Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
03 July 13
t's
worth pondering that the 19 firefighters who died Sunday battling a
huge wildfire near Prescott, Arizona, presumably were motivated by
something other than rational self-interest. Like the first-responders
to 9/11 and other emergencies, and members of the armed forces, they put
themselves in harm's way (or chose a job that did so) because they
wanted to serve.
Economics, and much of public policy and political
strategy, assume that people are motivated by self-interest, that the
definition of acting rationally is to maximize what you want for
yourself, and that other values - service, duty, allegiance to others,
morality, and shared ideals - are either irrelevant or negligible.
Ayn Rand, the philosophical guru of the modern
Republican Party, popularized this view of human nature. In her world,
selfishness is the only honest and justifiable motive. By looking out
for Number One, we accomplish everything that's necessary. Economist
Milton Friedman extended the logic: The magic of the marketplace can be
relied on to allocate resources to their highest and best uses. Anything
"public" is suspect.
The titans of Wall Street and the CEOs of our
major corporations have put this narrow principle into everyday
practice. In their view, the aggregation of great wealth and
maximization of profit is the only justifiable motive. Greed is good.
Eight-figure compensation packages are their due. People are paid
according to their economic worth.
This crimped perspective misses what's most
important. Shared values are the essence of a society. They fuel not
only acts of valor, such as those of these 19 young firefighters, but
they also motivate people to become teachers and social workers, police
officers and soldiers, librarians and city councilors.
And they generate social movements - abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights, environmental protection.
Most human beings want to be part of something
larger than themselves. They crave moral purpose and social solidarity.
If we overlook this, we fail to understand the means and meaning of
social progress.
2 comments:
Really? So you can't be a firefighter, cop or a solder just because you you ego is so big that you believe you the savior of humanity? Or just for the adrenalin rush? People risk there lives every day just for the fun of it.
I can only guess that you ether haven't read to books or did not understand them.
"It's worth pondering that the 19 firefighters who died Sunday battling a huge wildfire near Prescott, Arizona, presumably were motivated by something other than rational self-interest. Like the first-responders to 9/11 and other emergencies, and members of the armed forces, they put themselves in harm's way (or chose a job that did so) because they wanted to serve."
Any action one takes to help another person, such as fighting fires, must be chosen within the full context of one's own goals and values. Each individual must determine the time, the effort, the money that it is appropriate to spend, given the position of the recipient in his evaluative hierarchy of values, and then act accordingly.
To give a person less than he deserves, judging by his own hierarchy is to betray his values. To give him more is to divert resources to a recipient who in unworthy of them by his own definition, and thus again to sacrifice his values.
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