SELF AND INTERESTS
1 The good old cause
Our sole end is our own self-interest. Everything else we use as an implement to serve this. And our self-interest turns everything into a machine to cater to our wants. But it also makes us grateful, courteous, forgiving and prompt to team with those who might help us to gain our ends. It has faith in nothing, but will bow down to anything that might raise it. Though resenting all rivals, it will serve any scheme that seems to serve it. We have no true reverence, but we are ready to abase ourselves as a way to exalt ourselves.
It is love of self, more than love of others, that ‘beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.’ It sits enthroned in our hearts and in the world as the great anarch and the great autocrat. No cause is too hallowed or too profane for it to conscript for its own use.
It is the world that lives by faith, hope and charity, faith in its own unctuous lies, hope that its greed will one day land the prize it craves, and charity for the respectable rogues who keep it humming. Faith and hope keep you on the lookout for someone or something outside yourself that might help you to get what you want.
2 The god of our idolatry
Our self-interest is the force closest to the core of our being. And so when it is pushing us, we feel that we must be following our heart.
Those who vaunt that they are paid to do what they love are willing to love whatever they are paid to do. And those who boast of their incorruptibility rush to lease out their souls for a low rent. Yet some who have made their fortune from a calling grumble how dear it has cost them.
The disease loves nothing more than its own symptoms, which bear witness to its unique God-given essence.
3 All for self
I won’t do a thing if I can’t squeeze out of it some private good. Yet there’s next to nothing that I won’t do, since I soon find a private good in doing it. ‘We can all begin freely,’ as Austen points out. Though you may choose a scheme or occupation with no thought of your own gain, how could you stick at it for long, if it brings you no profit? Any labour that you persist in must be a labour of self-love.
We are perverse alchemists who melt down all the more precious things to the base metal of self. There’s nothing so great but we will find some means to milk it for our own low gain.
How could I hear the claims of others’ egoism, when I’m deafened by the dull drone and rumble of my own? Yet I still feel that they speak too loud. ‘Their own din,’ as Céline wrote, ‘prevents them from hearing anything else.’
We have the raw hunger of beasts but not their spotlessness. And we have the presumptuousness of gods but not their bright gifts.
How little others want from you, and how hot they are to get it. They will tear you to shreds for the least scrap of advantage.
No habit forms more quickly than that of taking as much advantage of people as they let you. The dullest person spots your weak points in the blink of an eye, and the kindest can’t help but make the most of them.
4 The slaves of self-interest
It’s clear how tyrannically self-interest rules us all, not when it pays its workers profusely, but when it is so slavishly obeyed by those who don’t gain a cent from it. We are so bent on prevailing, however high the price, and however mean the prize. Conceit covets triumphs, but will make do with the most meagre ones.
Some people let their own ambitions bully them as much as they use them to try to bully others. They have the strength to hack their way to what they want, but they are so weak that they need to. And they stop at nothing to feed fat their overweening desires, because they are loath to do the least thing to bridle them. They owe their sterile busyness to their lack of self-restraint. And so they have to toil to pay off the arrears by decades of strict self-discipline.
5 The hell of self
What but our selfishness could bear the strain of having to fill sixty minutes of every hour with self?
To get out of hell, we would have to get out of self. But all we want to do is stoke its fires.
So long as we are the ones doing the tormenting, we don’t much care if we are living in hell.
The door out of hell stands wide open, but we don’t notice. We are having too much fun torturing our fellow beings.
The self is a prison. What’s the worst of it, that you can’t break out of it, or that you can’t stop the world from breaking in?
Hell needs no devils. There the damned are hard at work extracting gain from racking one another.
6 Choosing interests
Chance will choose the ends that you aim at, and these ends will choose everything else for you. My thoughts and moods are the shadows of my schemes and of what I need to put my faith in so as to further them. I’m prompt to feel any emotions that might advance my prospects.
Our interests are our deepest self, yet we borrow them from some source close to hand. We hold fast to our own schemes and desires, no matter what others may think or say. Yet we form our projects and desires on templates that we take from others.
