| Topic: |
Science > Philosophy |
| User: |
"" |
| Date: |
15 Jun 2005 10:19:48 AM |
| Object: |
Doing good and doing well |
In postulating the equlibrium theory, John Nash went against both pure
capitalism, which claims that the benefit of the collective is achieved
through people striving for their own benefit, and against altruistic
ideologies such as Communism and religion that claim the pursuit of
self-interest to be antithetical to the benefit of the collective. What
he said was something that ought to be common sense: that the benefit
of the group is achieved when people strive to benefit themselves -
and the group. That is, in a social universe consisting of self and
others, the social universe benefits when one strives to benefit both
self and the social universe. Through this is achieved an improvement
in the well-being of all.
The social universe benefits, in other words, not from competition
alone and not from cooperation alone, but rather from the mixture of
competition and cooperation. It benefits from people seeking their own
benefit as well as that of the group. This mixture of competition and
cooperation, an integration of two opposite approaches to life, results
in a Pareto-optimal solution, an equilibrium that achieves the best
outcome for everybody. Knowing what's good for yourself and knowing
what's good for the group, rather than seeing the group as out to
destroy you or sacrificing yourself for the group, results in the best
solution both for yourself and for the group. This is the meaning of
synergy.
The mechanism of this approach is as follows. Competition sharpens the
tool - it challenges the person to be his best. Cooperation strives
for the benefit of the whole. Competition alone produces people who are
good at what they do and benefit the consumer, but who are at each
other's throats and never reap the full benefit of their efforts
because they spend so much time competing, hence they have no time left
to enjoy life. Cooperation alone produces a lazy, low-level state of
affairs that sells the consumer short. Combining competition with
cooperation - challenging people to be their best, and to contribute
their best to the shared outcome of which shared outcome each partakes
- arrives at the best outcome for the whole and for each member.
This, is the beautiful outcome; synergy; reconciliation and
integration; consummation; the good of the collective and the members
at the same time.
The optimal outcome for the world comes from cooperation of people
within small entities such as companies, within the context of
competition between companies and communities, within the context of
cooperation among higher levels of structure - industries, sciences,
technologies - to make a better world.
This state is largely (and thankfully in not least degree to the people
responsible) reflected in the status quo. As Covey rightly advised his
clients, companies should strive for their employees collaborating
among each other rather than competing against each other, and in
dealing with customers and suppliers companies should strive for
win-win scenarios. The first results in people expending their energy
striving to benefit the company and not in divisive intramural
politicking that seeks promotion of self at all costs to other
employees and regardless of benefit to the company; the second results
in companies having good relations with other participants in the
economy except, of course, their competitors. At a higher level, there
is at this time international scientific and medical cooperation, as
well as international economic policy-setting that takes business and
labor interests, as well as interests of the people for air and water
free of disease, into account. The latter is currently under challenge
by Bush administration - a state of affairs that best be corrected by
giving it the benefit of the boot.
What would bring larger entities to collaborate for a shared objective?
Seeing the full picture and seeing how participating within it can lead
to the benefit of the whole and of one's own entity. It is believed
that human nature is selfishness or at least rational self-interest,
but I posit that humanity has gotten as far as it has due to the fact
that it has a species consciousness as well as individual consciousness
- that people possess within themselves, whether through mechanism of
creation or evolution, a natural interest in the benefit of people
other than themselves. In other words, that people do in general, not
only as a result of liberal education but innately as a result of
genetic traits that are more profoundly expressed in some than in
others, wish for mankind to do well, and that this impetus has allowed
many people on their own accord to pursue teaching, scholarly,
charitable, monastic, scientific, creative, policing and civil service
paths that did not present great monetary or ego reward but allowed
satisfaction of doing something significant for other people. Few
feelings are better than that of having done a good deed - a feeling
that brings satisfaction even without the need to boast about it; I
consider only the feeling of great achievement, the feeling of mutual
love and the state of grace or spiritual ecstasy to be as gratifying.
The first two are rare; the third goes away unless one applies oneself
in serving mankind. Doing good is a far more sure path to gratification
than taking, and it is an easier path to gratification than achievement
or seeking a beautiful relationship.
The reason that doing good feels good is that it touches upon the best
in the human beingness - the interest in the good of the species and,
in some cases, of life itself. Thus, an order that benefits the self
even as it benefits the species does the most for the entirety of the
human nature - both for its self-directed, or self-interested, and
its species-directed, or altruistic, components, which are expressed to
different extents in different people and which people ought to be free
to choose the path that suits them the most. This offers man the
fulfillment of the entirety of the human nature - the opportunity to
do good, and do well, at the same time. "Love your neighbor [defined
in the Bible as all people including the hostile tribe of Samaritans,
not merely the person next door] as yourself" means, Love yourself,
and love your neighbor [defined as all humanity]. That means, do well
for yourself and help others. Do good, and do well, at once, this
increasing the benefit of mankind as it is contained both in self and
in others.
