Challenging the inevitability of self-interest

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I went to a talk last Saturday in Oxford, given by Ben Ansell, author of Why Politics Fails’. It worried me.

One central issue – and I challenged him on this – is his assumption that Man always acts in his own self-interest. This, some of you may remember, was the underlying premise of the adoption of ‘free market’ economics by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late 1980s encapsulated by the phrase ‘there is no such thing as society’.

But is it indisputably ‘true’? I researched the evidence for this split between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in a piece in the Dao of Complexity. Evolutionary biology points to humans having both a capacity for selfishness and a capacity for cooperation and altruism. And, as psychologists such as Winnicott suggest, maturity involves the practice of cultivating a more nuanced balance between ‘me’ and ‘us’. We couldn’t have hunted and farmed together, or brought up our young, if we were entirely driven by self-interest.

These assumptions on which whole edifices are built have great political power. Burke, regarded as the first Conservative (the UK party of the right), even used the ‘evil’ word. He held that “evil is inherent in human nature”, and that Government exists to restrain the imperfections springing from this negative characteristic.

The point is that what we believe about human nature often underpins public policy  – both its aims and its means. If we think that everyone is basically selfish, if not downright evil, this is likely to lead to tendencies to distrust or disdain those ‘not like us’ and develop policies to control, exclude or blame them.

And of course, the more you build a society on the merits of competition, and encourage people to behave in self-interested ways, then the more this normalises selfish behaviour. And when such  values become instituted, they become much harder to change. But selfishness is not our only drive; there are many examples of people acting collegiately – with others, the future, the natural world and their communities  in mind. I am concerned when we build economic and political approaches which takes as a self-evident truth that Man always chooses selfishness.