Our egoism is so urgent, and yet our ego is so empty, that we have to fill it up with a range of busy schemes.
7 Busy calculation
Our reason is quick to find expedients to serve our ends and pretexts to prop up our vanity.
Most of us see only what we are looking for. And most of us are looking only for our own profit.
Nothing is too little to engross our thoughts, if it might get us more money or fun. No satisfaction is large enough to match our fantasy, though no desire is too small to fill our whole soul.
Ambitious schemers make up a grotesque menagerie. Some puff up like toads to several times their real size. Some slither rat-like through crannies too strait for the rest of us. Others, like caterpillars, chew up a fat harvest. And some, like a troop of ants, branch into sections, and seem to swarm far and near.
8 The fickle persistence of self-interest
I don’t hesitate to give up on those ventures that fail to yield me a quick profit. So why do I stay so obdurately loyal to some of my most unrewarding schemes? We persist in our fancies, but waver in our faith. Our desires are biddable yet unrelenting, and our passions are tenacious but perverse. Self-interest makes us both obstinate and mutable in all things, not least our interests. If they weren’t so changeable, how could they adapt to each untried confluence of conditions and gain from all their projects?
The will never alters. It merely swaps its objects and hones its tools. We desire one good less by desiring some other more, or else by desiring less of the one but desiring that less just as much.
Where our self-interest is not in play, our talents are wondrous but soon discouraged. But where it is, they are unwearying yet mediocre.
9 Renunciation and self-interest
I leave off my high aims, because I can’t let go of my low cravings.
When I give up my grand goals for mean ones, I claim that I have renounced them. But in my defeat and despair I set my heart on a still paltrier stand-in for what I hoped to gain from success. When a tall enterprise burns down, a hundred squat weeds soon shoot up in its place. And I tend one of these, and put my erstwhile pet out of mind, and marvel that I gave so much time to a thing so slight. I don’t remit my zeal when I retrench my ambitions.
I’m quick to leave off aspiring to the loftiest things. But I resent any objections that might chill my lust for the lowest.
You may cease to hanker for any one thing, but you can’t stop hankering for something. I crave so much, yet I care for so little. And I care for so little, because I crave so much.
It’s not hard to lack. But it’s killing to lose. It is, as Pascal says, ‘horrible to see all that one owns slipping away.’ It may be easy to renounce success, but it’s parching to live without it. How it wrings our hearts to lose what was hardly worth having.
Some people give up their claim to all life’s silvered baubles, and then solemnly spend all their force on some absurd but arduous cause. They resist the world’s blandishments, but are seduced by its asperities.
ILLUSORY SELF-INTEREST
10 The illusions of self-interest and self-love
Our lives are lit up by our bright illusions, and warmed by our boiling desires.
Life is a game of illusions, in which the winner is the one who holds the most successful lies. In this world truth is the shadow, and appearance is the substance.
The ego yields to the reality principle as a ruse to reap its unreal gratifications. Most of our illusions are interested, and most of our interests are illusory. We use our godlike knowledge to guide us to our low and delusive goals. Our mad notions serve us so well that we would be mad to give them up.
We are so used to taking false for true when it profits us, that we continue to do so even when it fails to. Our dull wants constitute our inmost reality, yet they frame for us a world of gaudy flummery. How brightly objects seem to shine, as soon as they come in range of the halo of my own cravings.
We don’t believe the pious creeds that we profess. And we don’t dare to profess the self-serving schemes by which we thrive.
11 Self-interest the illusionist
We are hustled on by our mad compulsions, and held back by our irrational inhibitions. There are two kinds of people, the crazy and the dead. ‘Madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead.’
To make a success of some schemes, all you need do is hold fast to the glittering lies which hide how little they will content you.
I know the world through my wants and projects. I let my self-interest choose my ends, and these choose what I will or won’t know of the world and of my own heart. ‘Self-interest,’ wrote Amiel, ‘is an endless fount of commodious illusions.’
Few things are more self-serving than our delusions, or more self-defeating than our selfishness.
