It can also lead us to hardening our hearts against our fellow human beings in a vain attempt to avoid getting hurt--either physically or emotionally--by others, or what's going on around us.
Carl Jung once observed that mental illness is the avoidance of necessary pain. Ours is a society that not only demands instant gratification, but the impossible task of achieving our desires without risk or pain.
This has led us to an era where we have lots of acquaintances, but no friends; lots of opinions, but no ideals; ever-multiplying means of protection, but no safety.
In my November 9, 2009 OpEdNews article " Social Capitalism , " I pointed out that a common element that is found in all forms of mental illness is selfishness. We have to engage the world and take risks to be mentally healthy. This is not truly possible for any person whose impelling motivational force is selfishness. People who think only of themselves will, sooner or later, end up alone late at night, with no one to share with, even if they are surrounded by multitudes of people whose loyalty and companionship they have bought. To quote the great psychologist Erich Fromm, " Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either." ( Man for Himself, chapter 4; 1947.)
I will quote (with some additions and corrections in italics) from my article " Social Capitalism :"
" If selfishness is an invariable component of mental illness, which it is, then what does that have to say about an economic system that is based on selfishness? Can an economic system that distorts the fabric of civil society through its overriding emphasis on selfishness be considered healthy? Can we actually draw the conclusion that the economic selfishness exhibited by our society is a component of a deeper underlying mental illness within our society? I think we can.
Almost sixty years ago, the Rand Corporation created one of the most important models of game theory, 'The Prisoner's Dilemma.' Their assumption was that if presented with a choice between cooperation and self-interest--where the outcome of the dilemma was, unknown to the participants, weighted toward self-interest--the participants would choose self-interest. When they tested it on their secretaries, they were surprised that the secretaries overwhelmingly chose cooperation over self-interest. The people at Rand ignored the outcome of this iteration of their test, stating that the secretaries lacked the sophistication necessary for a valid test.
John F. Nash--whose life was featured in the film " A Beautiful Mind" -- at the same time proposed the Nash Equilibrium, in which Nash assumed that individuals acting in their own self-interest would always arrive at the best possible outcome. While brilliant, Nash was also a paranoid-schizophrenic, whose view of the world was tainted by his illness and its innate selfishness. However, Nash and the Rand Corporation's conservative outlook of fear and selfishness appealed to the military and more conservative and authoritarian elements of the government, who used this fear and selfishness to create America's nuclear policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Twice this policy almost ended civilization, in 1962 and 1983. Yet when Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon instigated the policy of detente, or cooperation, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, tensions between the super powers decreased until Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, and repudiated detente. In 1983 a Norwegian weather rocket almost triggered an automated Soviet nuclear attack, and this time it was the Soviet Union's Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev who began the new era of cooperation and disarmament.
What is true for international affairs is also true for our economic system. The basic result matrix for the Prisoner's Dilemma says that if both parties cooperate they will get 90% of what they want. If one is selfish and the other cooperates the one who is selfish gets 100% of what he wants and the person who cooperates gets nothing. Finally, if both sides are selfish, the two parties can, at best, only get 50% of what they want.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
