Tuesday, February 5, 2019

It’s MeFirst, or Slavery. Take Your Pick


In a previous post, 'Social Justice' Collectivism in American School and Culture, I highlighted a school principal’s collectivist/Left leaning commencement address. It included terms like “social justice” and “renewable energy” and a healthy dose of “community service.” These are Leftist agenda items. But something more universal lies behind the Left’s political agenda. Recently this principal “tweeted” this:

Not sure when the MeFirst Movement began, but I sure liked it better when we put the needs of the community and others above our own immediate needs.

Underpinning that lament is the age old conflict, individualism versus collectivism, or egoism versus altruism.

The first question to ask this vice-principal (who I will heretofor refer to a "T"), is, Why not MeFirst (or self-interest or selfishness)? But more on that later.

Let’s examine the second, collectivist portion of T’s lament.

Notice, first, that the statement distinguished between “community” and “others.” The reference to community is collectivism--the group as the focus of economic, political, cultural, and moral concern. The reference to “others” is altruism--the view that self-sacrificial service for the needs of other people is the essence of morality.

But collectivism and altruism are linked, with Altruism being the deeper philosophical base of collectivism. A littlethought will tell you where altruism leads. If it is right to put others above self, and if the principle is universal, then it is right to expect those others to do the same--put your needs above theirs. Such a standard of necessity must foster mutual dependency and mutual predation and the enshrinement of the unearned as the essence of social life. This can only undermine individual self-responsibility and ultimately lead to a breakdown of respect and trust. For a complete critique of altruism, I defer to my QUORA answer to “Is Ayn Rand wrong about altruism?

As to community above self-interest, that can only mean submission to some ruling authoritarian. A community is not a conscious entity separate from the individuals that comprise it. It is not an entity capable of deciding what it needs. Only individuals are capable of conceiving of and pursuing their needs. A community (or any collective) is merely a number of individuals. To say the needs of the community come before your own is to say the needs of others take precedence over our own. Who decides whose needs take precedence? A ruling political elite, acting through the mechanism of government. When someone speaks of community over the individual, they are speaking of whomever in the community gets himself into the position of authority to speak and act for the community. We’re talking about the supremacy of the state over the individual--i.e., some form of dictatorship. To put the needs of the community above our own means submission to the interests of some authority, and those who peddle community supremacy are setting society up for some kind of statism.

Now, as to MeFirst, I did a little searching and I couldn’t find any evidence of a formal movement. I did find a self-help course by Andrea Crowder that she labeled The Me First Movement, “teaching you about all our self-care rituals that have helped us stay focused to slay our life’s missions”:

We’re going to give you unapologetic permission to be deliciously selfish and by doing that, it’s going to empower you to be a better wife, mom, employee, GirlPreneur … whatever titles you claim.

I’m not judging the course. That’s not the point. But it sounds pretty benign.

Then there is Not #MeToo, but #MeFirst by Jennifer Anju Grossman for The Atlas Society. Grossman presents MeFirst as a means of dealing with sexual harassment. Appealing mainly to female victims, Grossman writes,

So what would a rationally self-interested -- #MeFirst -- approach to harassment look like?

It would involve a focus on ourselves, and what we can do as individuals to help prevent harassment, deal with harassment, and get beyond harassment.

Again, constructive. What’s wrong with either of these two MeFirst approaches to dealing with life? Why would anyone oppose someone resisting harassment or working to be one's best at whatever goals one chooses? Clearly, these two examples demonstrate that, at the very least, MeFirst can be good for you. Why would anyone denigrate MeFirst on principle? There is a motive--a sinister motive.

Which brings me to my third discovery--The Me First Movement posted by Clyde Kilough, editor of the religious website Life, Hope, & Truth. Kilough’s subtitle; “Looking at the movement at the root of all the evils can help us identify the only real solution.” Sexual harassment is among the evils, as is lying and murder. The movement behind all of this evil? “Me First selfishness”, started by Satan, the originator, according to kilough, of the MeFirst Movement.

We have all fallen prey to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. These pulls have affected, and infected, each of us! Satan’s Me First movement says indulge yourself, fulfill your desires, pursue your pleasures, cast off restraints. He keeps repeating to us his promise to Eve—all you have to do to be happy is satisfy your own desires—and we keep believing it (Proverbs 16:25)!

