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By far the dumbest Internet Jackass Day “joke” I’ve seen so far is this one from the official New Jersey state account on Twitter/X, claiming that effective immediately, they’re lifting the statewide ban on self-service gasoline. For those of you who’ve never been there, I swear, you cannot pump your own gas anywhere in the state. It’s so ridiculous — and the historical reason so crooked — that people have a hard time believing it. You have to wait for an attendant, who is generally rude and almost always slow. Back in the day, they were extra slow returning with change when you paid in cash, hoping you’d just give up and leave. I’d rather run out of gas and just abandon my car on the side of the road than buy a single gallon of gas in New Jersey. And yet here’s the official state Twitter account yucking it up like the joke isn’t on them.
I come across an occasional statement that our society runs on “enlightened self-interest”—I’ve noted it before in a conversation with Tom Nichols, and also in reading Stephen Pinker, and they’re not the only ones. But as I noted in response to Pinker, “It is an approach to morality that is widely accepted in practice, often acknowledged in passing, as Pinker does here, but is rarely taken with the seriousness it deserves or developed to its logical conclusions.”
This is important, because it is undoubtedly true that our society does run on some conception of “enlightened self-interest.” We recognize that it is natural for people to want to be prosperous and happy, to be able to find a nice place to live, to find work that is enjoyable and pays the bills, to be able to go out and enjoy all the good things that are available to us, particularly in wealthy, developed societies. So we’re not asking people to live in Altruria, an imagined altruist utopia in which no one looks to his own well-being and everyone works only for the good of others. And we’re definitely trying to avoid living in the actual, real-world versions of this ideal, in which the individual has no rights and exists only to serve the state.
But we rarely take much time to define what “enlightened self-interest” means, what are its rules, how it serves our self-interest, and what it is that “enlightens” it.
Enlightened Self-Interest
At various times, this idea has gotten a little more attention.
The “new right” isn’t new. The National Conservatives, post-liberals, and MAGA-adjacent factions are fighting a war that started centuries ago
The post What Studying Authoritarianism Teaches Us About Fighting It appeared first on New Ideal - Reason | Individualism | Capitalism.
"Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. (The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause of wars.)"~ Ayn Rand from her 1967 essay "The Wreckage of the Consensus," collected in her 1967 book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal [ read it here on p.249]
The newly minted Dr Matthew Hooton slithered into print on Friday last to make the case for state control of international trade.
Did I say make a case? Not a bit of it. The ever-odious doctor in conservative ideology simply told us that solutions to the international diesel dilemma will, and I quote, "require some sort of state control over international trade that we haven't seen since 1984."
"Diesel rationing," says the sickening spin doctor, "needs to be implemented urgently."
Reasons for this sudden need to abandon free trade, the price system and our minimal and ever-decreasing freedoms? Nah, just rhetoric: "If we run out of diesel," says his fire-filled column, "Covid will look like a rehearsal."
Covid, if you remember, was when government locked us up. There are people who enjoyed that -- and who still look with rosy-eyed affection at every over-bearing measure taken back then.
This repellent reptile is clearly one of them.
