Even if war has the goal of “getting resources” hurting the other team is an instrumental goal, which is why there is so much investment in weapons.
I don’t think “war is for resources” is a good fit to most wars. Trade is another way of getting resources; trade efficiency theorems imply alignment between selfishness and Pareto efficiency. War is incredibly costly, if it were about cost there would be much more spent on peace negotiations to make war as counterfactual (and therefore rare) as possible. Justifications for wars are often ideological (e.g. religious or about capitalism/communism) which are basically about competing collectives. It is common to continue fighting a war after it’s considered unwinnable e.g. in Vietnam.
There’s a naive theory that problems are caused by selfishness and a non-naive theory that problems are caused by spite (and that selfishness and altruism are aligned). Ayn Rand is clearly advocating the non-naive theory, noting that individually selfish people will generally avoid conflicts between each other.
Even if war has the goal of “getting resources” hurting the other team is an instrumental goal,
Sure; I thought in the original context you were saying: since spite strategies aren’t based on values “in the individual”, this is evidence that group values are less friendly. But getting resources seems like an individual value, and it seems weird to call organizedly getting resources (e.g. through war) a group value if it’s just individuals working together to get what they each want.
Justifications for wars are often ideological (e.g. religious or about capitalism/communism)
As I said above, I suspect ideologically motivated actions often mainly *are* expressions of some of people’s individual values (through a potential very strong and distorting filter for pursuing things that are coordinatable about, and pursuing them in a coordinatable way); in other words, Christianity is sometimes partly just “let’s get together and tax the heathens and/or take their land” with a different value of “us”.
It sounds like you’re talking about modern wars, like say in the past one or two centuries. Modern wars seem weirder than older ones, though maybe older ones would seem weirder with more detail. I think you’re saying that modern wars don’t look like anyone serving selfish individual ends, is that right? I’m not even sure about that claim. Even the paradigmatic case of spite, the Nazis, seems muddled; Lebensraum, and freedom from WW1 reparations, seem like key war motives (if not genocide motives). (To be clear, I’m taking “my grandchildren prosper” as a selfish value, and the hypothesis is that intuitions about subjugation point towards even war being worth it, because subjugation could be permanent and in particular could impoverish your grandchildren.)
Ayn Rand is clearly advocating the non-naive theory, noting that individually selfish people will generally avoid conflicts between each other.
I think Rand specifically would be disgusted by violent raiders, for being parasites instead of expressing their life through creating value for themselves. The villains in Atlas Shrugged are referred to as “looters” and “plunderers”. That’s a more specific meaning to “selfish” than “not kowtowing to the common good”.
Secondly, many Nazis had been indoctrinated in unquestioning loyalty to the party and with it its cultural ideology of preferring death over living in defeat.
Hitler himself said that he had been trained in WW1 to move towards danger.
The villains in Atlas Shrugged are referred to as “looters” and “plunderers”. That’s a more specific meaning to “selfish” than “not kowtowing to the common good”.
Hmm… it seems like an important part of her philosophy that the looters aren’t actually pursuing their own values, they’re expecting to be taken care of as part of a collective; I’m thinking more of The Virtue of Selfishness than her fiction.
Sometimes the teleology is more at a group than an individual level, e.g. green beard genes.
Yeah. I’ve updated some from the arguments about spite in Constantin’s post.
Nazi suicides: interesting. Still seems pretty muddled (I mean, I’m unsure + confused); like, there was a lot of rape and subjugation after the war, and they might have expected that. But still, suicide is pretty extreme so this is evidence against individual values being operative.
it seems like an important part of her philosophy that the looters aren’t actually pursuing their own values, they’re expecting to be taken care of as part of a collective; I’m thinking more of The Virtue of Selfishness than her fiction.
