Pursue Your Self-Interest
Lesson 6: Honor the Self (1 of 3)
Every moral code has a conception of what you owe loyalty to. Religion says to be loyal to God. Altruism says to be loyal to the needs and wishes of other people. A morality of happiness says to be loyal to the irreplaceable value of your life.
In Ayn Rand’s first novel, We the Living, the heroine expresses this attitude: “It’s a rare gift, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.” In saying that this feeling toward one’s own life is “rare,” part of what Rand is stressing is that reverence for your own life has to be earned. It is not automatic but the product of your choices.
To honor your self you need to have a self. You have to cultivate convictions, values, and strong desires. You have to conceive of a life you have a burning desire to lead—a human life aimed at a hierarchy of pro-life values, including reason, purpose, and self-esteem. You have to build your self-esteem by pursuing that life through virtue, i.e., an unwavering commitment to rationality. It is through thinking—through choosing to turn on the light that is your mind—that you come to form a self and value your own life.
What a pro-happiness morality says is: do it. Create a self and a life that you love, and honor that life. Your life matters. You are an end in yourself, not a means to the ends of others. You have a right to exist for your own sake. You have no duty to serve others, just as they have no duty to serve you.
In this lesson, we’ll see that self-interest is not the antithesis of morality, but the heart and soul of morality. It is only your desire to create a self and a life that you love that gives you a reason to be moral—and it is only through your dedication to morality that you can achieve the self-esteem that is the foundation of joy. And, I’ll add, the foundation of healthy human relationships.
The Meaning of Effective Egoism
A pro-happiness morality is one that upholds Effective Egoism. It’s egoistic in that it says you should live for your own happiness. It is effective in that it says the only way to achieve happiness is through fidelity to rational values and virtues. Values like reason, purpose, and self-esteem. Virtues like rationality, honesty, integrity, and productiveness.
Egoism is the most misunderstood concept in morality. We therefore need to be clear about what it means and what it doesn’t.
Effective Egoism is not psychological egoism
Psychological egoism is the idea that everyone is inherently selfish. There’s no point in telling people to be egoistic (or altruistic) because we always do what we most want to do. Mother Teresa was supposedly selfish because she wanted to serve the poor. On this view, we have no choice to be anything other than egoistic because we come hardwired to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.
Psychological egoism has an enduring appeal to economists, psychologists, and a surprising number of intelligent laymen. But in philosophy, the position never quite recovered from the critique of David Hume. His pen dripping with sarcasm, Hume describes the ultimate absurdity of psychological egoism:
By a turn of imagination, by a refinement of reflection, by an enthusiasm of passion, we seem to take part in the interests of others, and imagine ourselves divested of all selfish considerations: but, at bottom, the most generous patriot and most niggardly miser, the bravest hero and most abject coward, have, in every action, an equal regard to their own happiness and welfare.
It is simply not true, Hume thinks, that we can “explain every affection to be self-love, twisted and moulded, by a particular turn of imagination, into a variety of appearances.” To claim that Christian ascetics who ate only grass, sentenced themselves to solitary confinement, and castrated themselves were really trying to maximize their own pleasure is to empty the word “pleasure” of all meaning.
To argue that we always pursue our own interests because we necessarily act to seek pleasure and avoid pain ignores one crucial issue: values. Beyond physical pleasure and pain, which explain almost none of our actions, pleasure and pain are the product of our values, and our values are the product of our choices. And here our free will gives us the power to decide: Am I going to choose my values by my best assessment of what’s genuinely good for me—or am I going to choose my values by what some authority tells me to do—or am I going to choose my values by copying what other people care about—or am I going to give the issue no thought, picking up values blindly and at random?
Effective Egoism is about your ultimate motivation. To be a principled egoist is to direct all of your choices toward the moral end that is your self-interest. An Effective Egoist selects his values according to what he is rationally convinced will be good for his life, formulates a hierarchy of values, and then strives never to sacrifice a higher value for a lower value. Does everyone do that? Most people don’t have any self-conscious ultimate motivation. They aren’t egoists, they aren’t utilitarians, they aren’t altruists—they’re not seeking to implement any ethical theory. They’re still influenced by moral notions and make choices that carry moral weight. But they aren’t self-consciously striving to realize any particular moral end.
To be an Effective Egoist is to self-consciously aim at your interests. That requires two things: you need to formulate what your interests are and then aim at them in your actions. You need to conceive of a life based on rational moral principles and then strive to realize it.
