Marketize This: Selflessness

"The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone."

-George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858 

If I Needed You

My mom was many things. She was a nurturer, a kind and caring woman to the world.

Jenny and Brian circa 1996, MDA Camp at  Camp Waskowitz.

She was a binge alcoholic bipolar mess when I was growing up--and could be cruel and dismissive as easily as she could give a hug when I scraped my knee. Both aspects can be true, I know. It is rare to find people that can be almost or completely one or the other, we are all some sort of admixture of fuckery and kindness at one point or another. Your mileage may vary, I am speaking only of my own experience. 

I have been a person who so desperately wants to believe in the innate goodness of humanity and fails over and again to latch onto that view. When I see things like the mass disenfranchisement of black voters, the mistreatment of immigrants, the election of a convicted con man who also is clearly a predator, my view that most people in the US are at base hateful is reaffirmed. I could go on about this, but the counterpoint is the driving motivation for this morning's journal entry. 

Jenny and I used to talk about how, if we had the money that Bill Gates had, we would give most of it away NOW. People may scoff and say it's easy to make such a claim you broke-ass fool, but that isn't what people do. In fact, I tend to agree partially. Having been on the board of several liberal organizations, I can tell you rich people generally give money to ease their tax burden, or to control the organizations to which they donate. Again, while your mileage may vary, I have seen very rich people over and again make decisions about the lives of others with whom the donors have no contact, no idea of the lived reality of recipients of their wealth and decision making ability (forget agency), and who also believe they know better than anyone else what should be done with their money.   

That is the forest, my broad experience. But, I have also seen the trees. Some people just do good things reflexively. I experienced that when I volunteered for all those years at Muscular Dystrophy Camp out in Snoqualmie. People did that work as counselors for different reasons--court ordered community service, and people whose brothers and/or sisters were "campers." There are others who, like me (and Jenny) who attended because our parents were working at the camp. My mother was one of the camp runners, and Jenny's mom was the camp occupational therapist. The vast swath of volunteers, however, had no link with MDA or the campers, nor were completing court mandated community service.

Altruism is real. I can't claim it was the sole motivator for me or other counselors, but it was the initial moving force to bring us to camp. We made friends with the counselors and in the case of the cohort I worked with--the attendees who were in or close to but above my age cohort. Every year we would look forward to that third week in July, more than trips to NYC, Paris or Disneyland. After a couple of years it began to feel like old home day upon every return. Nevertheless, the altruism was the prime mover. 

I studied basic college micro and macro economics as part of my college experience. I learned more about rational choice theory ("ratcho") in econ and political economy. Ratcho explains all human action by ascribing any decision as utility maximizing (initially speaking purely of homo economicus, but later, when struggling to explain altruism, utility measured in units called "utiles")- everybody is just a dog tryin' to get a bone, in 1980s pop parlance. Its all horse shit. Think of utiles as a way of quantifying human actions. Each action taken can be measured in utiles. Washing your clothes, scanning your own groceries, mowing the lawn, watching the kids or grand kids, paying for college for your progeny, etc. Because all actions are selfish-and that is considered a good--any time you do anything that can't be quantitized (not quantified) is a problem for the theory. Utiles were, I believe (its been 30 years, so forgive my aging brain) created to help solve the problem of altruism. If everything was measured in money maximization, no theory could explain how a rational actor (under the theory we are all rational actors, generally) could be selfless. Enter the utile. Per the saviors of the profit-maximizer theory of action, a person is utility maximizing when they engage in altruism--because what we want to be is useful--a rational claim I suppose (don't we all want to feel useful?)--and thus was born the beknighted and complete bullshit of the utile.

 

As noted supra, utility was initially interpreted to be $$$$. Every person's decisions were driven by an end goal (and starting goal) of profit maximization. Any decision which wasn't seeking to enrich oneself is deemed irrational. It really is that basic. Such an explanation for human behavior hit one snag--how does this theory explain rational actors doing things that aren't profit maximizing--like growing flowers or help people when the former would be cheaper to buy and the latter could never be reconciled with the alleged money grubbing motivations which the theory relies on to explain everything else.  To be clear, per ratcho, if you volunteer your labor and receive no gain--in fact it would cost you an opportunity to profit maximize--you are mad, bonkers, stupid. 

 

Capitalists can't really expect us to believe they believe this--I  refer you to the 1000 points of light cited by GHW Bush back in 1988. Bill Gates supposedly donating his billions at death--certainly an I won't believe it until I see it claim--puts a lie to the ratcho argument--although maybe death is an acceptable loop hole. Gates has always been selfish--motivated by self rather than others. I learned the foundation game from very wealthy friends. Its a tax dodge, generally, and also a mechanism used to create a legacy--see Andrew Carnegie and libraries. 

 

Robber barons, new and old, while selfish to the extreme, do not demonstrate that ratcho is right or wrong. Such monsters will always be monsters, and ratcho is certainly in service to exalt the existence of all selfish bastards (anyone with ore money than they could reasonably spend in a lifetime and who do little to help others with it are the definition of selfish bastard). The oligarchs, ultra-wealthy, robber barons  don't exist ex machina, outside the ratcho theory, but certainly motivate the push to find an explanation for human behavior that capitalist economists long argued are only rational when the yearn to earn is everything. It turns out, despite at every turn the talking heads in the media  trying to convince us that money is everything with regard to human action, it is not everything that motivates human action. Monetize this

 

Why am I thinking about this? I  

I don't believe that homo economicus exists, nor do I believe that rational choice theory is a satisfactory explanation for all (or even most) human actions. It seems like something cooked up in academia to promote the careers of professional bullshit artists. It is akin to Professor Jack Gladney's invention of Hitler Studies in DeLillo's White Noise, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing in the words of the Bard. In fact, in one class on the subject I took, the professor was bragging that he had solved the "problem" of altruism. I can't say if he did, but what I can say is that capitalist economics feels a lot more like a religion than not, less a science than a justification for marketizing everything. 

I have really buried the lede. Here it is--I know people who are genuine altruists in actions that they take. It costs them something to be selfless, but they don't care. In fact, for some (like ascetics), it may be the point. I know them. Many such people make up the majority of the people I call friends. People who give not because they feel they have to, or because they think that altruistic acts are expected, required or necessary. They do it because it is a human thing to do. If you are a long time reader of my musings, I can promise you that I am certain I am describing you. How else to explain why someone went out of their way to help me find work when I left my County job. How to explain a friend who gave a 2–3-year-old perfectly functioning car to a coworker struggling to make ends meet or gave another $5000 so they could hire a family law attorney when in a custody battle? I still marvel at the outpouring of kindness that people showed me when I was in the middle of hell. 

Why am I bloviating and blathering about this? Full confession, I don't hold humans in high regard in most respects. I do, however, believe that even if most people are shit (again, your mileage may vary), given the chance most people would sacrifice on behalf of others. In other words, I think altruism is innate in all of us, that ratcho is neither rational nor are all human actions a choice but is hard wired. Some people lose the character trait of caring for others somewhere along the way and can't find their way back home. Its a fundamental thing about humanness, kindness, giving until it hurts or whether it hurts or not, loving your neighbor as you love yourself.