Enlightened Self-Interest

“You mean it’s not immoral to be selfish?”

The question does not mean, “Do I have permission to violate the right of others?” Or “Is it appropriate to be indifferent to human suffering?” Or “Are kindness and generosity not virtues?” But it means, “Do I have a right to honor my own needs and wants, to act on my own judgment, to strive on my own happiness?” Ultimately it means, “Do I have a right to exist for my own sake?”

If my right to exist is contingent on services I render to others, I exist only by permission or favor. My life does not belong to me. If my life does not belong to me, to whom does it belong?

From the time we are children, our parents, teachers, religious leaders - those authorities - assert that it is easy to be selfish and that it takes courage to practice self-sacrifice. But the opposite is true: it takes courage to cherish our own desires, to formulate independent values and remain true to them, to fight for our goals whether or not family or friends approve.

Most people begin practicing self-sacrifice almost from the day they are born. With each year they give away more and more of their desires and ambitions in order to ‘belong.’ Predictably, the result of this self-sacrifice is that, in a kind of perverted rebellion, they often end up being petty, narrow minded, and ‘selfish’ over trivia. Trivia are all they have left to fight for, after they have surrendered their souls.

“Do you mean it’s not immoral to be selfish?” is a way of asking, “Do you mean I don’t belong to others? Do you mean my first obligation is not to live up to someone else’s expectation?” Such a thought is both exhilarating and frightening. It promises liberation but only if we are prepared to challenge the teachings of a lifetime and step forth into autonomy and self-responsibility.

If one’s goal is a happy and fulfilling life, self-interest is best served by rationality, productivity, integrity, and a sense of justice and benevolence in dealings with others. It is served by learning to think long-term and to project the consequences of one’s actions, which means learning to live self-responsibly. Irresponsibility is not to one’s self-interest. And neither is mindlessness, dishonesty, or brutality.

Consider the following example. A young woman - I will call her Anita - decides she would like to become an architect. Her father is deeply disappointed, because he had always dreamed that after college she would join him in the dress business. “Must you so selfish?” Anita’s mother says to her. “You’re breaking your father’s heart.”

“If I don’t study architecture,” Anita answers, “I’ll break my own heart.”

So Anita goes to college to become an architect. While at college, she dates a young man who falls in love with her. He begs her to marry him, give up architecture, and become the mother of his children. “In the first place,” Anita tells him gently, not wishing to cause pain, “I don’t love you. And in the second place, I don’t plan to have children, at least not in the foreseeable future.”

“Not having children?” the young man cries. “How can you be so selfish? (The Pope would tell her that her practice of birth control is sinfully egocentric.) And don’t you care at all about my happiness?”

“Don’t you care at all about mine?” she responds, smiling.

A few years later, now a practicing architect, she meets a man with whom she falls in love. Anita sees in him the embodiment of the traits she most admires: strength, self-confidence, integrity, and a passionate nature unafraid of love and intimacy. To marry him, share her excitement and joy with him, nurture him at times, support him in his struggles as he supports her in hers -join with him in fighting for causes in which they both believe -is experienced by her as selfish in the most natural and benevolent sense of word. She is living for her values. Her life is productive, stimulating, and filled with love.

When her husband becomes ill, for a long time she curtails many of her activities to take care of him. When friends praise her for her ‘unselfishness,’ she looks at them incredulously. “I love him” is her only answer. The thought of selfless service would not occur to her. She would not insult what she feels for her husband by calling her caretaking self-sacrifice. “Not if you hold the full context,” she explains, “What would I do if I were ‘selfish?’ Abandon him? Whose notion of self-interest is that?”

(Another example. A man continually neglects a wife he loves, goes off to a party, leaves her ill at home and unattended, and if she leaves him and he is then devastated and miserable, we might say that he was ‘selfish.’ But it would be truer to say that he had a fool’s notion of his self-interest. His irrationality did not consist of his being selfish, but of being thoughtless, careless, and irresponsible about his self-interest. As is obvious in this example, there are persons so deficient in maturity, so narrow in their vision of their own interests.)

Later, when her husband recovers and life has stabilized again, she returns to work with great passion. She is eager to make up for lost time. When certain of her friends call to discuss personal problems, she accommodates them for a while, but when she realizes how much of her energy is being drained by them she finally calls a halt. “Sorry,” she says, “I don’t want to disappoint you, but right now I’ve got more urgent priorities.”

