Selfishness is as bad as everyone already knew it is

I'm going through some old posts I wrote and never posted and posting them. So look for some posts about articles and events from months back.

A study published in July in Psychological Review identifies what the authors call the Dark Factor of Personality (via Boing Boing). I've previously read about the "dark triad" of personality types which were masochism, machiavellianism and narcissism. This study finds that those, and other personality types that tend to lead to "ethically, morally and socially questionable behaviour" all stem from one common factor: the tendency to maximize one's own utility accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications.

If you got into a time machine and traveled back ten thousand years and told the pre-civilization humans you met that you were from the future with a dire warning: "Selfishness is the root of evil!" those humans would let you know that they already knew that. Everyone knows that.

John Nash, an important game theorist reportedly had trouble understanding why people didn't play games the way his theories suggest they should be played. Adam Smith, the progenitor of economics, thought that maximizing personal utility was the root of all human activity. Ayn Rand appeared to think that maximizing personal utility ought to be the root of human activity and that people who disagreed with that are holding you down. Gordon Gekko said "Greed is good."

John Nash had schizophrenia with paranoia. Gordon Gekko is a fictional symbol of unrestrained greed. I'm not sure what

Smith

and

Rand's

excuses are.

But the study doesn't really say that greed is the root of all evil. And I'm not just saying that "greed is the root of all evil" is hyperbolic and the study is careful. I'm going all in on translating the meaning of the study into an inaccurate but digestible bit of wisdom. It's just that greed isn't enough. To get to the root of all evil you need greed and beliefs that serve as justifications.

Often when people try to apply game theory to the economy and get evil-sounding results, they say that greed is just human nature. In the sense that they mean it that is probably false, but let's say it's true in a limited sense - we all sometimes think of ourselves above others or think of ourselves the exclusion of others. That in itself isn't enough to lead to us being assholes, though. What breaks through the asshole barrier is when we think that the near universality of these thoughts is a reason why those thoughts are okay to have.

It's not the human trait of being selfishness that's the problem, it's the

people saying that trait isn't a problem who are the problem.