, the rules don't apply anymore and they see prominent people who are dishonest, who are getting away with it.
That creates, you know, if you, if you think, yes, that's me, that's the world I want to live in, then you see this open field of opportunity and this open field of advancement and you be, you know, you, you, you go to the corrupt people and you make corrupt deals with them and if they don't stab you in the back like we had in this example we saw then, then you, you know, you help them out and they help you out and you have this whole system that rises up. And by the way, this is surprisingly non ideological, this kind of system.
A friend of mine was, I, so I, I noted something about how in one of these corrupt countries that the leader, the strongman leader had something, what was, somebody was noting how non ideological he was. He would, he wasn't socialist, he wasn't capitalist, he would just grab whatever. And I had a friend who lived for a number of years in China who said that's absolutely the case with the Chinese system, that they have no consistent ideology. The only consistent ideology is irrational self interest. You know, making the corrupt deals. It's a very ancient way of doing things. It's a pre modern way of doing things. Right. It's basically a tribal way. You have the tribal strongman and they are making deals and you flatter the strong man and you give him a cut of your proceeds. And it's, you know, the modern world is basically created by creating systems that are more rational that, that put, that push this general tendency toward irrational short term self interest that suppress it and tamp it down, make it less successful.
And so not only is it does it when you, when that falls apart or where you don't have that system in place, it attracts people who have this irrational self interest.
But also it forces people to, to work by those rules.
That is, you know, it kind of puts people in a position where being honest doesn't help you get ahead.
So people stop trying out of the futility of it.
But the other thing I wanted to address was this one of the relationship between self interest, virtue and social cooperation.
So it's a big point I make about self interest. I think Ayn Rand really took the, I've been doing work on this philosophically myself, trying to understand all this, but I think Ayn Rand sort of helped take this to a new level on the understanding of self interest, which is that one of the points I make is that the concept of rational self interest is a concept of social cooperation. It, you know, it's not if you weren't engaged. Because some things I've heard, especially from conservatives over the years, which is deeply ironic on many levels, is they said, well, you know, if you're engaged in, in a society and you're engaged in cooperation with others, then you're not just being a self reliant, self interested person, you have to be engaging in cooperation. And I said, well, no, if the opposite is true, if you were living in a hermit, living in a hut in the mountains, or if you were living alone on a deserted island somewhere, you wouldn't need individualism, you wouldn't need self interest. The concepts wouldn't have any meaning to you. You'd be doing everything by yourself and for yourself because you have no alternative. Right? You.
It's only in the context of social cooperation that concepts like self interest or individualism become necessary.
And the purpose of the function of that concept is to define the terms of social cooperation.
And the terms of social cooperation is, is it exploitative or is it cooperative? Is it to being done to mutual benefit? So what, what self interest says as a philosophy is rational. Self interest says, is that social cooperation should, should happen on a voluntary and mutually beneficial way, right? So you should make deals in a way that to, to mutual consent and to mutual advantage where you're not coercing other people, you're not ripping them off, you're not deceiving them, you're not, you don't have a relationship where one person gets all the advantages and the other person gets all the disadvantages, riches. So self interest is a way of saying you should have, you should have social relationships. And we are all pursuing our mutual self interest in a cooperative way together. And then we define the terms of what that is.
So self interest and social cooperation are really two sides of the same coin. Because when you have social cooperation that doesn't have self interest. So let's take a look at, I mentioned the Soviet Union. You know, communism is a great example where you had a whole system that was based on you are a cog and the social machine and you will be used up and exploited for the, for the greater good. And the greater good usually ended up meaning, you know, Comrade Stalin and the guys and, or, or the local commissar, somebody higher up in the food chain than you was exploiting you. And that's what happens is that in a system like that, where there's no allowance for self interest, it becomes not a system of cooperation, but a system of exploitation. And actually cooperation in those societies tends to break down because if you, if you have a system where you don't get any benefit out of working by the rules of the system, you're going to stop working by the rules of the system. The, the, the great joke that went around in the Soviet Union was, was that we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
So one of the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed is it relied on all the workers to go out there and do their best and work hard and make the system work so that all that benefit could be siphoned off to the state and then siphoned off from the state to the apparatchiks and the, you know, the, the guys in the politburo.
And then what happened is under those rules, people stopped doing the work. And, and so the whole system breaks down. So self interest is a way of defining the rules of social cooperation and making social cooperation possible on the fundamental rule. So Ayn Rand calls it the trader principle. And this is the idea that everything should be a trade in the sense that everything should be mutual advantage. Everything should be a trade where you give something and you get something back of equal, of something you regard as being of equal or greater value.
So you know that, that self interest, that cooperation should be done on the basis of self interest as defined by a system where everybody benefits from it, as opposed to one of exploitation where someone benefits at the expense of someone else.
[00:53:35] Speaker A: Okay, we have about six minutes left. You've pretty much covered all the questions. Scott asked one in the chat asking what are some examples of good long term thinkers today? But maybe you could just broaden it to maybe aside from Rand, who are other writers who have spoken a lot on this topic and maybe can provide some advice for people who want to do more introspection constructively.
