It isn’t quoted in the above selection of text, but I think this quote from same chapter addresses your concern:
“I instantly saw something I admired no end. So while he was weighing my envelope, I remarked with enthusiasm: “I certainly wish I had your head of hair.” He looked up, half-startled, his face beaming with smiles. “Well, it isn’t as good as it used to be,” he said modestly. I assured him that although it might have lost some of its pristine glory, nevertheless it was still magnificent. He was immensely pleased. We carried on a pleasant little conversation and the last thing he said to me was: “Many people have admired my hair.” I’ll bet that person went out to lunch that day walking on air. I’ll bet he went home that night and told his wife about it. I’ll bet he looked in the mirror and said: “It is a beautiful head of hair.” I told this story once in public and a man asked me afterwards: “’What did you want to get out of him?” What was I trying to get out of him!!! What was I trying to get out of him!!! If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can’t radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to get something out of the other person in return—if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.”
I do not agree. I don’t believe that there is not any action that any living organism, much less humans, take without a specific goal. When people say that they “just want to spread some selfless love in this grim world without asking for anything in return”, they have a goal nontheless.
I cannot of course say exactly what kind of goal they have, but for the sake of simplicity say that selflesslovespreader A wants to make other people feel good to feel good about making other people feel good. So how does Selflesslovespread A know that the goal have been achieved in that interaction?
Well, is it that far fetched to assume that a smile or a thank you from the person that the selfless love was directed at is a good measure of the success? I.e. Selflessloverspread A have manipulated the person to respond with a certain behavior that made it possible for Selflesslovespreder A to reach the goal of feeling good about making other people feel good.
I believe there is a self serving motif behind every so called selfless act. This does not make the act less good or noble, but the act serve as a mean for that person to reach a goal, what ever that goal is.
Can a human perform any type of action without a goal, no matter how small or insignificant?
I cannot of course say exactly what kind of goal they have, but for the sake of simplicity say that selflesslovespreader A wants to make other people feel good to feel good about making other people feel good.
Simpler still to say that selflesslovespreader A wants to make other people feel good, period. The addition of meta-level feelings does not add anything, and indeed detracts from it. People want what they want, not a simulacrum of the thing in the form of their beliefs and feelings about achieving the thing itself..
there is not any action that any living organism, much less humans, take without a specific goal
Ah, here is the crux for me. Consider these cases:
Compulsive behavior: it is relatively common for people to take actions without understanding why, and for people with OCD this even extends to actions that contradict their specific goals.
Rationalizing: virtually all people actively lie to themselves about what their goals are when they take an action, especially in response to prodding about the details of those goals after the fact.
Internal Family Systems and related therapies: the claim on which these treatments rest is that every person intrinsically has multiple conflicting goals of which they are generally unaware, and the learning how to mediate them explicitly is supposed help.
The hard problem of consciousness: similar to the above, one of the proposed explanations for consciousness is that it serves as a mechanism for mediating competing biological goals.
These are situations where either the goal is not known, or it is fictionalized, or it is contested (between goals that are also not known). Even in the case of everyday re-actions, how would the specific goal be defined?
I can clearly see an argument along the lines of evolutionary forces providing us with an array of specific goals for almost every situation, even when we are not aware of them or they are hidden from us through things like self-deception. That may be true, but even given that it is true I come to the question of usefulness. Consider things like food:
I claim most of the time we eat, because we eat. As a goal it is circular.
We might eat to relieve our stomach growling, or to be polite to our host, and these are specific goals, but these are the minority cases.
Or sex:
Also circular, the goal is usually sex qua sex.
Speaking for myself, even when I had a specific goal of having children (making explicit the evolutionary goal!), what was really happening under the hood is I was having sex qua sex and just very excited about the obvious consequences.
It doesn’t feel to me like thinking of these actions in terms of manipulation adds anything to them as a matter of description or analysis. Therefore when talking about social things I prefer to use the word manipulation for things that are strategic (by which I mean we have an explicit goal and we understand the relationship between our actions and that goal) and unaligned (which I mean in the same sense you described in your earlier comment, the other person or group would not have wanted the outcome).
