Before his current season of studenthood, N (my husband) was a community organizer. Part of his job was to meet with people one on one in the neighborhoods where he worked to determine what people’s self interests were. Organizing around what people already want is way, way easier (I didn’t say easy; I said easier) than running yourself into the ground trying to rally support for things people couldn’t care less about.

During those years of organizing, N and I had many conversations about self interest, and the ways it seemed to knock heads with the altruism pushed in the religious environments in which we moved. In those environments, self interest was often equated with selfishness, and was therefore something to try to tame and eventually, ideally, get rid of altogether. The goal was to have God’s interests at the helm (or, I suppose, have these genuinely become your own). How to define God’s interests was and is and ever shall be a whole nother truckload of worms.

The more we talked, though, and the more we lived and observed ourselves and those around us, the more we came to see self interest as not only the air we humans breathe, but actually something, when gotten conscious about, that’s healthy. Something we actually trust more than altruism to keep “good deeds” truly good. If I can be honest that I’m giving money to a beggar because I want to feel less guilty for the wealth I enjoy, and not because I actually care about this person in front of me, I have more options for figuring out whether I’m comfortable with not caring, and if I don’t care, why that might be, and if I do, whether tossing a few coins is really how I want to express that. Self interested good deeds with an altruistic veneer on top are a wonderful recipe for dehumanizing people, I think, for using them harmingly, and not actually helping in ways that are needed.

So I guess my first point is that I think all of us are self interested, and all (most? all sounds so extreme) of our good deeds are at their roots attempts at meeting our own iterests (for feeling important, establishing ourselves as nice or generous, not being lonely, staying out of trouble, not pissing someone off), and not only do I think that isn’t bad, but I think it’s good, and that getting conscious of what we’re actually wanting is the best way to avoid hurting people, and even the best way to actually help people. If I know what my self interests are and try to understand what yours are, we can negotiate a mutual sort of playing field where we both benefit. Mutuality seems like the safest place to be–no matter who in a pair has the most age or money or positional power–the best space for humanizing and protecting and truly serving everyone involved, not the least of which (and I mean that) is you or me.

Trying to empty ourselves of self interest seems to me to be the best way to nourish blind spots, and the best way to push our truest needs and motivations underground where they have no choice but to express themselves subconsciously, which is to say in ways we aren’t choosing, which is to say in ways we can’t evaluate with our conscious minds and values. I’m guessing some of the darkest things in our world, some of the ugliest abuses, could have been avoided were people free to acknowledge their self interests (sexual, emotional, vocational, intellectual) and find conscious and healthy ways of meeting them in mutual sorts of exchange.

The second point I want to make is that I think it’s okay when we can’t meet others’ self interests. I’m thinking here about people we really care about, specifically. Because those are the ones we can get caught in cycles with, cycles of being so driven by our need to make them like us, or be happy with us, or prop up their egos so they don’t pout or get mad, that we lose sight of our other needs, which include honoring and listening to our own selves. It is a painful lesson to learn that people in our lives cannot be everything we want them to be (can’t meet all the needs we thought they could or should); it is a freeing lesson, though not always painless, to learn that when we can’t be what others want us to be, that doesn’t mean we’ve done anything wrong. (Can you tell this is a pep talk aimed at me?)

But what do you all think of self interest? Does true altruism exist? What are ways that religion/spirituality can free us toward humanizing involvement with the needs around us, and not something that only masquerades as such?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Philosophy, Psychology, Bridge-building, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.