By
Roberto Diego
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Table of Contents
Bad Idea #3 Selfishness is Evil
Bad Idea #4 Human Sacrifice/Altruism/Collectivism See Below
The Solution: A Secular Society
The Source of the Idea
If you have ever criticized an individual for being “selfish” or “prideful;” if you have ever felt a tinge of jealousy or envy at a person who is more successful or more beautiful than you; if you have ever talked behind a person’s back in criticism over something he has done that has earned him praise; if you have ever told a child not to be too happy about an accomplishment because others would be jealous; if you have ever voted for higher taxes on the rich; then you are engaged in the ritual of human sacrifice.
Human Sacrifice is a very ancient religious ritual. It was originally engaged by primitive cultures who felt a need to propitiate an avenging god who threatened the survival of the entire group in some way. It was thought that if they gave the god some visible indication of their love as well as their willingness to atone for whatever evil they had done, then the god might not destroy them. The best way to appease the god, they thought, was to offer him or her a gift of their most beautiful child.
Today, the idea of propitiating a god in this way has been lost and a new ideology of sacrifice has been created over the centuries called collectivism. Collectivism is the idea that the collective, or government, is the owner of every individual and has the right to require the individual’s sacrifice for the sake of the collective. The propaganda of collectivism is essentially the same as that of the primitive religions that we spoke of above. The well-being of the collective is deemed to be so important that no individual can possibly resist the call to sacrifice. In fact, under collectivism, it is a crime to do anything that does not involve the well-being of the collective. With collectivism, the individual must pay homage to the “wonderful” collective, must obey with all his might and must show all others that he is dedicated to them. In addition, he must feel guilty for doing anything that is considered “selfish” and he must pay penance whenever he commits a sin of any type that gives him pleasure or joy.
In this book, both altruism and collectivism are discussed as separate “bad ideas.” But it must be pointed out that they are corollary concepts, hence the title of this chapter. Altruism is a moral concept whereas collectivism is the political/social implementation of altruism.
You see altruism and collectivism today among politicians. We elevate people to high office that have spent their lives working for others, organizing for others, living for others and otherwise showing others how dedicated they are to the collective well-being of some group or another. In fact, if it is suspected that an individual has been successful and/or selfish in any way, he has no chance of leadership. If he is a billionaire who has brought great products at good prices to the market and has significantly enhanced the lives of others, he has little chance of high office unless he changes his ideology and becomes a collectivist. If, on the other hand, a person has spent his life in the ghettos organizing poor people for lower rents and more food handouts, he is considered a good person and worthy of leading a nuclear nation in spite of the fact that when he leaves the ghetto for high office, most of the poor are still poor, rents are too high for them and they are still starving.
Likewise, the hatred that some cultures express toward the United States is the same sort of rejection that we see toward accomplished people. The reaction to the existence of the U.S. is to punish the country with hatred, propaganda and even violent terrorism. This is because our country fosters self-interest and capitalism rather than give all its wealth to the collective of poor countries. That our way of life brings more affluence and well being than all of the whole history of both Christianity and Islam is irrelevant to the haters of selfishness. It is more important for religious people to attack the egoism implicit in the very political system that makes affluence possible.
Altruism starts with the premise that man is basically evil. Because of this premise, it is easy to blame all bad things on man and offer as solution the idea that man should act differently than he normally acts. When you perceive that most men pursue their own well-being and that there are some other men suffering, hungry or sick, it is easy for the altruist to blame the suffering of non-productive men on the successful pursuit of life by productive men. The next step is to invoke collectivism, the idea that men cannot survive unless they work as a collective, with the most successful men sacrificing for those less successful; this provides the ideological justification for global self-sacrifice. In fact, there is only a difference of degree between the altruism that requires an individual to sacrifice himself with a bomb attached to his body and the altruism that requires that he give up a large portion of his income. They are both self-sacrifice.
Most of the people that tell us about our cultural moral crisis bemoan the loss of collective joining to solve what they consider to be collective problems. They tell us that “it takes a village” or that “we are all in it together” to convince us that we should join in a cause greater than ourselves. That this cause involves their forcing us to do what they consider the right thing, sacrifice our time, our education, our efforts, our plans and goals for the sake of others is not mentioned. They claim that because people are more selfish today; more concerned about self-gratification and the acquisition of goods that the world is in decline morally. The problem according to altruists is that 1) people aren’t altruistic enough and 2) most people care less today about their fellow men than they did in the past. Neither premise is true.
That each man is an individual and his ability to survive is dependent upon his own planning and thinking; that production does not take anything away from non-production, is irrelevant to the person who believes that as long as there are unsuccessful men in a collective it is the duty of the successful to provide their sustenance. That altruism is corrupt, that throughout history it has dragged men down to a position lower than the common denominator has been ignored by those that claim that the moral crisis for man is that he thinks for himself rather than for the collective.
The consequences of the idea
Altruism is the means by which people are robbed of their ability to make moral choices. It is a centuries old scam that has been practiced by its proponents across the millennia. The scam reveals that once people accept the premise of self-sacrifice, they have lost the right to survive for their own sakes; they must either live sacrificial lives or they are not accepted as “good” people. All over the world, the coercive imposition of altruism is destroying individual rights, property rights, even national rights for the sake of solving problems created by altruism. The result? The world is in worse shape by the scheme because production is transferred from unwitting productive people to those who grow rich by claiming to work for the downtrodden and poor.
