The Tabooness of Self-Interest

Our brain runs on self-interest and lying about it does more harm than good

People always claim to be serving others because self-interest is condemned by modern culture. Yet our brain releases happy chemicals when it sees a way to meet its own needs. It releases threat chemicals when you see an obstacle to meeting your needs. So people tend to act on self-interest to feel good, and then spin it to sound altruistic.

We call this “hypocrisy” when others do it, but when we do it ourselves, we don’t even notice. That’s because our verbal brain is not on speaking terms with our emotional brain. The brain structures that control emotion cannot process language, so they cannot tell us in words why they turn on a chemical. Our verbal brain fills in the gap. It creates explanations that bring social rewards without exactly being true.

This sounds nice until you see the harm done by ignoring our true motives. Here are some familiar examples.

1. All I do is for you.
   Parents often claim to do things for their children that are actually for themselves. Pushing too hard for success is the well-known example, but it often goes in the opposite direction: a parent enables failure so they can hold onto the child forever. Parents can be resentful when their own needs are ignored, which adds to the child’s burden. And a child has trouble recognizing their own needs when their parents make self-interest taboo. So a child is not served by parental self-effacement. It just serves the parent in a culture that rewards self-effacement.

2. I am opening this bottle for you.
   Addictions are often represented as a service to others. I’m just “being sociable” or “celebrating your big day” or “trying to cheer you up.” If you order a plate of fries “for the table,” you get to enjoy fries without feeling responsible for the consequences. If you splurge with money you don’t have, you can tell yourself it was for “them.” You want to stop your bad habit, but you say you can’t “let your friends down.” No one benefits from this charade. You can have more power over your impulses by locating them inside you instead of projecting them onto others.

3. I’m saving the world.
   When you think you are saving the world, you tend to give yourself permission to slide on other things. Paying the rent, obeying the law, and face-to-face civility are the first things to go. You don’t have time for such trivia when you are busy saving others. Sometimes you notice that your world-saving activities are not actually effective, or even ethical, but you persevere because you need the moral superiority it brings. You have no other way to feel superior, and you can’t admit that your inner mammal urgently craves social importance. So you cling to your savior role, even when the world would be better off if you just took responsibility for yourself.

I’m not saying we should be more selfish.
I’m saying we ARE selfish, and we need to see it in order to manage it.

This conflicts with everything you hear from the therapy-industrial complex. They say we are naturally altruistic. They say animals are altruistic, children are altruistic, hunter-gatherers are altruistic, and we would be too if it weren’t for our evil society. This trains you to blame society for your frustration instead of getting real with your mammalian impulses.

The warm-and-fuzzy view of human nature is enticing, but it’s profoundly disempowering.

• You cut yourself off from your natural motivational system when you can’t accept your self-interest, so you don’t feel motivated.

• You let your self-interest run wild behind a socially acceptable veneer, and can’t see how you’re choosing that .

• You get rewarded for “altruism” at a young age, which wires in that path to rewards and blinds you to other paths.

It’s hard to see your selfish impulses as natural when “experts” say the opposite.

It’s hard to get real about your emotions when the verbal brain’s propaganda is seen as your true self.

It’s hard to notice that your emotions are reward signals because we’re trained to see emotions as genetically programmed.

But you can get real about your mammalian impulses even though it’s hard. You can get real whether or not the therapy-industrial complex approves. You can stop seeing your choices as a service to others and get real about the emotions behind them.

The Inner Mammal Institute can help you do this. My book Why You’re Unhappy: Biology vs Politics shows why we ignore our inner mammal, and how you can to learn to guide it instead. My free videos explain our mammalian impulses in an entertaining way. My video course helps you build new neural pathways to guide your inner beast like an Olympic equestrian.