But when that thinking takes hold, wicked things begin to happen. When Me First takes over, it’s always at the expense and hurt of someone. We have all been hurt, and we have all hurt others. That is ultimately the only possible outcome of Satan’s way of thinking.

Notice that to “satisfy your own desires” as a means “to be happy” is equated with evil. This is the view of selfishness that dominates and corrupts our understanding of selfishness. “Me First” means “always at the expense and hurt of someone!” [my emphasis] It means unthinking whim-worship unconstrained by any consideration for consequences to others or even one’s own long-term interests.

Where does that leave us as far as moral guidance is concerned?  If the moral choice is to hurt others or renounce happiness, what is one to do? This is the classic, basic fraud perpetrated by moralists; that our only moral choices are to run roughshod over others while we indulge every immediate whim, or renounce the pursuit of personal happiness. This view obliterates any possibility of a benevolent, respectful pursuit of happiness.

Philosopher Ayn Rand identify the false choice this way: Sacrifice others to self or self to others. Is that really the only moral choice we have?

No. Ayn Rand identified the core wrongness of Kilough’s line of thinking:

The most disastrous error (or fraud) in the history of ethics is the moral diagnosis of criminal actions: traditional moralists claim that the evil of a robber or a murderer consists of the fact that he acted for his own “self-interest.” I claim that his evil lies in his choice of values, in what he chose to regard as his self-interest.

Rand identified a third, benevolent, non-sacrificial, non-criminal alternative--rational self-interest and its social corollary, the trader principle. Trade is the basic, non-sacrificial, non-exploitative way for good rationally selfish MeFirst people to deal with one another. It is the voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange of value for value, in which each person gives something another values in order to get something he values more in return. Trade is the basic MeFirst alternative to the lose-win of collectivism and altruism. Trade is win-win--people getting better together. The trader principle applies to more than commercial transactions. It applies to personal relationships, like friendships and romance. Properly understood, Ayn Rand correctly identified selfishness as a virtue.

To repudiate MeFirst is to strip from each individual the morality of self-governance and self-improvement. How cruel is that? The fact is, no human can live without being selfish. No human can prosper, or support his family, or engage in rewarding personal relationships with others without being honest about what’s important to oneself, and respecting what’s important to those whose associations we seek. MeFirst is the necessary ingredient of social harmony. MeFirst does not mean disregard of others. As a universal premise, it means respecting others, even strangers. To be against MeFirst is to be against life itself--and guilt-free living.

The very act of self-reflection--of deciding what values one needs to pursue, achieve, and keep so as to make one’s own life the best and most successful it can be--is by definition MeFirst. To deny MeFirst is to throw out the very selfish virtues one must learn and practice in order to plan one’s life long term and pursue happiness; virtues like self-esteem, self-motivation, self-discipline, self-respect, self-responsibility, independent thinking, integrity, honesty, courage to stand by one’s beliefs even if unpopular, to plan one’s life long-term, and so on.

Of course, collectivism and altruism have from America’s Founding had some grip on the culture. Today, we are further along on the tyrannical path back to “the needs of the community and others,” and further from the freedom of “MeFirst,” than ever. That is, we’re moving away from individualism and regressing toward tribalism. The slogan is an expression of that regression.

The vice-principal says he’s “Not sure when the MeFirst Movement began.” This, from an American educator! The Declaration of Independence, the ultimate political expression of MeFirst, has served us well. It has led to the most peaceful, just, and prosperous expression of true brotherhood, the capitalist United States of America, that ever existed--in the process sweeping away one age-old inhumanity after another. America—the nation built upon the universal principle that each and every individual possesses the inalienable personal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—is the ultimate expression of MeFirst. “Not sure when the MeFirst Movement began?” It began with the nation of the Enlightenment, America. 