Altruism is the collectivization of morality, the focusing of human action on benefiting the collective (others), and it is through collectivism that altruism has created a real moral crisis. Altruists have missed the truth that, in our secular society, people are living more rational lives and making better life-decisions because of the freedom inherent in individual self-responsibility. The critics of capitalism have failed to see (because they want to believe there is a moral crisis) that people are more moral under capitalism. And, more to the point, they have failed to see that altruism is the moral crisis. In fact, it is because people advocate and practice altruism that bad moral choices are made and harm is done to others. There is a history that proves this.
Let’s look at the pronouncements of dictators for one source of the moral crisis brought on by altruism. Their demands and propaganda were designed to convince people that it is proper for each individual to sacrifice his product for the sake of the collective. These men, using altruism and collectivism, have justified their wars of conquest and brought about the murder of millions of people. The result of this form of altruism is economic decline, property destruction, millions of deaths and poverty, not to mention the need to justify wars that loot other nations. Consider also the huge amounts of resources and human energy (and lives) that needed to be mustered to defeat dictatorship. In terms of human lives, effort and massive expenditures (human production) on war munitions; the size of this response made by self-interested individuals to keep dictators from taking over their lives was massive. All of these costs can be laid upon altruism, the idea that it is man’s duty to sacrifice for others. It is only the selective focus of rationalists that moves them to believe that dictatorships, and the wars and genocides for which they are responsible, have no connection whatsoever with altruism as practiced by Obama, Clinton and McCain.
Altruism and the self-sacrifice of the individual are the hallmarks of totalitarian systems. They are also the hallmarks of many of today’s politicians who are in the same mold as Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Altruism makes them possible, creates them, justifies them and moves them. That we ignore this truth today only indicates that our culture is so steeped in altruism that our leaders and intellectuals must keep us ignorant of the evil that altruism creates through its enforcer collectivism. One has to wonder why they can’t count the gargantuan scope of the losses they have created.
Yet, even today, our politicians tell us that the hallmark of a good person is not working toward a goal, making a productive living and enjoying the fruits of his labor. We are told instead that a good person spends his time in the Peace Corp, gives two years to creating a better infrastructure in Africa, pays high taxes for the sake of progressive programs ostensibly designed for the poor, totally oblivious to the loss that has been suffered by the best among us and the catastrophe that is actually taking place; poverty is the result of altruism not selfishness.
It is selfishness that is the hallmark of a person who wants to get an education and become the best in a particular field so he can earn a good income. Feeling guilt for wanting to do something for yourself and your future and instead giving up your future for the sake of helping tribesmen in the U.S. or Africa creates a loss. Every second you spend relieving someone’s suffering creates a loss for you and your future; keeps you from developing the seed capital that could help you start your own business and put honest people to work making an honest living. And worst, it keeps the people who receive your charity poor by teaching them the mistaken notion that they don’t have to work hard for themselves; someone will take care of them. Keeping yourself from accomplishing as much as you can as quickly as you can hurts you, your family and even the poor people that you could put to work. Investing money in charity creates a loss that brings everything down; investing it in education, capital accumulation, hard work and self-interest creates a positive that lifts everyone up.
Exploitation is the collectivist’s way of gaining man’s labor, a way for him to enjoy the status of the man of integrity by becoming his ruler and parasite. Collectivism distorts all relationships and all values and makes everything cheap. It consumes men’s lives and destroys them with wholesale guilt for everything they do. It makes doing things for selfish reasons into a crime punishable by anger and hatred and turns good men into broken hulks incapable of life, love and pleasure; mere pretenders to the good. Collectivism internalizes and ritualizes one choice: to do things for others. It turns the individual away from reason in favor of “others.” The amount of hours spent in helping others, the loss of money and intelligence, the huge costs of maintaining institutions that do very little good are hardly counted but nonetheless real. This destroys incentive, investment and hope for the future. As a consequence, it destroys the future for the needy as well as the self-supportive.
All collectives require that the individual make an effort to fit in, to become a member. The individual must subordinate his mind, his work, his money, his life to the needs of the group. If he does not, he will be exposed to the "mask" of the collective--and that is a fate worse than death.
Indeed, most people think that altruism and collectivism are benevolent ideas. Whenever they hear them preached, they get misty-eyed and yearn to give money to relieve suffering. Though much of the empathy they feel for people who are suffering out of no cause of their own is real, what they don’t understand is how the guilt they feel is harming them. People working hard to make a living and have a good life should never feel guilty for doing so. Nor should they feel guilty for the enjoyment and pleasure they are able to purchase with their hard earned money. Nor should they feel they have to give that up for those that suffer. Yet, the advocates of altruism and collectivism impose guilt as a matter of course. They cannot exist without it, they write laws to impose suffering on successful people and they take money forcibly from guilt-ridden citizens who think it is their duty to give. The number of times each day the average citizen receives phone calls from this organization or that organization; the number of commercials they see on television or hear on radio; the number of news stories about people harmed by this or that are so overwhelming that it is impossible for an individual to know who “deserves” his hard-earned money. If he does not give to one of them he feels guilty. What he does not understand is that these organizations (and many of them are scams) count on that guilt; they count on him to feel bad and they enjoy making people feel guilty.
The worst consequence of altruism/collectivism is that it establishes the premise that man is not a free, sovereign entity. It institutionalizes the idea that it is proper for society or government to induce guilt in people and to forcibly rob them of their property. Altruism and collectivism are based upon an attack on man; they require it; they could not exist without it. Through the influences of rationalism and empiricism, altruism and collectivism are let loose on the world. The havoc reached by these negative and deadly ideas can be found in the killing fields and mass graves of the world not to mention the poverty which they claim to fight but instead create. It is a pity that we haven’t noticed it is the very ideas most humans admire that are causing so much death.
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