Psychological egoism is, in the end, a version of determinism. In reality, though we cannot act without some motivation, we are the selectors of the values that motivate us. Those values can either be chosen rationally for the purpose of attaining happiness—or they can be chosen on some other grounds—or we can default entirely, and allow our values (or, more precisely, our whims) to arise by accident.
Effective Egoism requires valuing other people
Other human beings are obviously of tremendous “practical” benefit. They are sources of knowledge and trade. It is clearly easier to flourish in a free, technological society than on a deserted island. But that is hardly the sole or even the primary benefit we gain from other people. Companionship, friendship, love—these are among the greatest pleasures life has to offer. Near the top of any Effective Egoist’s hierarchy of values will be the people who matter most to him.
I’ll have more to say about how and why an Effective Egoist should form meaningful human relationships shortly. What I want to stress here is this: to uphold Effective Egoism is to say that you are your own primary value—it’s not to say that you are your only value. Every action an Effective Egoist takes should be aimed at the preservation of his life and the achievement of his happiness. He isn’t a resource for others to exploit, just as they aren’t resources for him to exploit. But other people matter to him.
An Effective Egoist has a generalized positive attitude toward others rooted in respect since, like him, they are human beings. Think of the best moments of your life: the morning after you’ve fallen in love or the evening after a major success at school or work. That joy tends to spill over into a wider feeling of goodwill: you hope that others could experience the happiness you’re experiencing. The Effective Egoist, precisely because he loves himself and his life, carries with him a similar feeling throughout his life—not some phony “love for humanity,” but a generosity of spirit that expects the best from people and hopes to find it. Other people are seen as spiritual allies—until evidence convinces him that they are not.
But what an Effective Egoist feels for the specific people who matter to him is far more profound. The primary benefit we receive from the people we love is joy in their existence. Just as we can become invested in our favorite fictional characters, sharing their joy and sorrow, so we become invested in our favorite people. Their happiness makes us happy. Their interests become, to an important extent, our interests.
The point isn’t that an Effective Egoist can care for others as much as a committed altruist. The point is far stronger: only an egoist is truly fit for love and friendship. When people are riddled with self-doubt and unhappiness, friendships can become one-sided or co-dependent. Painted on smiles can conceal hidden jealousies. When people view self-sacrifice as a moral duty, they tend to oscillate between resentful service and presumptuous demands (since their friends, too, have a duty to sacrifice). Self-confident, happy people aren’t takers: they’ve created lives of abundance and so they are free to express kindness and generosity. Principled people are solid. You can rely on them. They’ll tell you the truth. They’ll keep their word. They aren’t trying to prove something about themselves, so they can take joy in your joy, and be open and empathetic when you need to share your fears and frustrations.
The key to understanding how an Effective Egoist treats human relationships is to keep firmly in mind what a sacrifice truly is. It is not a sacrifice to help someone you care about. It is not a sacrifice to let your friend choose the movie. It is not a sacrifice to pick up the check, or bear an inconvenience, or lift someone up when they’re down. A sacrifice means surrendering what you find personally valuable for what you don’t.
One insignia of sacrifice in human relationships is when you act out of guilt. When you let your brother mooch off you after he’s made a mess of his life and shows no inclination to fix it, that is a sacrifice. When you stay in a sexless marriage because you don’t want to hurt your partner’s feelings, never mind how they’re torturing yours, that is a sacrifice. When you allow your cousin to use you as a source of free day care, when he could easily afford to pay someone, that is a sacrifice. When you lie to your parents about attending church because you don’t want to hurt their feelings by admitting you’re an atheist, that is a sacrifice. Whenever you give in to someone else’s irrational emotion, that is a sacrifice.
There is a flip side to acting from guilt, a form of sacrifice that’s more insidious because it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. If your motive for doing something for others is the jolt of self-worth you get from helping them, that is often a sacrifice in disguise. Your internal conversation amounts to: “This isn’t what I selfishly want to do, but doing this will make me feel like a good person.” This can be difficult to distinguish from the inevitable positive feelings that come from doing someone a favor. Here your only protection is a clearly defined hierarchy of values and careful introspection.
To value others, ultimately, is to respect and aid their own egoism. When my friend and mentor Alex Epstein started his own business and was trying to raise funds for a debate with environmentalist Bill McKibben—a debate that would ultimately launch Alex’s career into the stratosphere—I donated $500, which was a ton of money for me at the time.
Alex replied: “Don, if you ever try to start your own one-man army, you’ll realize just how rare people like you are. I certainly do. And the difference between rare and none makes all the difference.”
