And this makes for a pretty lonely and downright harmful society, when viewed through that lens.
And I'm not going to feel stupid or naive for feeling like children are tricked into believing the opposite is true.
I want to also say, this state that everyone is acting in their self interest is not something we should promote, or be proud of, or assume is the natural state of things. It is a state that we are being forced into, and we are being convinced to accept.
People as individuals are actually very good. And if we were to get over a few little logical fallacies, we could extend that goodness onto our whole society. But there are many reasons why that is considered harmful by some in power, and then many more who are propagandized into agreeing with them.
Being good and working in your own self interest aren't mutually exclusive though. In fact most of good things are genuinely done out of complete self interest, and practically all good things on the corporate or bureaucratic level. There's always someone involved in the decision who directly benefits, luckily sometimes it's all/most of us too. Society gets better when the self interested goals of an individual are aligned best with the majority of people (e.g. why presidents are on average better than kings).
To give a very active example, Zuckerberg isn't throwing billions into making ML models and then giving them out for free out of some sense of cosmic right, he's doing so to eliminate competition and further Meta's goals of making more money. But since his actions align with what most of us want, i.e. open source models, it's all seen as a relatively good thing. There is no such thing as "objective good" in nature, there's just how actions influence the person doing the moralizing.
Every living being on earth is hardwired to do two things first and foremost: survive, and make sure its species survives. The ones that weren't are simply no longer around. Helping others is ultimately something you do out of self interest, since you benefit from it indirectly. It is absolutely the natural state of things.
> Being good and working in your own self interest aren't mutually exclusive though.
Being good and selfish/doing whatever is in your own self interest no matter who else gets hurt are mutually exclusive. The reason we can't trust the food we eat is because companies are selfish and don't care that you get sick. They'll feed you poison because even though they already have billions in profits, it makes them a few extra cents every time they do. That's where we're at, and allowing it to continue isn't the natural state of things.
A company only cares about money, always have, always will. The way you make them care about their actions is by taking away their money, it's all pretty simple.
The monetary damage from bad PR when caught clearly isn't enough, but when you have regulators like the EU who impose massive fines as a percentage of gross revenue, suddenly every company becomes super careful about what they do. And those regulations are there because it's in the selfish self interest of the electorate to not get poisoned :)
We don't live in the natural world, we bend it to our will. By recognizing what's the default we can leverage that to improve on it more effectively. If you know a bad person will do bad things, you can plan for it and make sure nobody gets hurt. Pretending a bad man isn't bad is just optimistic delusion and why libertarianism doesn't work in real life.
Children aren't tricked into believing it because it's actually true. As you point out, people are inherently good, and they act against their self-interest all the time. It's always a mistake though. ;D
It's important to separate objective self interest (knowing all the facts combined with perfect reasoning) and subjective self interest (based on limited and likely misleading data, with possibly faulty reasoning). The first one will obviously not be true for the most part and is usually only knowable in retrospect, but aside from some amount of purely random decisions, the rest will largely fall in the second group, if only subconsciously. But I'd argue it's still the same exact principle :P
Quite right, even the broader philosophical definition of "cynicism rejects all conventional desires for wealth, power, glory, social recognition, conformity" fits perfectly with my views. I am a cynic in every sense of the word :)