C.S. Lewis stated that the Christian recognizes God's creation as
fully perfect, and the existence within a man of a certain motive
therefore predicted a natural way whereby it may be fulfilled. Indeed,
this is the same statement as that made by rationalist philosophers,
that the Universe is rational (and all motives within human psyche are
there for a reason - because they help our survival or evolution as a
species). Given that both self-interest and altruism are potent motives
within human psyche that have had tremendous formative power on the
history of the species, both the Christian and the rationalist view
demand that there be a rational and Christian way to channel both
altruism and self-interest in society. There is. It is to possess a
social covenant whose values encourage people to benefit both
themselves and the species - to do good and do well at the same time,
with those who want to do well without doing good being subjected to
laws of market competition that brings them to work for the
consumer's interest and those who want to do good without caring
whether or not they do well monetarily being given the honor that the
social usefulness of their endeavors demands.
I go at this further and state that this - to do good and do well -
is the only sane value system that can be given to people. Anything
else results in hypocrisy or worse. To tell people to do good -
without anyone being allowed to do well - is to essentially instruct
the people to serve without anyone getting the benefit from being
served. It is thus to waste the efforts of the entire civilization (as
of course we have seen in Communist countries) and let their endeavors
go down the drain. To tell people to do well is to impose upon people a
value system that they may not very well want to intelligently espouse
- a value system that tells people, not what they should do (as in
the case of totalitarian civilizations), but what they should want -
an act of more profound totalitarianism than can be found in
totalitarian countries; an act that formulates people from within and
then tells them to compete one against another. It is not easy to see
why many of the more philosophically-minded youth in societies that
live by this code rightly rebel against this ridiculous set of affairs
and turn against their civilization and frequently see it as the great
enemy. To tell people what they should want, is, quite simply,
ridiculous. And it is especially ridiculous (and indeed tyrannical)
when it is maintained through a system of threats, blackmail, personal
destruction and other forms of abuse, in a nation that claims to derive
its legitimacy from believing itself free and giving its people free
existence. Not only does the second order lead to hypocrisy and indeed
brutality and abomination, but it utterly and completely destroys the
moral claims to legitimacy of America - and far worse than that,
leads its most honest minds into suicide or rebellion.
It is in the merger of the best of the two endeavors - in being able
to seek the benefit of the species as well as the self, in the ways
that are most natural to oneself and beneficial within the context of
the civilization - that is created an order that fulfills the human
beingness in its entirety - in its both self-directed and
species-directed capacities. And it is in this that can be created a
civilization that is truly humane and truly accomplishing the most of
human beingness.
Having traveled and lived in many different parts of America, I have
seen wrong done on both the left and the right. The problem with the
left consists of its unshakable belief that, because all people are
created equal, the people with better genes must be attacked and
brought down to the level of those with worse genes. The most malignant
form has been its attack on beauty. Now if (as the perpetrators of this
con say) beauty is something relative, then it makes no sense to only
attack beautiful women; one must attack all women, including the homely
ones. And if one is attacking the beautiful women, then one knows that
they are beautiful, which undoes the entire concept that beauty is
relative and brands one a hypocrite and a liar. Which, far worse than a
regular liar and hypocrite, is indeed a hypocrite and a liar that
destroys things far more meritorious than oneself - things that are
also of far greater quality and took far greater effort to create.
Indeed what we see is something so hideous that it cannot be seen as
anything less than evil. What we see, is people being made ashamed of
their gifts and of their greatest endowments, which leads them
essentially to deny their expression. For magnificent women to go with
men who are in all respects their inferiors and be by them brutalized
out of their desire to get back at the upper classes (and, after some
time with the aforementioned brutes, to be so emotionally distraught
that they go to psychologists, who proclaim their problem one of
emotions rather than one of bad guidance), or for brilliant men to turn
anti-intellectual and anti-spiritual and to shun the pursuits in which
they are capable of excelling, or for people with any kind of a gift to
be undermined in it by viciousness of their "neighbors" - those
who claim to speak for "everyone" and believe that their gigantic
overbearing arrogance in claiming to speak for "everyone" is less
than the innocent pride of the person in standing by his or her gifts -
and then, as a result of such assault and manipulation, fail to develop
their gifts out of the idea that they have no right to it because they
are inferior when they are superior or at least less malignant - far
from enforcing any values worthy of enforcing or serving any equality
worthy of serving, is in fact a ruin of the best minds of the country
and pursuant that of the country itself.