I said, “Thank you Alex. But I should say, I regard this as an investment in my future. If you succeed, it will be infinitely easier for me. $500 is a ridiculously small price to pay.”
“Well, yes,” he said, “I was praising you for being selfish. That’s what’s rare.”
Ineffective Egoism isn’t egoism
If you were truly selfish, wouldn’t you steal a million dollars if you knew you’d get away with it? This question and questions like it reflect a deep-seated view that self-interest entails predatory and unprincipled behavior. But nothing could be more utterly unselfish than manufacturing human victims.
Let’s start by reversing the question: why would you think that it is to a person’s interest to steal a million dollars? You might point to the things a person could buy with the money. Fine. But that does not answer the question. A person’s interests, remember, are defined long range and full context. They consist, not of isolated goods or positive feelings, but of a way of life—a constellation of pro-life values that fit together into a non-contradictory whole so that he can achieve non-contradictory joy, “a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction.”
The question is not whether you can buy desirable things with stolen money. You can. Nor is the question whether it’s possible to steal a million dollars and get away with it. It’s possible, though baldly asserting that a thief “knows he’ll get away with it” is ridiculous. Every thief thinks he can get away his crime, but his guilt is a fact, and like all facts it is in principle discoverable. No. The question is whether the life of a criminal or of a creator is to your interest. We don’t choose between isolated actions but between kinds of lives.
Choosing the life of a creator makes the creative intelligence of other people an asset and the facts of reality your ally. Choosing the life of a criminal means volunteering for people to use their creative intelligence, not to offer you values in trade, but to expose and punish you. It means willingly making truth and intelligence your enemies instead of your allies.
People don’t choose the life of a criminal because they are rationally convinced it is to their interest. We all know in some terms that the human way of life requires thought and production. We understand that a nation of thieves would have nothing to steal and would quickly starve to death. The criminal’s whole game is become a hitchhiker on other people’s thought and production—on the way of life that actually allows human beings to flourish.
Any confusion on this point only comes from pretending that we don’t have to choose between ways of life. That we can view an action out of context. That there is such a thing as a rational, productive person who steals once in a while. But a person who steals “once in a while” is a criminal and is living the criminal way of life. Leonard Peikoff puts it this way:
The power of the good is enormous, but depends on its consistency. That is why the good has to be an issue of “all or nothing,” “black and white,” and why evil has to be partial, occasional, “gray.” Observe that a “liar” in common parlance is not a man who always, conscientiously, tells falsehoods; there is no such creature; for the term to apply to a person, a few whoppers on his part is enough. Just as a “hypocrite” is not a man who scrupulously betrays every idea he holds. Just as a “burglar” is not a man who steals every item of property he sees. Just as a person is a “killer” if he respects human life 99.9 per cent of the time and hires himself out to the Mafia as an executioner only now and then.
Why isn’t it in your interest to steal a million dollars? For the same reason you don’t cheat on your lover. It’s not because “you might get caught.” It’s because that’s not what you’re after in life. You want an open, honest, fulfilling marriage, where the love and admiration in your lover’s eyes means something. In the same way, the reason you don’t go around looking for opportunities to steal isn’t fear of ending up in prison. It’s that you are focused on a life of reason, purpose, and self-esteem—on living a human life. Anything that detracts from that, that threatens that, that undermines that has no value to you.
An Effective Egoist, in sum, is committed to pro-life values and the virtues required to achieve them. Morality is not a restriction on self-interest, not a limitation or a constraint. It is the only way to flourish.
You might call the conventional view of self-interest “Ineffective Egoism.” It’s ineffective because what achieving your own interests actually requires is fidelity to a morality of happiness. But, in the final analysis, it’s not even egoism: the person who “thinks only of himself” and is willing to do anything to anyone to get what he wants doesn’t, as we’ll soon see, even desire the best for himself.
Cruel and evil people aren’t selfish
As human beings, we need to understand the world around us. This has often led us to invent and embrace non-explanations that seem like explanations for things we do not understand. Primitive peoples saw lightning and wove tales of angry gods. Today, we laugh at their ignorance. But when it comes to explaining human behavior, we, too, are stuck with primitive just-so stories. We look at dictators, terrorists, murderers, rapists, thieves, addicts, manipulators, jerks, power-lusters, social climbers, thrill seekers, prickly geniuses, successful investors, and ambitious entrepreneurs and we attribute to all of them the same ruling motive: “selfishness.”
A motive that explains everything, explains nothing. There is nothing important that unites a murderer and a jerk, let alone a murderer, a jerk, and an Effective Egoist. Labeling everyone who isn’t selfless “selfish” prevents us from answering a difficult but important question: What does explain human cruelty and human evil? If it’s not driven by a preoccupation with oneself, what is it driven by?
