Topic: Myrkul Sells AnCap... - page 2. (Read 8698 times)

I suggest The Social Contract from Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04335a.htm

There are two kinds of selfishness:
1) Keeping what you have all to yourself, refusing to give any of it to others
2) Wanting to acquire something, and working actively and ruthlessly with the goal of acquiring it.

Unless you can eat and survive off of whatever it is you are squatting on in #1, you'll starve to death. Problem solved.
For #2, you can either acquire what you want by force, or by trade. If you do it by force, you can expect to receive force in kind. If you do it by trade, the ONLY way for you to be selfish is to give others what they want in return. You are selfish with money, because you are ruthlessly squandering your labor, and throwing it away at your employer, in order to get money in return. You are selfish with your lover, because you are giving up your affections, time, and money in exchange for their love (at least I hope it's in exchange, and not one sided). All businesses and corporations are selfish: they exist to pursue profits, and the only way they can do that is by giving you the best products and services they possibly can. And all those products that you are buying were invented by selfish men who thought "I bet I could make money if I figure out how to do/make this." Without selfishness, we would essentially be dead, because there would be no motivation to invent or do anything. "Why should I bother inventing, or doing, if someone else will do it and share it with me?" That's why communism was a failed system.

Two can play the definition game:
"Enlightened self-interest is a philosophy in ethics which states that persons who act to further the interests of others (or the interests of the group or groups to which they belong), ultimately serve their own self-interest."

"Rational selfishness is a term generally related to Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy, and refers to a person's efforts to look after their own well-being, to cultivate the self and achieve goals for the good of the self. The focus in rational selfishness might be considered to be more self-directed (where the benefit to the group or society is a possible by-product) than the focus of enlightened self-interest which is more group-directed (and the benefit to oneself might be more of the by-product)."

Until you can explain how we can possibly settle that obligation, we'll just have to call it slavery, if only for a lack of a better word  If you can provide a better word for an obligation that can not be settled, or describe how to settle that obligation, please do so.

Stating my opinion is not the same as calling you a bad person.  If I wanted to do that I would just do it.   

I'll leave it here and people can decide for themselves if they believe it is a good or bad thing:

Definition:
Selfish:  "Lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure"

Self-interest:  "taking advantage of opportunities without regard for the consequences for others."

Sure about that, buck-o?

You can keep that point of view all you want.   You just discredit yourself even further. 

See and now you reveal yourself.   I never said anything that you could construe into sinister motives and I do not think you are evil at all.  We have nothing more to talk about.  At least Myrkul one of most respectful and intellectually honest one of the bunch. 

That is Myrkul and Rich_T showing their true self. They think everyone is selfish like them, therefore they try to convince people to accept a false condition to justify their own condition. Since their are selfish, they try to fool people into think they are selfish like them, so they can free themselves from the criticism against selfishness.

Good point.

Any of those other reasons would also be self-interest. Actions are either neutral, self-destructive or for self-interest. If I stand in the cold dishing out soup to the homeless, it is because it provides me with something, even if it is only a feeling of well-being or just assuaging some white guilt.

Note the need to ascribe sinister motives to those with a different opinion. You don't just have a different perspective on life, you are bad, evil etc.

I don't think it's missed at all. I think the point is that it should be voluntary.

On the contrary, my conditioning was the same as yours, to see sacrifice as virtue, to see loss as gain, to see suffering as joy.

I had to work long and hard to break that conditioning.

I am sorry that is how you have been conditioned to see the world.  We just have different perspectives and I think you are wrong about your theory of human nature and behavior.  We are much more complex than that. 

If you had no self-interest, you wouldn't care that you're hungry.

If you had no self-interest, you wouldn't care about your actions.

If you had no self-interest, you wouldn't care about your family. Hear me out: Why did you start that family? Purely out of concern for the continuation of the species? Did you pick your wife solely on genetic factors? Do you want your children to thrive simply because they are human beings? No, you have self-interested reasons for all of that. Face it, you're selfish. It's not a bad thing. It's how humanity has progressed this far, and it's how we will continue to make progress.

Let me take these statements and give you my perspective in my daily life:

If you are not self-interested, you don't eat when you're hungry. - I eat because I am hungry, just because my body tells me its time to eat doesn't mean it was motivated by self-interest.

If you are not self-interested, you don't clean up your waste. - I clean up my waste because I care about my actions and how it affects other around me.  That is called personal responsibility. 

If you are not self-interested, you don't seek the best job for your abilities. - I seek jobs I enjoy doing, will provide value to the company and will provide a proper income for my family. 

Here are the definitions below, sounds like major guiding force we want to in society, doesn't it? NOT

Definition:
Selfish:  "Lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure"

Self-interest:  "taking advantage of opportunities without regard for the consequences for others."

You seem to be using two words interchangeably that you should not be. Selfish is self-interested. Narcissistic is self-loving, specifically to the exclusion of others. Narcissistic is indeed a bad thing, but selfish is not. Self-interest is, again, how you stay alive. If you are not self-interested, you don't eat when you're hungry. If you are not self-interested, you don't clean up your waste. If you are not self-interested, you don't seek the best job for your abilities.

So if you're not selfish, you're broke, wallowing in your own shit until you starve to death.

Now, I've used this quote before, but you keep making this mistake, so...
"The greatest non sequitur committed by defenders of the State is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State." - Murray Rothbard

Selfish is a bad thing, it is a major reason society is messed right now.  Everyone so focused on themselves with their narcissistic tendencies has let our republic some to the point of almost utter collapse.  Participation in your community and your government is how you keep a prospering society (I don't mean financially, I mean socially and culturally). 

You just represent the next step towards a point where it is fully justified to be selfish and cut-throat with no moral reservation to the impact of your behavior to people other than your own personal benefit.  Life becomes only cold calculation for the most part and our humanity just dies off in general because no one cares and they don't feel it is their responsibility to care and or do something.

This is one of the major flaws of the AnCap ideology.   

You keep saying selfish like it's a bad thing. Self interest is how you stay alive.