We need knowledge to show us the way to what we want. And we need illusions to convince ourselves that it was worth wanting. We fail because we can’t fathom how the world works. But we don’t see that we have failed because we don’t want to fathom who we are.
A worldly climber is a combination of cunning realism and childlike self-absorption.
12 Illusion and advantage
We prefer our own advantage to most truths. And yet we prefer our own errors to many advantages. We stay chained to rusted lies, because we are slaving to reach our goals. But we can’t reach our goals, because we are chained so tight to our lies. We will stop at nothing to expedite our schemes. But if they miscarry, we’re glad just to keep our grip on our false opinions. We fix our eyes on our bright dreams, to help us sate our sullen lusts, or to salve our chagrin when we fail to do so.
My illusions land me in real troubles, which hurt me so bad, that I have to seek sanctuary in additional illusions.
Most of us think and act judiciously only in the schemes that serve our own ends, a few in all but that.
Human beings are rational animals who have more sense than to try to use their reason to guide them through this mad world.
Our illusions make the constitution of our lives. Our wants and schemes are the policies that give them form. Information is the bureaucrat which advises them how best to act. And our will is the minister who carries them out.
13 Self-interest shuts out self-knowledge
We are more foreign to ourselves than we are to our ambitions. And we dwell farther from our hearts than we do from our schemes. Our concupiscence keeps us close to others and far from ourselves. We are whirled on blindly by our greed, and we are gulled by our own self-belief.
We hone our self as a tool to implement our aims. And we want to learn who we are as we want to learn the tool’s trade, to squeeze the most use from it.
The eye reposes most agreeably in the middle distance. And that’s where we live, with our compulsions and career. I don’t dare to grasp who I am. And I don’t care to know what I aim at. That would just hold me back from getting what I want.
We have to hollow out our hearts in order to lay hold of the junk that we are sure will fill them up.
14 We don’t know what we want
People are not quite aware of what they want, but how unwaveringly they fight to lay their hands on it. I don’t know what I want, and yet there’s nothing I won’t do to grab more of it.
We squander all our selfish force on schemes that yield us no gain. What won’t we suffer or sacrifice to reach a goal which will bring us no good?
We are never sure of what it is that we desire. So it’s lucky for us that we have our self-satisfaction to tell us that we’ve got it.
People can’t stop wanting not just what they do want, as Schopenhauer showed, but even what they don’t want. As Hoffer points out, ‘We not only keep wanting what we cannot have, but go on wanting what we no longer really want.’
15 We don’t know what is good for us
We set aside our principles for the sake of our profit. And then we squander our profit to give rein to our giddy freaks and whims. We are willing to ruin ourselves for a caprice, but we won’t so much as discompose ourselves for a conviction.
Our most potent motives lurk in the hiatus between long obsession and brief whim. ‘So little are we governed by self-interest,’ as Hazlitt wrote, ‘and so much by imagination.’
If we weren’t so intent on our own interest, our folly would be sure to undo us. And if we weren’t hobbled by our folly, our self-interest would devour the wide world. The harm that we cause by our flailing avarice is abated less by our fine charity than by our gross ineptitude.
We rarely pursue our real interests, much less our best ones. So how could they bring us true peace? Many people are too grasping to see where their real profit lies. And they care for no more than a small segment of their own self. Their egoism sunders them not just from others but from their own heart as well. What they serve is a baseless semblance of their present self, and they sacrifice to this the part of them that is most real and lasting.
We are too much the fools of our desires to be truly self-serving.
SWINDLING SELF-INTEREST
16 Self-destructive self-interest
Our own self-interest treats our self with the same lack of care that the national interest treats our land. We exploit and rifle it for gain. What we feel for it is both more and less than love. We love our self as the fire loves the coal. And yet, like the fire, we love nothing else.
I do my neighbours no more good by my neighbour-love than I do myself by my selfishness.
What mayhem we would cause, if we loved our neighbour with the same boundless, fierce, unjust partiality that we love ourselves. Thank God there’s not much chance of that.