On the right, we see another problem. We see what essentially is an
all-engulfing goose chase that, as Gerry Spence rightly says, steals
people's lives. What we see is a misuse of the concept of individual
responsibility. What I have to say to this is as follows. There can be
no responsible action without knowledge. Only in understanding the
world, from many places, does it become possible to understand the full
range of consequences of one's actions and therefore to truly act
responsibly. And yet the people who most shout about responsibility are
ones that are most hostile to knowledge and what it takes to acquire
it. Which means that the result of their propaganda is people acting in
an uninformed fashion. Indeed it is something more sinister still:
People being bullied or manipulated into lives they would never have
chosen if they had known better. And that, makes the people who
participate in this conmen and liars; ones that, more than any simple
conmen and liars, in effect steal lives of everyone over whose lives
they have impact. Which, once again, is a far more malicious and
horrible thing to do than simply to steal or to defraud.
On another level we see a rigid groupthink; a mind-stealing social
machinery that through a studiously defined system of reinforcements,
threats, punishments, lies and rewards creates a character and
essentially warps the entire psyche - and then ridiculously proclaims
the person free. To the preceding, I ask: If you are all so free, why
are you all the same? A person who's actually free is a person who is
free to design the reality of himself and the reality of his life -
effort directed at both the self-directed and world-directed (internal
and external) levels of reality. And for that freedom - true freedom
- like for true responsibility - is required knowledge. Which most
certainly does involve values that honor and respect knowledge - and
honor and respect what takes to acquire it and to transmit it (in
itself very much a species-directed endeavor).
In the latter, we find America currently lacking. The disrespect that
is afforded the teaching profession is, I believe, scandalous; for it
is the teachers that inform the cognitive habits of the young
generation, and teachers again that have the power to either affect the
children into being developed human beings and productive citizens, or
else through neglect or bad instruction resign them into the hell of
addiction, depression and crime. The teachers in America aren't
respected, and for this reason American primary education despite money
expended upon it is lagging behind that of other industrialized
countries, as the best and the brightest shun teaching careers. It is
considered more respectable to be a lawyer, a psychiatrist, a policeman
- a person who cleans up the messes - than to be a teacher and
prevent the messes from occurring in the first place. A good teacher is
a great asset to the civilization; someone who can instill in children
the love of the subject, the love of learning, the love of productive
endeavor, the love of the neighbor, the love of country and the love of
life. I have been fortunate to have had two such teachers in an
American private school. They deserve all the respect one can give
them, and the more respect is afforded great teachers the more great
people go into the teaching profession and have positive effect on the
formation of young minds, in schools public as well as private.
Altruism is thus neither solely the effect of liberal education nor the
result of shortage of self-esteem. Altruism is a perfectly legitimate,
natural, motive that, like self-interest, exists in the human psyche
- in some people more than in others. It is, in my view, one of the
better things that exist in the human psyche, and it benefits the world
we live in as well as its members to honor altruism and channel it
constructively and intelligently toward where it would the do the good
for other people that it naturally seeks to do.
Representing one's effect upon the collective benefit as the sum
Si = ax+a1y1+a2y1+...+anyn,
Where x is self, a is contribution to the benefit of self, and each y
term is an other person that stands to be affected by one's actions,
S increases with increase in the sum of the terms. The benefit of each
person is the sum
Bi = bx+b1y1+b2y2+...+bnyn,
Where x is the self, b one's own contribution to the benefit of the
self, and each y term the contribution of another person to one's
benefit. Collective benefit is the sum of Bi's - a sum of actions
expended by all individuals to benefit themselves and other people in
the social whole.
This definition quantifies everyone affected by the individual's
actions, whether they take economic form or other forms. It includes
- one's co-workers, one's wife and children, one's neighbors,
the government, the people whose health is affected by industrial and
agricultural activity that forms one's consumption, the people who
produce the goods one consumes, one's friends and enemies.... The
interests of all these people needs to be reflected in the society and
the economy in order that one's actions work toward benefit of all
whose lives one touches. In this, the main tenet of Christianity -
that the main commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself, with
the concept of neighbor including all human beings - becomes reified
in
society's system of reinforcements, and people are steered toward
living the lives that will get them right with God, even as they are
steered toward living lives that benefit - themselves as well as each
other.
The equation above is true for the objective definition of the
collective benefit - the benefit of "the greatest good for the
greatest number" according to utilitarianism or the benefit of "all
individuals included in the society," according to Ayn Rand's
concept of society as the sum total of its individual members. But game
theory maintains something else: that collective benefit is not simply
a sum of its parts but an entity in its own right. That is, the group
exists as a real entity; whether it be Christianity claiming that all
Christians are part of the body of Christ, or pantheism claiming that
we are all one, or government claiming that a nation is a real unit
that retains its own character regardless of which individual citizens
live in it. Therefore there is, in addition to the good of the
individual members of the collective, also the benefit of the
collective. Which collective can be defined, respectively, as -
Christendom; humanity; or the nation.
