This is the second installment of the series on Evolution, Economics, and Political Philosophy, the introduction of which can be found here.

Introduction
Actually, I probably could have titled this ’self-interested nature.’ Self interest doesn’t quite make the world go round, but it certainly makes us go round. Beyond DNA and various parts of our molecular machinery, self interest is the unifying theme of all living organisms. Selfishness is why evolution has produced such myriad forms as the Mantis Shrimp and the Scaly Anteater.

Some have accused me of being a neo-Randian, of worshipping at the altar of selfishness even as they deny its very existence as our primary motivator. The self-interested nature of all living beings is morally neutral. It isn’t something to deify as anarcho-capitalists do, or to vilify and attempt to expunge as collectivists do. It exists, it is the single rule that all life obeys. It is responsible for our greatest masterpieces and our worst catastrophies. Mother Teresa was motivated by self interest as much as any Fortune 500 executive. Self interest just is.

Modeling Behavior: The Assumptions Behind Game Theory
The assumption that individuals will act in a self-interested and rational manner has allowed the study of behavior–both human and animal–to move beyond the nebulous world of thoughts and feelings, archetypes and motivations, to a predictive model of behavior. While not as refined or determinate as physics or chemistry, mathematical models of behavior are capable of astonishing accuracy when it comes to predicting the choices we make both conscious and unconscious. John Nash of Beautiful Mind fame, and sociobiologists John Maynard Smith and Robert Trivers are a few of the great names out there when it comes to the mathematical modelling of behavior.

Any explicative theory or paradigm is built upon certain assumptions. Game theoretics and other mathematical models of behavior are dependent on the following three:

• 1. Individuals will always act to further their own interests

• 2. Individuals will act in a rational manner

• 3. Individuals are party to all necessary information to make an informed decision

To present this from a Platonic point of view, if the model is the perfect form, the real world is the slightly bastardized expression of it. In other words, these conditions don’t always hold true. Humans aren’t completely rational, and natural selection isn’t rational in the least, merely appearing so when looked upon with a teleologic perspective . And we are never possessed of perfect information; at some level, our cost/benefit analysis is never going to be 100% accurate. We can never quite know whether what we think is a winning choice actually is. The idea of imperfect information is a pretty basic one, and needs little further discussion other than to understand that there is always uncertainty in decision-making. Rationality, however, is a topic worthy of further discussion at a later point.

The high fidelity of these models in predicting behavior is what lends credence to the assertion that self interest is ultimately our sole motivation. The only other major paradigm that has been asserted is group selection (in sociobiological literature); its political equivalent–one which it enjoys an incestuous ideological and historical relationship with–is collectivism. For the past 200 years, group selectionists of every stripe–sociobiological, economic, and political–have tried to assert the viability of this selective domain, and have continued to fail in presenting any evidence for its existence.

Given this long history of failure of the group selectionist paradigm and the equally long history of success of that of the individualists, it is probably safe to say that self-interest is our primary motivation. However, another thing one must remember about models is that in addition to the fact that their assumptions aren’t ever completely fulfilled, they are often narrower in scope than the real world. By this I mean self interest is a wide-ranging and broad concept that cannot be reduced simply to maximization of economic wealth or reproductive gains. Mere observation makes it patently obvious that very few individuals’ lives revolve around either of those goals.

Self Interest Defined
The truth is that self interest manifests itself in everything from the food we eat to our education to our work ethic. Major failings of both libertarian and mixed model ideologies is that they over-estimate the importance of economic (material) wealth. Many libertarians believe that ‘the market’ will solve all problems. Many leftists believe that no one would want to stay on welfare, the standard of living (material wealth) being so low. However, few individuals would feel adequately compensated for the loss of a child if they received in return every cent they had spent raising him. And many people don’t believe that leaving welfare and getting an entry-level job in order to increase material wealth only incrementally is worth the 40 hours a week of exertion.

While it would be nigh on impossible to catalog, model, and codify all the various avenues in which self interest expresses itself, understanding the ways in which self interested behavior impacts social and political systems is considerably easier. Although imperfect, a useful classification arises if we define selfish behavior as either acting at an internal or an external level. Internal self-interest is about ‘feeling good’. External self-interest could be conceived of as ‘being superior’. The former, of course is about the position the individual sees himself in, while the latter is about how others perceive the individual in question. The primary internal interest is maximizing comfort. Whereas the primary external interests are power and influence. Wealth actually contributes to all three; serving to grease the wheels as it were.

Comfort is fairly self-explanatory. While many dream of a mansion, a summer home on the spanish riviera, a supercar, and a yacht, most aren’t motivated to turn this dream into reality. People are quite content with reasonably comfortable accomodation, a trip every year or two, and a car that gets the job done. While what they define as adequate may vary, few would need to become highly paid executives, plastic surgeons, or hollywood entertainers to achieve their relatively modest goals. Most people are content not to find themselves wanting for any of life’s basic and not-so-basic necessities.

While obviously wealth is necessary to achieve all of these material goals, after a certain point, such wealth becomes superfluous. At that point, the marginal utility of undertaking extra work, vying for promotion, getting more training, is considerably less. The attendant increase in comfort just isn’t worth the extra work.

Influence–an external interest–is perhaps the most nebulous. The academic who after 10 years of schooling and postdoctoral work is making about as much as an electrician and considerably less than a plumber. Who nevertheless spend 60, 80, even more, hours a week relentlessly pursuing research. Who takes off for the wild jungles of Brazil or Africa to make notes on what a monkey is doing every minute of every day for a year. He’s driven by the desire to be influential, at least in the limited circle of individuals engaged in similar pursuits. George Soros pouring millions and billions into moveon.org and Air America, he too is thirsting after such a title.

Power differs from influence in that power is a more direct attribute. The prince under Machiavelli’s tutelage was a man questing after power. Machiavelli’s primary concern was influence. The man behind the man on the throne. Frederick Delano Roosevelt, though, was a man after nothing more than power. From his assumption of Emergency Powers to his dramatic expansion of the Executive, to the fact that he fully intended to continue being elected president for the remainder of his life, there can be little doubt that no matter what other motivations he had, power was clearly one of them. Some would say the same of George W. Bush’s recent expansion of Executive–indeed all goverment–power.

It would be a fair assumption to say that there are scarcely few elected officials at the national level who aren’t drawn to the position out of some desire for power and influence. The same could be said of those in the upper echelons of civil service as well. Teasing apart influence and power can be a difficult proposition at best, but is more or less unnecessary to the understanding of the operation of political systems. Influence manifests itself through its effects on the projection of power; so one merely needs to look at power and how it is distributed and used to understand the contribution of both. As in comfort, wealth is clearly involved in attaining and maintaing both influence and power. Here, however, the marginal utility of increased wealth is considerably greater, to look at the interplay of wealth and power in the legislature alone.

Conclusion
The distribution and control of wealth is all too often the centerpiece around which political systems are drawn. As I’ve attempted to show in the preceding paragraphs, this view is at once both myopic and overly constrained. Wealth is merely the currency through which one’s aims are realized. It is the motivations of comfort and power that we need to understand. It is these which people thirst for, and which they will attempt to gain, often enough at the expense of others.

In order for a government to be stable, in order for the people under said government to be free of oppression, the political system under which it operates must be constructed to be proof against the depredations of those who would obtain their material wealth from the pocketbooks of others, as well as against those who would use the power of the government to oppress the very people it was meant to keep free.

The next installment will cover cooperation. How self interest is ultimately the motivator behind it, and how group selectionist and collectivist paradigms will always fail to incite cooperation, instead tending toward exploitation of the few against the many.