Lowering the Self-Interest Rate

Perhaps the greatest of all human weaknesses, and certainly the most infuriating, is our tendency to think that what is good for us individually is good for everyone else as well — to mistake what is in our own best interest for the common good. We see this every day in ways large and small. In the case of someone like Timothy McVeigh, the consequences are monstrous and tragic; in the case of campaign finance reform, they often become farcical.

Timothy McVeigh believed that because he hated the government everyone else did too, and that any action he took against the government would be in not only his best interest but everyone else's. He took the ordinary human vice of myopia and turned it into the very face of evil. It's a narcissism of colossal proportions. The final indignity is that the man who murdered dozens of children — calling them "collateral damage" —considered smuggling his own sperm out of prison so that he could sire children of his own.

We're all afflicted with this form of blindness in one degree or another. We see it in everyday life and we see it in our politics. We all tend to justify doing something that is in our own interest by suggesting it is good for all. Managers equate their own success with what is good for their employees. Politicians invariably believe their own reelection is nirvana for the electorate. So much of our politics is based solely on self-interest. Is it any wonder that people of high incomes tend to be Republicans and people of low income tend to be Democrats?

But I suspect things are changing a bit. I'm not suggesting we've all become altruistic, but here are two examples. A story earlier this week in the Washington Post revealed that polls from the 2000 presidential race showed that more and more high-income Americans were becoming Democrats, and more low-income Americans were turning Republican. What this suggests is that people, for better of for worse, are not choosing party affiliation purely on the basis of their own economic benefit. In fact, they are often voting against their economic interests.

And then there is campaign finance reform. I don't claim that campaign finance reform is equivalent to Gandhi's quest for Indian independence (although you could argue that it was also in his self-interest), but it is a rare example of politicians who are motivated by something other than narrow and immediate self-interest.

That is why John McCain's quest for reform has intrigued almost every journalist in America as well as millions of voters. It is the man biting the dog. It's the fish out of water. It's downright counterintuitive. That's why we're fascinated. Here you have a conservative Republican from a conservative state who is fighting against an institution — soft money — that disproportionately benefits himself and his own party.

Ironically, what he has managed to do is to show other politicians that what they had traditionally thought was not in their self-interest actually is. He has made the case that money has so debased politics in America that every politician is personally debased as well. And, finally, that if they can do something that the voters might actually perceive as statesmanlike, those same voters will reward them at the ballot box.

And if that's selfishness and mistaking your own self-interest for the common good, I'm all for it.