Psychological Egoism is dead, long live Psychological Egoism!

Picture from space.com article, “Where Do Black Holes Lead?”

“Falling through an event horizon is literally passing beyond the veil — once someone falls past it, nobody could ever send a message back,” he said. “They’d be ripped to pieces by the enormous gravity, so I doubt anyone falling through would get anywhere.”

Professor Richard Massey, Royal Society research fellow at the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University

{Part 1}-{Violence}{Good}

Psychological Egoism posits that all actions taken by human beings are done in their own self-interest, which means there is no escaping self-interest. Self-interest is posited as some kind of inevitability, but then what does self-interest even mean? In this case, being must be self-interest. Why then even talk about self-interest, why not then talk about being? Self-interest is further seeming like a lost cause.

Self-interest posits an inability to act and do in a manner which is outside of the self. This then understandably leads to a lot of errors in calculation, since impersonal forces tend to be ignored. Thus, psychological egoists or self-interest theorists turn into navel gazers, and forget the outside world exists. This however, dirempts self-interest and being in a way which no longer makes self-interest the ground of being. If one doesn’t escape their self-interest, and impersonal forces causes one to act rather than one’s will, then self-interest must be understood as outside of the self.

Institutions have a self-interest which is outside of any one of the creators, but an institution posits something which is created by humanity. The institution has both ideals and impersonal processes which affect the self, but the institution was created by humanity. This human birthed force means that the world is strewn with Frankenstein forces which are not equal to any single human life, but rather birthed out of self-interest!

Self-interest then is the human which escapes life itself, Frankenstein’s Monster is born in the institution! The creation is alive, but it is not any one person. The person becomes drawn into The Monster’s arm, the institution carries the ghost of the human will, and is the articulated demand in the world. We are carried and pushed by forces which seem like they could be equal to a single person like Jeff Bezos or Adolph Hitler or Donald Trump, but in fact we are contending with Frankenstein Monsters created from the human articulation, humans demands become the inhuman.

The human and the inhuman together create self-interest, and that is why self-interest is the ground of being. Self-interest is not the only substance in the world, it is not the only thing, but it is the key substance of creation and its consequences. Self-interest in order to be thought of at all must be thought of as the ground of being, of the will being articulated and coming together in the world in institutions outside of any one organic life form.

Only when The Monster is visible can it be rationally understood. Self-interest is the living dead institutionalized: the result of human efforts which ensnare humans in the creations of others and themselves. This ensnaring into the symbolic is radically at war with itself, the various snares competing and forming cartels as the violence of history moves forward, consuming and disintegrating us.

What then, is the good?

{Part 2}-{Violence}{Good}

The Good can be known as an ideal with its own logic, but the logic is once again, subject to self-interest. In “The Ego and Its Hyperstate” (Zero Books 2021) I detail the dialectical progression and creation of the interpersonal and the good in the framework of self-interest. The good is known by a tripartite system of Novices, Craftsman, and Leaders of the Good Cause, who contend to create force in the world for the good and to define what the good cause is (Part 2, Section B). They are linked through language, or through symbolic knowledge of the good. Interpersonal and Communal Life are negotiated through simple agreements, identities which reflect a developed form of agreement, and orders which negotiate both agreement and identity (Part 2, Section C).

To know self-interest is to begin to look at the Absolute Hyperstate (Part 2, Section D). I have laid the groundwork in the text to begin to know the inhuman and human forces of self-interest, to navigate both Frankenstein’s Monsters and The Good. This doesn’t make me an expert on the causes themselves, which have leaders and people who know what they are doing relating to various good causes, but I hope that through the text it may elucidate to my very clever, and very attractive readership the gravitational forces that they have to navigate.