We are both more self-seeking and more self-destructive than we know. We care as icily for the good of others as we toil clumsily for our own. Though we are disinclined to do a charitable deed unless it will further our own ends, we are lured to do a mess of discreditable ones that hinder them.
A human being is a selfish and self-lacerating animal.
How lucky that few people care enough for us to do us as much harm as we do ourselves.
I oppose those who try to injure me with the same ferocity that I do those who try to save me from injuring myself.
17 Swindled by our own self-interest
If we weren’t in such a sweat to seize what we want, would we be so easily defrauded of it? We are as ruthless in the pursuit of our good as we are ready to be swindled out of it. People try to bluff us for their ends, and we allow them to for our own. Our egoism, so versed in cheating others, at last cheats itself. We gain so little from the intrigues for which we make them pay so dear.
I’m glad to be gulled by my own mad fancies, so long as I can brag that I’m an astute exception. But most of the time I choose to be swindled with all the rest, rather than profit on my own.
Venal people are fleeced with ease but reluctant to trust. The cunning can be entangled by their own subtlety. A chump may be still more disillusioning than a cheat.
18 The heart is a hungry dupe
Is our deceitfulness more credulous or is our credulity more deceitful? We let ourselves be cozened in our haste to snatch a quick gain. ‘The eagerness of a knave,’ Halifax wrote, ‘maketh him often as catchable as ignorance maketh a fool.’
Our heart is the dupe of our wants more than the head is the dupe of the heart. We are so prone to being hoaxed, not because our uncorrupted heart is too trusting to heed our judicious misgivings, but because our clamorous voracity drowns them out. And we are so easy to cheat, not because we are so guileless, but because we are so greedy. ‘How willing the vulgar are,’ Scott says, ‘to gull themselves when they can find no one else to take the trouble.’ As Machiavelli knew, a mark always meets a quack half way.
The body does not corrupt the soul. The soul corrupts the mind.
We submit to be robbed by the arch-deceiver, our own self-flattery. Our guileful self-interest is fooled by our gullible self-regard. ‘A person’s vanity,’ Balzac says, ‘is a pretender that never lacks for a butt.’
19 The cunning credulity of self-interest
We fool ourselves ingenuously but not innocently. The self-seeking that makes us cunning makes us credulous.
We are too cunning to be innocent, and too naive to be wise.
We need others to share our delusions as much as we need to be deluded. It’s only fools, who don’t see how the world works, that decline to be defrauded like the rest of us.
We make headway in this crooked world by becoming clever fools and conniving dupes.
The world distrusts all solid realities, and yet is determined to be deceived by the hollowest shows.
Some people are credulous because they are innocent, and some because they are corrupt. The guileless can be bought for a pittance, since they naively trust that the world will keep its promises. And the corrupt are not hard to bluff, because they are so keen to hear what might bring them the least gain.
Most of us are not hard to fool, because we are so eager to believe, or at least too lazy to doubt.
20 We put our faith in the faithless
We don’t trust those who tell the truth, yet we let the most patent deceivers take us in. It is the faithless that compel our cunning faith. We see straight through the few who have seen through themselves. But we are hypnotized by the bright opacity of a self-swindler, most of all when the swindler is us. ‘All other swindlers upon earth,’ Dickens writes, ‘are nothing to the self-swindlers.’
I feel a great need to have faith in the wisdom of those who fool me, so that I won’t need to see what a fool I am.
21 Charm
The charmer thrives by the adage, Self-love conquers all. All the world loves a self-lover, like Alcibiades or Rupert Brooke, who seems to be in love with all the world. Their charm is their velvet selfishness turned outward, and their brashness supercharges them with a high voltage charisma.
Charm, as Amiel wrote, is ‘the trait in others that renders us more pleased with ourselves.’ The vanity of others delights or disgusts me, depending on how much it seems to play up to or snub my own.
We are charmed by the self-importance of those who add to our sense of our own importance.
Charisma is one of the fake forces whose effects in this world of fakery are all too real.