Turning back to the post, I have a different lens for how to view How To Win Friends and Influence People. I suggest that these are habits of thought and action that work in favor of coordination with other people; I say it works the same way rationality works in favor of being persuaded by reality.
I trouble to note that this is not true in general of stuff about persuasion/influence/etc. A lot of materials on the subject do outright advocate manipulation even as I use the term. But I claim that Carnegie wrote a better sort of book, that implies pursuing a kind of pro-sociality in the same way we pursue rationality. I make an analogy: manipulators are to people who practice the skills in the book as Vulcan logicians are to us, here.
I have been under the weather for a week, I meant to answer you earlier.
To me having a goal and knowing why I have that goal are two separate things and a goal does not become less of a goal because you do not know the origin of it. Perhaps goals are a hierarchy. We all* have some default goals like eat, survive and reproduce. On top of those we can add goals invented buy ourselves or others. In the case you are without a goal, I believe you still have goals defined by your biology. Every action or inaction is due to a goal. Why do you eat? are you hungry? Bored? Tired? Compulsion? Want to gain weight? Want to loose weight? There is always a goal.
Take people with OCD. In what way are those persons contradicting any goals by doing OCD stuff, like checking if the stow is off 157 times before leaving the house so they missed work? Yes, the goal of getting to work was missed, but the MORE important goal of not accidentally burning down the house and killing 35 neighbors and being the disgrace of the neighborhood was effectively achieved. So its not that fiddling with the stow was with out a goal canceling out the “real” goal of getting to work for a none goal. They were just of different importance.
If I may comment on you sex qua sex analogy. I am convinced that the sex act involved a social interaction where you wanted the other person(s) to behave in a specific way to make the act of sex as enjoyable as possible (what ever that my mean). The act of sex did not happen in a vacuum. You or the other person(s) wanted to have it, no matter what the goal was. And you or the other person(s) had to manipulate the other(s) to achieve what ever goal there was to the sex.
Yes, I agree that we need coordination with other people to achieve things, and that they my be benign. But to me there is no distinction between benign or malevolent attempts to persuade or influence someone. They are both acts of manipulation. Either you managed to get someone to do something or you did not. Why did you want this person to do this in the first place? Because you had a goal of some sort, you did not act out of a vacuum. “But I just did it to be silly, or stupid, or because I was bored”, well… than that was the goal, but a goal none the less.
It isn’t quoted in the above selection of text, but I think this quote from same chapter addresses your concern:
Thank you ryan_b for your comment,
I do not agree. I don’t believe that there is not any action that any living organism, much less humans, take without a specific goal. When people say that they “just want to spread some selfless love in this grim world without asking for anything in return”, they have a goal nontheless.
I cannot of course say exactly what kind of goal they have, but for the sake of simplicity say that selflesslovespreader A wants to make other people feel good to feel good about making other people feel good. So how does Selflesslovespread A know that the goal have been achieved in that interaction?
Well, is it that far fetched to assume that a smile or a thank you from the person that the selfless love was directed at is a good measure of the success? I.e. Selflessloverspread A have manipulated the person to respond with a certain behavior that made it possible for Selflesslovespreder A to reach the goal of feeling good about making other people feel good.
I believe there is a self serving motif behind every so called selfless act. This does not make the act less good or noble, but the act serve as a mean for that person to reach a goal, what ever that goal is.
Can a human perform any type of action without a goal, no matter how small or insignificant?
Simpler still to say that selflesslovespreader A wants to make other people feel good, period. The addition of meta-level feelings does not add anything, and indeed detracts from it. People want what they want, not a simulacrum of the thing in the form of their beliefs and feelings about achieving the thing itself..
Ah, here is the crux for me. Consider these cases:
Compulsive behavior: it is relatively common for people to take actions without understanding why, and for people with OCD this even extends to actions that contradict their specific goals.