Maybe I’ll look at that. So, definitely in Atlas Shrugged, the looters are described as not pursuing their own values, and as not even necessarily expecting anything (they’re intentionally destroying the substrate that’s sustaining them, and when confronted with this fact they either scream or just keep mashing the “collective good” button). I’m saying that, by “selfish” in the good sense, Rand is excluding both the people who aren’t pursuing their values, and the people who *are* pursuing their values by consciously deciding to loot. The character of Fred Kinnan is consciously looting:
“I’m a racketeer – but I know it and my boys know it, and they know that I’ll pay off. Not out of the kindness of my heart, either, and not a cent more than I can get away with.… Sure it makes me sick sometimes, it makes me sick right now, but it’s not me who’s built this kind of world – you did – so I’m playing the game as you’ve set it up and I’m going to play it for as long as it lasts – which isn’t going to be long for any of us.”
Fred Kinnan is a comparatively sympathetic character among the looter coalition, for more or less the reason you just described. I think Rand’s opinion is that people like Kinnan are being locally rational & self-interested, but within a worldview that is truncated in an unprincipled way to embed a conflict theory that is in tension with his ability to recognize & extract material concessions and, if taken to its logical conclusion, involves a death wish. It doesn’t seem like he’s enjoying his life or really has any specific concrete intentions.
Robert Stadler is another interesting mixed character. He starts out with specific intentions (learning how the physical world works on a deep level). This eventually puts him in conflict with the looters, and unlike the viewpoint character Danny Taggart he submits to their worldview, giving up his sanity & the agenda that made his life worth living in order to occupy a place in their regime.
Kinnan is better adapted to cynically hold onto his position for longer, but at the price of the kinds of hopes that created a conflict for Stadler.
I agree Kinnan is more sympathetic, intentionally so. Like, if everyone around is a Kinnan, you just have to be good at mechanism design, and their local selfishness will, like fluid filling a container, form something good (according to the mechanism designer). I’m saying that Kinnan doesn’t kowtow to the collective in the same way; but is still a looter, is still not living up to Rand’s visionary form of selfishness that loves life, and would find his way to conflict with people, if that were in his local self-interest. In other words, I’m trying to say that although dropping selfishness altogether seems more something (less value-enacting; more able to be sucked into totally ungrounded maelstroms) than being a Kinnan, still, being selfish isn’t enough to avoid conflict.
I like how Stadler’s arc adds a touch of real horror to the story (related to the point of the OP). Where the viewpoint characters merely sustain the regime until they decide not to, Stadler “lets the cat out of the bag” and finds himself blindsided by the regime turning genuine scientific insight to depraved ends.
Even if war has the goal of “getting resources” hurting the other team is an instrumental goal, which is why there is so much investment in weapons.
I don’t think “war is for resources” is a good fit to most wars. Trade is another way of getting resources; trade efficiency theorems imply alignment between selfishness and Pareto efficiency. War is incredibly costly, if it were about cost there would be much more spent on peace negotiations to make war as counterfactual (and therefore rare) as possible. Justifications for wars are often ideological (e.g. religious or about capitalism/communism) which are basically about competing collectives. It is common to continue fighting a war after it’s considered unwinnable e.g. in Vietnam.
There’s a naive theory that problems are caused by selfishness and a non-naive theory that problems are caused by spite (and that selfishness and altruism are aligned). Ayn Rand is clearly advocating the non-naive theory, noting that individually selfish people will generally avoid conflicts between each other.
Sure; I thought in the original context you were saying: since spite strategies aren’t based on values “in the individual”, this is evidence that group values are less friendly. But getting resources seems like an individual value, and it seems weird to call organizedly getting resources (e.g. through war) a group value if it’s just individuals working together to get what they each want.
As I said above, I suspect ideologically motivated actions often mainly *are* expressions of some of people’s individual values (through a potential very strong and distorting filter for pursuing things that are coordinatable about, and pursuing them in a coordinatable way); in other words, Christianity is sometimes partly just “let’s get together and tax the heathens and/or take their land” with a different value of “us”.