We love a swaggerer as much as we hate a sneerer. We are beguiled by those who puff their own importance as much as we are repelled by the few who mock the impostures of the world from which we hope to gain. And what dire shame we heap on anyone who would make us feel the least bit ashamed.
Why scowl, as if to show that the world is not good enough for you? Better to smile, and disdain to let the world know what you think of it. A smile may betray more deep scorn than a sneer, since it doesn’t care to show how little it thinks of those it beams on.
The charmer has learnt that if you tickle people’s conceit, they won’t mind when you filch their real gain.
22 The ruses of self-interest
Our self-seeking stoops so low to pocket its small gains that it may seem meek. And it consents so eagerly to be foxed that it seems ingenuous. And it schemes so wholeheartedly with anyone to get what it wants that it seems trustworthy.
Like a threatened nation, you have three options to deal with the world, appease, ally or attack.
By promoting their schemes, people grow both brutal and accommodating. They forward them with ruthless economy and ruthless excess. They will drop any principle that might hold them back, yet they stop at nothing to push them on.
I’m scarcely aware of all the guile that my machinations prompt me to, and I don’t foresee the troubles that they’ll cause me.
Our self-interest serves us well by appearing not to serve us better. It is advantageous to miscalculate once in a while, to show that you are not calculating. We gain so little from our accomodations with the world, that they seem guiltless. And we reap so much from our misconduct, that we feel no need to prove it just.
LITTLE INTERESTS
23 The smallness of self-interest
The puniest particle of life is worth more to itself than the rest of life as a whole. ‘What is the entire world,’ asked Sade, ‘compared to a single one of my desires?’ And what is the long chain of life and its delicate gestation weighed in the scale with my own brief term here?
We are more presumptuous than ambitious. Our hopes are modest yet insatiable. Our views are microscopic, but our pretensions are megalomaniac. We are so crammed with vanity, that we can let our true pride starve. Egotism surveys life through a magnifying glass, not through a telescope. Our selfishness, which knows no bounds, sets very tight bounds to our world.
However wide or narrow our horizons, it is our own glory that lights them up. And the narrower they are, the more glowingly it does so.
Since we are too weak to dominate the big world, we decide that our own narrow tract of it must be all that matters. But the foreshortened arc of our job, household or cluster of friends looks real from the inside alone, since no one else has any interest in behaving as if it were real. The smaller the world in which we view ourselves, the larger the place that we seem to fill up in it.
24 The monotony and variety of self-interest
We are stitched together from such multicoloured odds and ends, so how do they make up such a monochrome whole?
Self-interest is as monotonous as the self, and as multifarious as the ten thousand things that it covets. What could be meaner and more predictable? Yet what could be more irresistible and engrossing? How did unvarying interest frame so floridly variegated a world?
Some people’s self-love must be promiscuous, to embrace all the incompatible selves that they are quilted from.
25 Zealots and opportunists
Those who have no principles may yet be willing to die for a cause that gains them nothing. And yet most dreamy fanatics turn out to be crafty careerists. A deranged militant like Hitler may act with wily duplicity.
Chancers presume that they owe it to their high merits to squeeze the most out of all the low opportunities that come their way.
Some people are better than their ambitions, but by prosecuting them they grow worse. Like Macbeth, they act by the rule that ‘For mine own good all causes must give way.’ They don’t have the high integrity to follow their best projects, but they lack the self-command to give up their mean ones.
We pursue goals that are unworthy of us, and by pursuing them we grow unworthy of anything better.
26 Insatiable self-satisfaction
Our self-seeking is insatiable but easily appeased. I covet so much, yet I’m content with such scanty takings. Since I rate my place so high, why do I take such pride in the lowest gains? How readily we are disaffected, yet how cheaply we are delighted. Our hearts would not be surfeited with paradise. Yet how hungrily they fall to feast on the broken meats of this corrupted world. We are impossible to satisfy, but easy to please.
27 Self-satisfaction is easily satisfied
Our defeats are more bitter than we feared. And our victories prove more insipid than we hoped. But our self-satisfaction helps us to digest the one, and lends seasoning and savour to the other.