Rationalizing: virtually all people actively lie to themselves about what their goals are when they take an action, especially in response to prodding about the details of those goals after the fact.
Internal Family Systems and related therapies: the claim on which these treatments rest is that every person intrinsically has multiple conflicting goals of which they are generally unaware, and the learning how to mediate them explicitly is supposed help.
The hard problem of consciousness: similar to the above, one of the proposed explanations for consciousness is that it serves as a mechanism for mediating competing biological goals.
These are situations where either the goal is not known, or it is fictionalized, or it is contested (between goals that are also not known). Even in the case of everyday re-actions, how would the specific goal be defined?
I can clearly see an argument along the lines of evolutionary forces providing us with an array of specific goals for almost every situation, even when we are not aware of them or they are hidden from us through things like self-deception. That may be true, but even given that it is true I come to the question of usefulness. Consider things like food:
I claim most of the time we eat, because we eat. As a goal it is circular.
We might eat to relieve our stomach growling, or to be polite to our host, and these are specific goals, but these are the minority cases.
Or sex:
Also circular, the goal is usually sex qua sex.
Speaking for myself, even when I had a specific goal of having children (making explicit the evolutionary goal!), what was really happening under the hood is I was having sex qua sex and just very excited about the obvious consequences.
It doesn’t feel to me like thinking of these actions in terms of manipulation adds anything to them as a matter of description or analysis. Therefore when talking about social things I prefer to use the word manipulation for things that are strategic (by which I mean we have an explicit goal and we understand the relationship between our actions and that goal) and unaligned (which I mean in the same sense you described in your earlier comment, the other person or group would not have wanted the outcome).
Turning back to the post, I have a different lens for how to view How To Win Friends and Influence People. I suggest that these are habits of thought and action that work in favor of coordination with other people; I say it works the same way rationality works in favor of being persuaded by reality.
I trouble to note that this is not true in general of stuff about persuasion/influence/etc. A lot of materials on the subject do outright advocate manipulation even as I use the term. But I claim that Carnegie wrote a better sort of book, that implies pursuing a kind of pro-sociality in the same way we pursue rationality. I make an analogy: manipulators are to people who practice the skills in the book as Vulcan logicians are to us, here.
Thank you ryan_b for expanding on your thoughts,
I have been under the weather for a week, I meant to answer you earlier.
To me having a goal and knowing why I have that goal are two separate things and a goal does not become less of a goal because you do not know the origin of it. Perhaps goals are a hierarchy. We all* have some default goals like eat, survive and reproduce. On top of those we can add goals invented buy ourselves or others. In the case you are without a goal, I believe you still have goals defined by your biology. Every action or inaction is due to a goal. Why do you eat? are you hungry? Bored? Tired? Compulsion? Want to gain weight? Want to loose weight? There is always a goal.
Take people with OCD. In what way are those persons contradicting any goals by doing OCD stuff, like checking if the stow is off 157 times before leaving the house so they missed work? Yes, the goal of getting to work was missed, but the MORE important goal of not accidentally burning down the house and killing 35 neighbors and being the disgrace of the neighborhood was effectively achieved. So its not that fiddling with the stow was with out a goal canceling out the “real” goal of getting to work for a none goal. They were just of different importance.
If I may comment on you sex qua sex analogy. I am convinced that the sex act involved a social interaction where you wanted the other person(s) to behave in a specific way to make the act of sex as enjoyable as possible (what ever that my mean). The act of sex did not happen in a vacuum. You or the other person(s) wanted to have it, no matter what the goal was. And you or the other person(s) had to manipulate the other(s) to achieve what ever goal there was to the sex.
Yes, I agree that we need coordination with other people to achieve things, and that they my be benign. But to me there is no distinction between benign or malevolent attempts to persuade or influence someone. They are both acts of manipulation. Either you managed to get someone to do something or you did not. Why did you want this person to do this in the first place? Because you had a goal of some sort, you did not act out of a vacuum. “But I just did it to be silly, or stupid, or because I was bored”, well… than that was the goal, but a goal none the less.