“God, but you’re selfish,” she is told.

When she deals with other human beings, she respects the legitimacy of their self-interest and does not expect them to sacrifice it, any more than she would sacrifice her own. And she cannot understand why other people do not necessarily feel this way. She notices that ‘selfish’ is what some people call her when she is doing what she wants to do rather than what they want her to do. She also notices that while she is not intimidated by this accusation, many others are.

Is Anita a virtuous woman or an unvirtuous one? Is she moral or immoral? What can we say about her?

The first thing I would say about her is that she operates consciously. And the next thing I would say is that she stands outside traditional moral categories: she is an exponent of rational or enlightened self-interest - a possibility not even acknowledged by those who talk about self-sacrifice as the moral ideal and imply that the only alternative to sacrificing self to others is sacrificing others to self. Anita does neither; she does not believe in the practice of human sacrifice.

Observe that everything she does is motivated by loyalty to her values. She acts on her judgment. And her judgment is thoughtful, not impulsive. For her husband, whom she loves most in the world, there are almost no limits on what she is prepared to do within a rational framework. For her friends, there are many more limits; she is generous, but not to the point of ignoring her higher values. If she supports certain causes, it is because they concern values that are important to her and to the kind of world she wishes to live in. She respects self-interest but understands that what is or is not to one’s self-interest is not necessarily self-evident -it requires thought. And her range of concern is a lifetime, not the convenience or inconvenience of this moment. That is why I say she operates consciously.

If our intention is to live consciously, we need to focus the searchlight of awareness on the moral values we have been taught since childhood -to question the moral issue critically and consider what serve our life and well-being and what is inimical.

If we are operating consciously, the most obvious question to ask, when someone proposes ‘a life of selfless service,’ is why? Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why it is moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for other to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice?

Most people do not try to practice the moral code of self-sacrifice consistently in their everyday choices and decisions. That would not be possible. But to the extent that they accept it as right, they are left in confusion, if not in a moral vacuum. They have no adequate set of principles to guide their actions. In relationships, they do not know what demands they can permit themselves and what demands they can permit to others; they do not know what is theirs by right, theirs by favor, or theirs by someone else’s sacrifice. Under the pressure of conflicting external injunctions, they fluctuate between sacrificing themselves to others and sacrificing others to themselves. They swing between the beliefs that self-surrender is a virtue and the knowledge that they must smuggle some selfishness into their lives in order to survive.

Small wonder that when some people do decide to be selfish, they are so often selfish in the narrow and petty sense rather than in the rational and noble sense. No one taught them that rational self-interest is possible and that it is the obligation of a conscious human being to think carefully about what does in fact represent long-term self-interest. When they hear selfishness castigated as petty, cruel, materialistic, anti-social, or mean-spirited, these epithets strike a responsive chord within them: their own guilt feels like a validation of the charge.

Prior to industrial revolution and the birth of capitalism, poverty was the natural condition of almost all of the human race. It was not perceived as an aberration but as the norm. Ninety-eight percent of the world’s population lived in conditions unimaginable to a twentieth-century citizen. That was poverty of a kind that makes what we call poverty today look like luxury.

It is not kindness, compassion, or selflessness that lift people out of poverty. It is liberated human ability - combined with perseverance, courage, and the desire to achieve something worthwhile and (most of the times) make money in the process. But of course, such motives are not unselfish. And that is why they can accomplish ‘miracles.’ Wealth could be created. New industries would offer employment to millions of people, build communities, heal poverty, and create undreamed of possibilities of survival and well-being.

Why are religious leaders and moral preachers not celebrating the nobility of the entrepreneurial spirit and the power of the liberated mind to accomplish ‘miracles?’ Why aren’t they stop talking about self-sacrifice, decide to step out of the Middle Ages and rethink their code of values - and began proclaiming the glories that were possible when human intelligence is liberated and people are free to act on their own initiative? Why are they not championing such life-serving virtues as independence, productive ambition, competence, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, integrity, and the drive to innovate?

Kindness and compassion are virtues, to be sure, but what has carried the world and moved it forward, lifting humankind out of the cave and beyond a life expectancy of thirty-five - what has conquered disease and steadily lightened the burden of human existence - what has created and goes on creating new possibilities for fulfillment and joy on earth - is the rational, self-assertive egos of audaciously imaginative men and women who refuse to accept suffering and stagnation as our destiny.