This can be understood economically, but this can also apply in other
aspects of life. Quite simply, actions that benefit both self and
others, whether in enhancing their state of mind or enhancing their
material well-being, are actions that lead to collective benefit. A
person who hurts another person poses a net drain on the collective
well-being; a person who helps another person enhances it. Attitudes
that are ennobling and enriching - that help people to see the beauty
in each other and cherish each other - are attitudes that increase
total benefit and are as such attitudes that increase the well-being
both of the individual and the collective. Attitudes that are
prosecutorial, degrading, shriveling and abusive are attitudes that
cause misery and are as such wrong for both the whole and the
individual members.
Ilya Shambat
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| User: "Bret Cahill" |
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| Title: Re: Doing good and doing well |
15 Jun 2005 11:46:47 AM |
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wrote:
In postulating the equlibrium theory, John Nash went against both pure
capitalism, which claims that the benefit of the collective is achieved
through people striving for their own benefit, and against altruistic
ideologies such as Communism and religion that claim the pursuit of
self-interest to be antithetical to the benefit of the collective. What
he said was something that ought to be common sense: that the benefit
of the group is achieved when people strive to benefit themselves -
and the group. That is, in a social universe consisting of self and
others, the social universe benefits when one strives to benefit both
self and the social universe. Through this is achieved an improvement
in the well-being of all.
Where the conditions of Nash Equilibrium are met:
Due to the limited conditions in which NE can actually be observed they
are rarely treated as a guide to day-to-day behaviour, or observed in
practise in human negotiations. However, as a theoretical concept in
economics, and evolutionary biology the NE has great explanatory power:
In these cases the conditions are generally met, for the following
reasons:
1. In these long-run cases the 'average' agent can be assumed to
act 'as if' they were rational, because agents who don't are
competed out of the market or environment (in standard theory). This
conclusion is drawn from the "stability" theory above.
2. The payoff in economics is money, and in evolutionary biology
gene transmission, both are the fundamental bottom line of survival
(agents ignoring these will not appear in the long run).
3. The assumption of rationality among all participants is based on
the long-run time scale arguments.
4. 'The market' or 'evolution' are ascribed the ability to
test all strategies.
5. As point one, an irrational agent is presumed to disappear.
In these situations the assumption that the strategy observed is
actually a NE has often been born out by research.
Your distorted interpretation of Nash Equilibrium is off-base. Nash
assigns the selecting agent as the "market" or "evolutionary forces".
Your argument is based on the individual acting for the good of the
collective. Who or what determines "the good of the collective"? No
individual or group has the power to determine/predict the future as
market/evolutionary forces are based on many, many factors that are not
understood or known by humans. In fact, acting for the collective good
distorts the outcome these very forces drive to(only for a limited
time). That's because acting for the good of the collective is
irrational and that behavior will be weeded out (altruistic victims).
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Doing good and doing well |
16 Jun 2005 04:31:03 PM |
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Bret Cahill wrote:
Your distorted interpretation of Nash Equilibrium is off-base. Nash
assigns the selecting agent as the "market" or "evolutionary forces".
Your argument is based on the individual acting for the good of the
collective. Who or what determines "the good of the collective"?
There has been a study about happiness all around the world. Latin
Americans, who are in the middle by income, were at the top. Eastern
Europeans, who also are in the middle by income, were at the bottom.
America and Africa were both somewhere in the middle.
Any questions?
No
individual or group has the power to determine/predict the future as
market/evolutionary forces are based on many, many factors that are not
understood or known by humans. In fact, acting for the collective good
distorts the outcome these very forces drive to(only for a limited
time). That's because acting for the good of the collective is
irrational and that behavior will be weeded out (altruistic victims).
What you are saying is so evil and degenerate, it's not possible even
to find words for it.
You are no better than a Nazi. Fortunately you do not speak for America.
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| User: "Publius" |
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| Title: Re: Doing good and doing well |
16 Jun 2005 10:12:45 PM |
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wrote in news:1118957463.482542.157890
@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com:
No
individual or group has the power to determine/predict the future as
market/evolutionary forces are based on many, many factors that are not
understood or known by humans. In fact, acting for the collective good
distorts the outcome these very forces drive to(only for a limited
time). That's because acting for the good of the collective is
irrational and that behavior will be weeded out (altruistic victims).
What you are saying is so evil and degenerate, it's not possible even
to find words for it.
Being a neophyte libertarian, Brett is still struggling to find his
footing. Once he grows into his new role, he'll discover that it is not
possible to act for the collective good because there is no "collective
good." Any act one may consider will at best yield good for some people. It
may also effect certain others adversely. It will likely have no effects at
all on most.
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