The fact is, T’s got it backwards. America was never, in its original Founding principles, a nation that put the collective, whether identified as the “community” or “others” or some ruler, over the individual. The Declaration proclaimed that your life belongs to you; that MeFirst is your political right. America protected the individual from the tyranny of the tribe and its rulers. Americanism at its core holds that you--not the community, your neighbors, or the state--but you have first claim on your own life. Let me reiterate: Americanism is rooted in the ultimate political expression of MeFirst, individual rights. “Not sure when the MeFirst Movement began?” What does he think is meant by the words of the legal document that marked the birth of the United States of America--the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? The Revolutionary War was fought to establish every individual's right--every common man’s individual right--to MeFirst.

On some level, the Founders seem to have understood the moral significance of those words. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, proclaimed: “If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling and indeed ridiculous to suppose that a man had less right to himself than one of his neighbors or indeed all of them put together. This would be slavery.” [P. 54] Indeed, the Confederate slaves were slaves precisely because they were denied their own MeFirst. When someone speaks of “put the needs of the community and others above our own immediate needs,” they are speaking of masters and slaves, with most of us being slaves.

To say to a young mind that his or her own life should not be one’s highest value is downright cruel--especially from an educator whose job it is, or should be, to give the young student the intellectual tools, and thus foster the self-esteem, he’ll need to make his own life the best it can be. To advocate OthersFirst as a moral ideal is plain evil. It is a slave morality and a repudiation of Americanism and humanity. It is to instill unearned guilt for wanting to live where self-esteem should have grown. If we are to save America’s students from a self-destructive or morally crippling life course, we must teach their moral right to MeFirst, properly understood--not as a necessary evil, or as a matter of practicality--but as a moral principle. He must learn that MeFirst does not mean running roughshod over others for the sake of some immediate whim. MeFirst, rational selfishness, is in fact the only basis for benevolent coexistence. Because a person tends to project his own moral premises, he who believes in his moral right to MeFirst will also respect that same moral right in others. It means mutual respect. It means to self-confidently, righteously, and guiltlessly pursue the values one rationally deems necessary to achieve a flourishing life for himself, and its corollary responsibility to respect the same moral rights of others.

The worst fraud perpetrated by moral theorists is to equate self-interest with bad behavior. The choice is not be self-interested, or be moral. The choice is in how you express your self-interest; what you regard as in your interest, and how you go about achieving it. We do need ethics, not as a commandment to put others first, but to teach us the right way to pursue our own self-interest. It’s both good to be MeFirst self-interested, and bad to regard it to be in one’s self-interest as harming others. They are not the same thing and, in fact, are opposites. The choice is not lose and be moral or be immoral in order to win, with each of us shifting between the two. That is a false choice, a straw man. The choice is a life among equals, each of whom respects others’ first claim on her own life.

A word regarding the vice-principal's use of the word “immediate” (“one’s immediate needs”). I want to emphasize that there are times when setting aside, for the time being, one’s immediate concerns for the sake of others is appropriate and consistent with rational long-term self-interest. But I’m taking T's entire statement as a general moral command, not a contingency.

Why would anyone offer, as a moral choice, slave or master? It serves the purposes of certain kinds of people. Run like hell from anyone who tells you your own self-interest should be subordinated to others. They intend to be “the others”--i.e., the masters. What is the roadblock to that would-be master? Anyone who declares “Me First” and is willing to fight for his moral right to his own interests.The best way to respond to that corrupt statement is to answer: I sure liked it better when most of us revered the inalienable individual rights to our own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The next step is to supplement that statement of political rights by embracing its corollary, the moral right to, and virtue of, MeFirst.

Related Reading:



Of course, Rand was not merely against altruism. She was primarily for rational egoism and its peaceful social corollary, the trader principle.


Why Most Academics Tilt Left--Brian Balfour for FEE

Leftist intellectuals desire to exert influence and, in turn, feel important. Their desires to re-make society can only realistically be brought about through the existence of a massive government; a government in which these academics will be able to influence, under the guise of academic “expertise.” There is an inherent liberal bias favoring greater social control by the state among academics in part because it’s the only avenue academics have to become the social reformists they desire to be.

The allure of advancing a utopian vision combined with classrooms full of highly amendable students proves to be a powerful magnet attracting Leftist intellectuals to academic positions.


1 comment:

SteveD said...

'terms like “social justice” and “renewable energy'

Like many leftist agenda items, both of these terms are oxymorons.