[00:54:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, good long term thinkers today. I mean, I think we, there are a lot of people out and the thing about this sort of rational self interest or self interest properly understood is that it's something that it's something that doesn't get a lot. People don't talk about it a lot. So I mentioned in the article I did on this that, you know, I saw several prominent writers, like Stephen Binger was one of them, who will make these offhand references. Well, of course our society works on enlightened self interest.
But then it's like an offhand comment on a book that goes on, talks about everything except that. And so we often have this, I think it's a, it's, it's a blind spot we have today because as I mentioned, the rational self interest or enlightened self interest or self interest properly understood was a major topic that people talked about. It was the standard theory of how society should work and what ethics should be. You know, 200 to 250 years ago at the height of the Enlightenment and it is barely talked about today. And I think that's part of the problem. Why we have some problems in our current political system, in our current economic system with, with sort of short term or irrational self interest is that we, we don't have people discussing this and, and going over it and, and teaching this as a moral philosophy. We often, and I think that's the legacy of altruism, that altruism created this sense that, look, sacrificing yourself for the good of nobly sacrificing yourself, living a monk like existence for the good of others, that's the ultimate virtue. And every, and self interest is horrible and it's evil and we should stamp it out. And so if you have the idea self interest is evil, we should stamp it out. You don't go through the trouble of trying to explain, here's how self interest works here, how we can have a society where we have a system of enlightened self interest where everyone can benefit. You don't go through the trouble of talking in those terms and explaining that. And I think because of that you get an economy to some extent and a political system where people accept, if people embrace the irrational self interest because they don't have the concept of irrational self interest, it's not being discussed. But at the same time, what I would say is most people in advanced societies actually do live by the terms of rational self interest to a significant extent.
They often live, they live by it without having necessarily the words for it or the, or, or the, the, you know, being taught that as an idea. But most people do in fact, especially in, in advanced developed societies like, you know, Western Europe and the United States, most people do. In fact, they go out and they get a job, they work, they, they pay their bills, they, they don't rob banks. And crime is actually surprisingly at a low level right now historically, and nobody really knows why. But you know, I think it has to do with the fact that, you know, this a society of rational self interest, society of enlightened self interest, it works, it actually is so much to the benefit of, of, of everyone involved in it that we do generally live.
Now, your mileage may vary, you might be in a bad neighborhood, but we do generally live in neighborhoods and surrounded by people who are acting on their rational self interest or an enlightened self interest.
They're out there working and they're providing good things for themselves. They're buying houses, they're buying cars. They're doing the things they need to, to provide for themselves and provide for their own happiness, but at the same time respecting the rules of society. So I don't think, you know, I kind of resist the idea, you know, despite some prominent examples like the one I started with in the news, I resist the idea that we're in a hellscape of, of irrationality.
You know, we are in an advanced technological, industrial society, an educated society where people are generally, you know, most people are, are capable to some extent of passing that marshmallow test.
And, and we have the benefits of it. And I think it is so beneficial that people do live according to the rules of that to a very large extent. But what's lacking is the theory behind it. And so I think that's sort of one of my little crusades is let's, let's talk about the theory behind it. Let's talk about what the rules of rational self interest and lightened self interest are and, and have that concept out there. So people know. Yes, it's okay to, to, to.
I see this a lot with, we talk about the manosphere and a lot of stuff that goes online. I'll wrap up. I know we're coming up against the time limit, but there's a lot of these sort of young men who are brought into cryptocurrency and all that. Oh, you can, you can get ahead by engaging in these shortest short term schemes that often end very well for the person promoting them and not so well for the people following his advice.
And I think that that comes from the lack of a concept of rational or enlightened self interest that you have, especially young men. There's a lot of pressure on young men. You have to succeed, you have to get ahead. You have to show you're a winner. And they want to have, you know, to be able to show that, to show that they, they're succeeding and getting ahead, but they don't have, you know, real genuine moral guidance and examples. And so they listen to Andrew Tate or, or, or follow various other prominent political figures and get trapped into an irrational model of self interest, interests because we're not talking about and promoting the rational model of self interest.
[00:59:35] Speaker A: Okay, well like you said, we are at time but that was a great hour to cover this topic. Rob, thank you so much for doing
[00:59:42] Speaker B: it and thanks everyone for listening and throwing out these great questions.
[00:59:47] Speaker A: Yes, thank you everyone who asked the questions. Really great conversation. And if you enjoyed this and you want to see more of these types of conversations in the future, don't forget to support the Atlas Society. Atlas society.org donate and be sure to rejoin us next week. Jag will be back to celebrate again our 300th episode a long time coming but it's amazing that we're here. And she is going to have Nadine Strossen returning to the to objectively speaking to talk about her new co authored book war on words 10 arguments against free Speech and why they Fail. We'll see you next time. Take care everyone.