How content I would be, if I were as charmed with everything else as I am with my own self. I’m never less than thrilled with my own merits, though this doesn’t quite suffice me. And I’m so well pleased with myself, that anything else can please or displease me. Most of us are too delighted with ourselves to be discontented with our lot. Yet we are all too self-seeking to sit still.
How modest or how vain we must be, to have achieved so little and still to be so self-satisfied.
I can bear to be stripped of all that I have, since I am still sheltered by my self-assurance.
All satisfaction springs from self-satisfaction. Most people are so pleased with themselves, that they are pleased with all the rest of the world as well.
SELF-REGARD
28 We are proud of our demeaning self-interest
We are no less proud than avaricious. So we have to pretend that all that we do to feed our avarice must redound to our glory. Yet we may still blush to seek the prizes that even our pride wants us to get. We have to make our profligacy our pride, since we are too much the slaves of our greed to break its shackles. ‘The jingling of the guinea,’ Tennyson wrote, ‘helps the hurt that honour feels.’ Pride may be ashamed to calculate, but it’s yet more ashamed to lose.
We would be ashamed to lose the fight, but we are not ashamed to fight it in such a way that we don’t deserve to win.
Proud of all that helps us to lay hold of what we desire, we yet deny that it is doing any such thing. Though vain of our plans, we shy from acknowledging the mean ploys that we stoop to in carrying them out. If we didn’t set our price so high, how could we bear to crouch so low from day to disgraceful day to snaffle up such trim gains?
What we crave are the slight but solid prizes which we hope will magnify the slight and doubtful distinctions which lift us a notch above our peers.
29 Self-interest is self-repairing
Self-interest is unashamed, yet is prompt to mend when it fails. And self-regard is quick to feel shame, but refuses to reform when it has disgraced itself. Ambition learns from its stumbles, but vanity denies that it made them. Some of us would sooner face ruin than recognize that we were wrong. We would rather weather our acts’ calamitous outcomes than mitigate them by admitting that we had brought them on our own heads.
Some people recover from reverses because they are so limber, and some because they are so unbending. My self- interest makes me pliable but persevering. And my self-regard makes me obstinate and unwavering.
30 Self-regard at war with self-interest
My greed and my pride, like president and congress, form part of the same administration, but they may come from adverse blocs and are incessantly bickering.
Our self-seeking racks us, but our self-satisfaction soothes us.
We are sustained by the solid diet of our self-seeking. But we breathe each instant the impalpable air of our lies and self-conceit.
Our self-belief keeps us afloat, and our self-interest sweeps us on down the cascade of life.
Some people sell their real self-interest to gild the sheath of their self-regard. And some abdicate their dignity to promote their mean designs.
Even the most unhinged people don’t lack clever reasons to confirm their mad immodesty or to find excuses for their mad resolutions.
We act in order to push our self-interest. And we think in order to puff up our self-regard. We act in order to do well for ourselves. And we reflect in order to think well of ourselves. Our thoughts frame a continuous appreciative gloss on the text of our conduct. Our conceit is our faith, and our self-seeking is our works, and we trust that we are justified by both.
31 Self-regard trumps self-interest
The luxury of our self-regard is dearer to us than our obligatory self-seeking. Our mad arrogance outwits our scheming avarice. We cling to a fervent faith in the fetish of our self. But pride is a jealous god, which may demand the immolation of its firstborn, our advantage.
Our self-seeking tells us how to act, and our self-conceit tells us what to believe. Domineering self-regard truckles to low self-interest. And yet our deft self-interest is the dupe of our simpleminded self-regard.
A selfish person, as the proverb says, will burn down your house to roast his eggs. But blusterers will burn down their own house, to show that they know how to roast eggs more skilfully than you.
Some people are so proud, that they don’t deign to walk on two legs. So they hack off the limb of their self-interest, to show how nimbly their self-regard can hop to and fro on one.
People are too selfish to repent the wrongs that they do to others. And they are too smug to regret the harms that they do to themselves.