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xssve -> RE: Ayn Rand and altruism (4/14/2012 10:36:55 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
Altruism is defined as "disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others" by the Oxford Dictionary. Many of us would, I suspect, feel altruism has a positive meaning - it is a quality that we admire in people, it is something we see as desirable. Some would even go so far as to suggest that altruism is a basic force for good inherent in human nature, found at the heart of human civilisation and culture.
The author Ayn Rand takes a very different view:
"Altruism is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. Altruism is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships...Altruism is the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization. ".- Ayn Rand, Interview in Playboy Magazine, 196
Is altruism a force for good or " poison of death in the blood of Western civilization', or perhaps something else? Is it relevant or obsolete in today's world? What do you think?
Altruism is both critical and central to human social networks and institutions, from marriage, to child-rearing, to economics and defense, but it is seldom selfless - see reciprocal altruism.
As usual with righty philosophy, they define problems in such a way as to make them seem like something they aren't, and most of their rants tend to be about things that are simply pure abstractions with no empirical basis in reality.
It's a different model, and it yields different data in terms of perceptions of cause and effect w/respect to specific problems, how those problems are solved, and the resulting outcomes of those solutions.
i.e., if all problems are someones fault which a basic assumption of cuase and effect, then punishing those at fault should prevent that from recurring.
The fact that this never seems to work never seems to result in any re-evaluation of the model, rather it typically leads to increasingly Draconian levels of punishment, which intensifies the underlying problem in a vicious cycle.
Often, an authoritarian benefits form this, i.e., if a significant amount of tax revenue is devoted to law enforcement, it's in the vested interest of anyone who profits from that to perpetuate or even intensify the problem of crime - crime and law enforcement form a distinct economy within the larger economy, and they are often intertwined, it's not a just a hypothesis there are several rather large and extensive studies on the situation.
For example, those who are economically marginalized have a greater incentive to steal in order to increase their income, but they cannot profit from theft without market for stolen goods, and the "fence" is often a member of the legitimate business community, who acts as both redistributer of stolen property and money launderer, and he may have police on the payroll in order to perpetuate the value chain.
Similarly, street level drug dealers are seldom in the business of importing the drugs, which is often the province of ostensibly legitimate business networks including both importers in the private sector and law enforcement, customs, border patrol, etc.
Lets say the problem/solution set here from an authoritarian viewpoint is: "get people to stop doing drugs by punishing them".
There is so much money involved in that particular trade, that corruption in the border patrol is thought to be so widespread as to be practically ubiquitous, google it if you don't believe me.
The result, is it really doesn't matter how many street dealer of users you incarcerate, you just make room for more dealers and users in a never ending stream, a closed loop economic system subsidized by tax revenues.
The altruistic thing here would be to de-criminalize drugs, and spend some of the money going to law enforcement and incarceration on treatment of those who cannot control their addictions, re-education so they can get and hold legitimate jobs, etc., which while seemingly altruistic, has the resulting outcome of enabling individuals to transition to doing useful work and generating tax revenues, thus in the end, everyone actually benefits, and the groups as a whole: economic and social institutions are all strengthened rather than weakened.
From a right wing POV however, it's a very simplistic binary mytheme: police good, drugs bad, bad is punished, good is rewarded, and outreach element here seems highly altruistic - you rewarding these bad people for doing bad things, spending their tax money on drug users, etc., and because of the whole punishment paradigm, they can't get past that to see the potential benefits.
Meanwhile, the cycle is corrupting the judicial and law enforcement system, and enriching the individuals who perpetuate it - it's revolving door because we don't have the room to incarcerate everyone who commits the victimless crime of altering their consciousness with chemical substances, or we have to release violent criminals to make room for them.
Or, of course, build more jails, and turn them into profit centers, that feeds on a steady diet of tax revenues and never even remotely comes close to solving the problem, and in fact has a vested interest in perpetuating and even exacerbating it.
And all kinds of other business are drawn into that - arms dealers selling to both sides for example, and every time there is gang war and bunch of gets get killed in some spectacular firefight (using weapons channeled into the underground economy through ostensibly legitimate sources), gun sales increase, more money is channeled into law enforcement and the penal system, everybody wins except the cops and the criminals who have few or no alternatives, and in fact the majority of street cops are all for decriminalization if they haven't been corrupted by the value chain already - the whole thing is very obvious from the street level.
Who really wins here? Politicians and bureaucrats who benefit from looking like they're doing something, if not from actually getting kickbacks from the fences, gun dealers and importers who are profiting far above and beyond anything they could ever hope to attain though legitimate business.
And those are the people who aren't "criminals"!
The truth is, in the criminal community itself, crime doesn't pay all that well, it's a lot of work and risk for very little return, they're not only being exploited for labor, but their status a "threat" is exploited for even greater profits (tax revenue streams, and market expansion/increased sales of guns, for example) by the much more lucrative industries that service it.
Now, who pays for it? Taxpayers and insurance companies mostly.
You see from right wing POV, the individual is always responsible for their actions, correct? And it's true, one is responsible for ones actions, but people behave differently when they're pushed to the wall, under stress, even average, law abiding and well meaning people do horrendous things, and looking at it as a historical/statistical problem, one can confident;y predict that under certain conditions of economic stress, a certain percentage of people will opt out of the legitimate economy, particularly if it doesn't even cover their sustenance needs, let alone offer them any social mobility, and will compensate with an underground economy, they have responsibilities to themselves and their families that outweigh any responsibilities to a system that does not offer them or their families anything in return, it's really sound basic economic thinking, the orthodox economy has to invest in them and share in the returns if it wants them to participate.
It's a statistical economic phenomena, in all of recorded history it has never not worked that way, and never will not work that way, and bad money crowds out good, another economic truism, meaning that far from crushing the underground economy, it will simply end up co-opting and corrupting the aboveground economy.
If your values system boils down to "money talks", then this should come as no particular surprise or shock to you.
If not, you could save yourself a lot of money by being a little more openly altruistic.
Because as it stands, you're being one hell of a selfless altruist to a lot of criminal enterprises, and getting not a goddamn thing in return.
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