Does Altruism Exist? by David Sloan Wilson

Author:David Sloan Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press

FIGURE 7.1 AYN RAND’S WORLDVIEW

In short, Rand’s worldview adds a layer of unreality on top of the unreality of Homo economicus. Those who become believers acquire a kind of zealotry typically associated with religious fundamentalism. Social commentator Maria Bustillos put it well in a 2011 article on Rand’s influence: “Rand’s books have sold nonstop from the moment they were published because people love hearing how not only can they get away with being totally selfish, it’s absolutely the right way to be. The best way to be, as in, morally the best.”21 The following passage by Nathaniel Branden, a disciple of Rand who became her lover before leaving the movement, could have been written by a religious zealot: “This is how we were back then, Ayn and I and all of us—detached from the world—intoxicated by the sensation of flying through the sky in a vision of life that made ordinary existence unendurably dull.”22

Never mind that Rand was an atheist and clothed her worldview in the language of rationality; the linearity of her worldview exemplifies fundamentalism. Invoking the gods is just a detail. The fundamentalist nature of Rand’s thought explains why academic philosophers have never taken her seriously, but she still casts a spell over her readers to this day, not least Alan Greenspan, who was part of her inner circle as a young man and went on to become chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006. We should be frightened when politicians insist that their staff read Ayn Rand. The separation of church and state offers no protection against this kind of fundamentalism.

In the previous chapter on religion, I wrote that an adaptive worldview has two requirements. First, it must be highly motivating psychologically. Second, the actions motivated by the worldview must outcompete the actions motivated by other worldviews. But worldviews that are successful in the evolutionary sense of the word need not benefit society as a whole. We know from multilevel selection theory that they can spread, cancerlike, at the expense of society as a whole. We are currently witnessing this phenomenon with the spread of the “greed is good” worldview.

Calling a worldview cancerous says nothing about the thoughts or intentions of its believers. To pick Greenspan as an example, by all accounts he is a decent man who thought that he was promoting the common good. During the widely reported congressional hearing that followed the 2008 financial crisis, he was genuinely dumbfounded that the policies he helped to implement led to such disastrous results: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”23 We can sympathize with Greenspan’s plight as a good man who caused great harm, which is the stuff of tragedy. But a worldview that causes its believers to do harm while regarding themselves as morally pure is even more insidious than a worldview that actively condones harm.

Given the unreality of Homo economicus, coupled with

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