It sounds like you’re talking about modern wars, like say in the past one or two centuries. Modern wars seem weirder than older ones, though maybe older ones would seem weirder with more detail. I think you’re saying that modern wars don’t look like anyone serving selfish individual ends, is that right? I’m not even sure about that claim. Even the paradigmatic case of spite, the Nazis, seems muddled; Lebensraum, and freedom from WW1 reparations, seem like key war motives (if not genocide motives). (To be clear, I’m taking “my grandchildren prosper” as a selfish value, and the hypothesis is that intuitions about subjugation point towards even war being worth it, because subjugation could be permanent and in particular could impoverish your grandchildren.)
I think Rand specifically would be disgusted by violent raiders, for being parasites instead of expressing their life through creating value for themselves. The villains in Atlas Shrugged are referred to as “looters” and “plunderers”. That’s a more specific meaning to “selfish” than “not kowtowing to the common good”.
Sometimes the teleology is more at a group than an individual level, e.g. green beard genes.
There were suicides at the end of the war. While there were some selfish reasons for this the article mentions:
Hitler himself said that he had been trained in WW1 to move towards danger.
Hmm… it seems like an important part of her philosophy that the looters aren’t actually pursuing their own values, they’re expecting to be taken care of as part of a collective; I’m thinking more of The Virtue of Selfishness than her fiction.
Yeah. I’ve updated some from the arguments about spite in Constantin’s post.
Nazi suicides: interesting. Still seems pretty muddled (I mean, I’m unsure + confused); like, there was a lot of rape and subjugation after the war, and they might have expected that. But still, suicide is pretty extreme so this is evidence against individual values being operative.
Maybe I’ll look at that. So, definitely in Atlas Shrugged, the looters are described as not pursuing their own values, and as not even necessarily expecting anything (they’re intentionally destroying the substrate that’s sustaining them, and when confronted with this fact they either scream or just keep mashing the “collective good” button). I’m saying that, by “selfish” in the good sense, Rand is excluding both the people who aren’t pursuing their values, and the people who *are* pursuing their values by consciously deciding to loot. The character of Fred Kinnan is consciously looting:
https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/atlas-shrugged/fred-kinnan
(I could be straightforwardly wrong about what Rand thinks. And I notice she has Kinnan say, “it’s not me who’s built this...”.)
Fred Kinnan is a comparatively sympathetic character among the looter coalition, for more or less the reason you just described. I think Rand’s opinion is that people like Kinnan are being locally rational & self-interested, but within a worldview that is truncated in an unprincipled way to embed a conflict theory that is in tension with his ability to recognize & extract material concessions and, if taken to its logical conclusion, involves a death wish. It doesn’t seem like he’s enjoying his life or really has any specific concrete intentions.
Robert Stadler is another interesting mixed character. He starts out with specific intentions (learning how the physical world works on a deep level). This eventually puts him in conflict with the looters, and unlike the viewpoint character Danny Taggart he submits to their worldview, giving up his sanity & the agenda that made his life worth living in order to occupy a place in their regime.
Kinnan is better adapted to cynically hold onto his position for longer, but at the price of the kinds of hopes that created a conflict for Stadler.
I agree Kinnan is more sympathetic, intentionally so. Like, if everyone around is a Kinnan, you just have to be good at mechanism design, and their local selfishness will, like fluid filling a container, form something good (according to the mechanism designer). I’m saying that Kinnan doesn’t kowtow to the collective in the same way; but is still a looter, is still not living up to Rand’s visionary form of selfishness that loves life, and would find his way to conflict with people, if that were in his local self-interest. In other words, I’m trying to say that although dropping selfishness altogether seems more something (less value-enacting; more able to be sucked into totally ungrounded maelstroms) than being a Kinnan, still, being selfish isn’t enough to avoid conflict.
I like how Stadler’s arc adds a touch of real horror to the story (related to the point of the OP). Where the viewpoint characters merely sustain the regime until they decide not to, Stadler “lets the cat out of the bag” and finds himself blindsided by the regime turning genuine scientific insight to depraved ends.