To understand evil, start with this: have you ever been in a room with someone who is strikingly beautiful and become self-conscious about your weight? Have you ever seen a happy couple and become aware of your relationship failures? Have you ever been angry and the sight of someone else’s happiness made you angrier? Other people can make us aware of our perceived flaws and short-comings. For healthy people, these are fleeting moments of pain. More often, the sight of other people’s virtues and successes sparks positive feelings: the desire to admire, the desire to emulate, the desire to achieve what they have achieved.
For evil people, it’s different. Filled with a perpetual and overwhelming sense of self-doubt and shame, they spend the lion’s share of their time and energy trying to quell their feelings of worthlessness. Typically this takes the form of seeking out feelings of superiority. I’m tougher than others, I’m sexier than others, I’m richer than others, I’m smarter than others, I’m more powerful than others, I’m more terrifying than others. (Different people will gravitate to different pretenses at superiority based on which pretense seems easiest to obtain or which aspect of life makes them feel most insecure.) They secretly feel like a nobody, and so they become fixated on proving they’re a somebody.
What happens when this sort of a person encounters someone who actually possesses the values he pretends to possess? Resentment, envy, hatred. The sheer existence of strong, confident, healthy, happy people makes him feel deeply inferior, and his ruling desire becomes the desire to destroy. Ayn Rand called this motive “hatred of the good for being the good.”
They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself . . . . [T]hey are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul.
This is so ugly a motive that a person cannot admit it—to others and above all to himself. He needs rationalizations. And here conventional morality provides evil people with the two most powerful rationalizations: “I don’t hate him because he’s good—I hate him because he’s selfish”—and, “My destructive acts are moral because my motive isn’t my own welfare, but the greater good.”
If you’ve ever seen Breaking Bad, the core story is the descent of an average man into pure evil. At every stage of his descent, the anti-hero, Walter White, justifies his actions by saying, “I’m doing this for my family.” I’m selling drugs—for my family. I’m lying to everyone I know—for my family. I’m killing anyone who threatens to expose me—for my family. In the final episode, White cannot maintain that rationalization any longer. He admits to his wife: I didn’t do it for my family, I did it for myself.
You might think that’s a confession that his ruling motive was selfishness. But the show reveals the true meaning of his confession. From the beginning of the show, we see that White feels a deep sense of emptiness and inferiority. He feels pushed around by his cocky brother-in-law, by his overbearing boss, by his naggy wife. He feels resentful toward his former business partner who got rich after White had left the company. His motive wasn’t selfishness—it was the attempt to cope with his insecurities and resentments by the cultivation of power and the destruction of anyone and anything that threatened his pretenses.
To move from fiction to real life, think of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Communism and fascism rose to power by preaching that individuals have a moral duty to serve and sacrifice for the greater good: for the proletariat or for the volk. Hitler put it this way:
This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise of every truly human culture. . . . The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call—to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness—idealism. By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.
But these appeals to the greater good were only rationalizations for destruction, which is why, despite years and decades of achieving nothing but destruction, those nations never stopped to reconsider their systems. They never said, “our ideology isn’t actually achieving a greater good, we need a better ideology.” Because their ideologies and systems were in fact achieving exactly what they were intended to achieve: destruction.
Now ask: Does this motivation have anything in common with someone who desires, not to destroy, but to create? Who builds cars or phones or computers instead of gulags and gas chambers? Who seeks the achievement of personal happiness instead of the quelling of envy and self-hatred? Who is committed to a life of reason, purpose, self-esteem rather than manipulation, fraud, and exploitation? No? Then how disastrous to our moral thinking is it to label both kinds of people “selfish”?
Our conventional notion of “selfishness” is a package deal. It teaches us to equate Bernie Madoff and Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes and Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump and Ayn Rand. Every package deal works by uniting things based on superficial similarities. Here the fact that neither criminals nor creators are out “for the good of others” is used to blur an essential distinction: the distinction between the person who sacrifices others and the person who respects others in his quest for personal happiness.
Instead of reaching lazily for the term “selfishness” to describe every bad actor, we should cultivate a richer moral and psychological vocabulary. And we should reserve the term “selfishness” for those rare people who take their genuine interests, and the pro-self morality that identifies their interests, seriously.
What, then, does an Effective Egoist morality have to say positively about how we should relate to other people? If it’s not true that we should sacrifice others in order to amass money, power, and status, how should we relate to them?