How Can One Create a Harmony of Interests Among People?

Question: How there can be a harmony of interests among people. Aren’t there all kinds of conflicts of interests?

Answer:  "The Objectivist ethics holds the human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifices of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.”  ( Ayn Rand , “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness 31 paperback)Objectivism holds that there are no fundamental conflicts of interest among rational people. That is to say that the success in life of one person does not require the suffering or failure of any other. It means that, in principle, all people can succeed in living long and happy lives, if they live by reason, embrace the virtue of productiveness, and deal with one another by trade.

This principle of the harmony of interests is key to the Objectivist view of ethics and politics. Objectivism’s ethics of rational selfishness is not an ethics of dog-eat-dog because of the harmony of interests. A political system based in individual rights to freedom—i.e., capitalism— does not pit the “haves” against the “have-nots” because of the harmony of interests.

The harmony of interests is possible because the characteristically human means of gaining values is production. Human beings apply our reasoning minds to create and use tools, to discover natural laws, to invent social technologies (e.g., the “meet-up”), and so make the products we need. Today practically every product we use and every social arrangement we take part in is the result of a developed, complex process of invention and production.

That isn’t how things used to be. Before the rise of industrial capitalism, to seek wealth simply was to seek to rob others. If you wanted to live securely, you needed a strong fort or strong friends to fend off the enemies that would take your wealth and your life. Aristocrats ruled over serfs. Men were warriors. Women looked for powerful protectors. Wars of conquest swept society, fed by the riches the conquerors could rob. The Romans conquered Europe by robbing and enslaving their enemies. They were conquered in turn by barbarians hungry for loot. Leaping ahead: Napoleon’s empire fed off the territory he conquered, and the English conquered India by making war pay. Now the English have abandoned their empire: it was too expensive to keep. And Napoleon ended up with nothing. Look at the U.S. today in Iraq: whatever the reasons for conquering and remaking Iraq, it has been no way to create wealth. Today we live as individuals, men and women. It is education that has the most value: our productivity depends, more than anything else, on our ability to use our minds.

Yet conflicts still abound in society. Stuck in traffic, it’s perfectly clear that if all those other people hadn’t driven, you would be home already. Next time you look for a home, won’t you hope everyone else in the market will keep far away from the places you want? The last thing you want is a bidding war. In the current recession, whole retail chains are going bankrupt: their stockholders are ruined, but the going-out-of-business sales are fantastic!

To understand in what sense there is a harmony of interest despite these conflicts, we need to consider some deeper principles.

REASON

The harmony of interest only holds among people able and willing to live by reason. When suicidal, murderous holy warriors attack a hotel in the name of purity, there is a conflict, sure, but rationality ain’t in it. But unreason can be subtler, too. How about someone who becomes miserable out of envy, their hatred festering out of their belief that they could have been great, if only—! If their sense of possibility isn’t grounded in their real abilities and the effort they expended, then unreason is at work again. Many conflicts arise because people flinch at seeing their own flaws, and defensively lash out at others. Again, these aren’t rational conflicts.

FREEDOM

A key point to bear in mind in considering conflicts we know of today is that we live in a mixed economy that also features encroachments on freedom of speech and religion. The fact that all our freedoms can be attacked through the political process pits us against our fellow citizens in a war of political pull. It makes us worry more than we should what our neighbors believe and how they will vote. The public school system, for example, makes every new schoolchild a liability to childless taxpayers. Zoning laws make every renovation job an opportunity to fight, and make locating a business into an ugly conflict among bureaucrats, local residents, business competitors, and the entrepreneur. So we have to look for interactions that are basically free, or where, at least, we can compare how well individual interests are served by freedom versus unfreedom.

CONTEXT

There are conflicts among reasonable, free people, too. But they aren’t fundamental. Consider the Olympics: there is only one gold medal in most events; not every entrant can have one. Or consider a romantic competition: if two women yearn for the same man, they can’t both bring home the prize. In all these cases, the context is important.

When you join a sports competition, or take part in any game, you decide to accept the rules and conflict involved. Would an Olympian rather have a world stage on which to perform and the satisfaction of challenging the best, or avoid competition altogether? Similarly, anyone who is looking for love can benefit from an open opportunity to meet a wide range of possible mates. It’s a risk in that situation that there may be some competition for love. But the range of choice makes it worth it. In any case, competition in love is overrated: the love worth having is a mutual recognition. It can’t be won or stolen.

The bottom line is that conflict is good for us, in context, when participating is to the benefit of everyone involved. That is a conflict framed within the principle of trade: voluntary, and beneficial. It’s a conflict, like economic competition generally, made possible by a deeper harmony of interests.

HARMONY OF INTERESTS, NOT GOALS

The harmony of interests exists not at the level of particular goals: we don’t often share particular aims like owning this house or that dress. It exists at the level of live-and-let-prosper. It is striking evidence for the harmony of interests that generally, the economic and political freedom of a country is strongly correlated with the longevity, professed happiness, and economic prosperity of its citizens. This regularity exists because the rich generally earn their wealth, they don’t take it from the poor. That some are rich, does not keep the poor from becoming rich, too. The sources of happiness for humans —such as security, material well-being, health, meaningful social bonds, virtuous living, and productive engagement with projects and values—can more easily be produced than stolen. Some, indeed, only exist if produced—friendship and virtue are examples.

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