On Political Selfishness... And Intellectual Altruism

Yesterday, I discussed selfishness – good and evil – and concluded that political selfishness is evil, while commercial selfishness is good. Our Chacha State’s food minister, Sharad Pawar, is an excellent example of the former. He is known as a “sugar baron” – but he is no entrepreneur. He runs a vast sugar empire through his “nationalist socialist” (Nazi) politics, and it is he who is directly responsible for the astronomically high prices of sugar in India these days. I have an earlier post on his thuggery, where I referred to him as a “rascal.”

As ET has commented today, Sharad Pawar is playing Marie Antoinette, telling us all that sugar is bad for the health, that people should consume less sugar, and that sugar is not an “essential food” for the poor. These views have been echoed in his party mouthpiece, ET says.

Actually, sugar is an essential source of energy – especially for the poor. The tea that poor people drink is always heavily loaded with sugar, because it instantly delivers the “sugar rush” and enables these poor people to continue with their back-breaking labours. Truck drivers in India, for example, refer to a heavily sugared cuppa as a “100 mile tea” – because of the energy received. For all these poor people, tea is now unaffordable. And Sharad Pawar, the political sugar baron, is saying, “let them eat gur.” This is political selfishness at its worst. The man is not just a rascal; he is actually an unapologetic gangster masquerading as a politician. And he is Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi and Soniaji Gandhiji’s closest “ally.” It is rumoured that he is now chumming up to the Shiv Sena. Welcome to Indian socialist politics, where all “political parties” are but gangs of thieves, ruffians and murderers.

Talking about selfishness, Anoop Verma has left another comment on my post of yesterday. He says he found the post useful, but he sticks to his stand on altruism being evil. I would have let it pass – for did not Ayn Rand title her book The Virtue of Selfishness – but for his comment on men of ideas. Anoop writes:

Altruist intellectuals have been in the business of dishing out false propaganda for thousands of years. They have managed to impart false meaning to almost every concept. That is why selfishness has such a bad name, and people think that altruism is a good. The reverse is true.

I am a great admirer of men like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, who suffered greatly for their views, but steadfastly maintained their integrity. I suppose they could be called “altruistic intellectuals,” though I would prefer to call them “creative geniuses.” In a chapter in Human Action on “Action Within The World,” in the section on “Human Labour As A Means,” Mises discusses the creative genius from the praxeological angle – that his work cannot be called “labour” as such, for it satisfies its performer neither mediately nor immediately. Indeed, his work is his personal struggle, an agony, and its benefits flow freely to mankind, although the common people mostly sneer at the man who struggled to create his books, theories, poems, plays or novels. I reproduce the entire section below, for Anoop’s education. The PDF file of Human Action is available here. For this section, go to page 139.

The Creative Genius

Far above the millions that come and pass away tower the pioneers, the men whose deeds and ideas cut out new paths for mankind. For the pioneering genius to create is the essence of life. To live means for him to create. The activities of these prodigious men cannot be fully subsumed under the praxeological concept of labor. They are not labor because they are for the genius not means, but ends in themselves. He lives in creating and inventing. For him there is not leisure, only intermissions of temporary sterility and frustration. His incentive is not the desire to bring about a result, but the act of producing it. The accomplishment gratifies him neither mediately nor immediately. It does not gratify him mediately because his fellow men at best are unconcerned about it, more often even greet it with taunts, sneers, and persecution. Many a genius could have used his gifts to render his life agreeable and joyful; he did not even consider such a possibility and chose the thorny path without hesitation. The genius wants to accomplish what he considers his mission, even if he knows that he moves toward his own disaster.

Neither does the genius derive immediate gratification from his creative activities. Creating is for him agony and torment, a ceaseless excruciating struggle against internal and external obstacles; it consumes and crushes him. The Austrian poet Grillparzer has depicted this in a touching poem “Farewell to Gastein.” We may assume that in writing it he thought not only of his own sorrows and tribulations but also of the greater sufferings of a much greater man, of Beethoven, whose fate resembled his own and whom he understood, through devoted affection and sympathetic appreciation, better than any other of his contemporaries. Nietzsche compared himself to the flame that insatiably consumes and destroys itself. Such agonies are phenomena which have nothing in common with the connotations generally attached to the notions of work and labor, production and success, breadwinning and enjoyment of life.

The achievements of the creative innovator, his thoughts and theories, his poems, paintings, and compositions, cannot be classified praxeologically as products of labor. They are not the outcome of the employment of labor which could have been devoted to the production of other amenities for the “production” of a masterpiece of philosophy, art, or literature. Thinkers, poets, and artists are sometimes unfit to accomplish any other work. At any rate, the time and toil which they devote to creative activities are not withheld from employment for other purposes. Conditions may sometimes doom to sterility a man who would have had the power to bring forth things unheard of; they may leave him no alternative other than to die from starvation or to use all his forces in the struggle for mere physical survival. But if the genius succeeds in achieving his goals, nobody but himself pays the “costs” incurred. Goethe was perhaps in some respects hampered by his functions at the court of Weimar. But certainly he would not have accomplished more in his official duties as minister of state, theater manager, and administrator of mines if he had not written his plays, poems, and novels.

It is, furthermore, impossible to substitute other people’s work for that of the creators. If Dante and Beethoven had not existed, one would not have been in a position to produce the Divina Commedia or the Ninth Symphony by assigning other men to these tasks. Neither society nor single individuals can substantially further the genius and his work. The highest intensity of the “demand” and the most peremptory order of the government are ineffectual. The genius does not deliver to order. Men cannot improve the natural and social conditions which bring about the creator and his creation. It is impossible to rear geniuses by eugenics, to train them by schooling, or to organize their activities. But, of course, one can organize society in such a way that no room is left for pioneers and their path-breaking.

The creative accomplishment of the genius is an ultimate fact for praxeology. It comes to pass in history as a free gift of destiny. It is by no means the result of production in the sense in which economics uses this term.

There are extremely great men who live lives far above those whose only concerns are “breadwinning and the enjoyment of life".