Is Greed the Answer to Society’s Problems?

President Barack Obama has met with heads of state to mend fences and find common ground on which trust and cooperation might be built, while Bernard Madoff confessed to orchestrating an investment Ponzi scheme, swindling $65 billion from trusting investors and charitable organizations.  These contrasting episodes of idealism and corruption represent the broad scope of human nature, which includes not only the impulse to pursue narrowly defined self-interest, but also an impulse to serve social concerns greater than the self.

In recent years, society has all but relegated the pursuit of the collective interest to the world “as it ought to be,” a pursuit given lip service at religious services, political rallies, and during half time at sporting events as coaches try to motivate their teams.  Meanwhile, we have grown to accept self-interest as the real world of making a living and paying the bills, and of running a political machine.  The thought that, outside their own immediate families, people are motivated by anything other than ambition and greed is considered naïve.  To see the world as fundamentally Machiavellian is considered rational.

The problem with these assumptions is not only that they are simplistic and misleading, but that by accepting them as factual, we perpetuate a tyranny of low expectations, and we fail to employ other levers for cooperation and human advancement that are at our disposal.

Humans are an obligatorially gregarious species, meaning that we have always lived in social structures in which our survival is heavily dependent on one another.  According to the “social brain hypothesis,” the driving force behind the evolution of enhanced intelligence was the need to manage the intricate social bonds that kept us alive.  The line of hominids that led to us branched off on its own distinctive path as much as seven million years ago.  During 99.9 percent of that vast expanse of time, the interest of the individual and the interest of the family or tribe were so tightly intertwined as to be almost indistinguishable.  Even if a brutal egoist could survive for a while at the expense of those around him, without a healthy and sustainable framework of social bonds to protect them, rarely if ever would his heirs live long enough to reproduce.  Thus the genes that survived as part of our biological heritage are heavily biased toward the formation and attentive maintenance of human attachments and collective efforts.  That is evidenced by how social context “gets under our skin” in profound ways: Loneliness, for instance, can alter the DNA transcription in your immune cells.

I don’t buy the justifications for greed, either from the school of “rational self interest,” or from the “they’re all a bunch of crooks” school that simply abdicates responsibility and looks the other way. Top down efforts to constrain self-interested behavior—legal sanctions and moral codes—can only do so much.  The most effective lever for improving human behavior is bottom up: it lies in what we as individuals envy, expect, accept, and celebrate.

– John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick

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