(5) Human nature and "enlightened selfishness"

RJ: Let me push this a bit. There are two different paths to go down here. One is to say to people, "Listen, I understand that you want all these material things, but if you put aside that greed there is something in the long run that will serve you better." Or you could say, "I know you want these things, but you have to train yourself not to want them because they aren't of any real value." Which is politically more effective and more realistic?

AO: I recognize that people want these things, and I'm saying there is something else that is even more valuable. You don't have to get rid of the instinct for material things to do this. You begin to practice, to learn that it's more rewarding to pursue a path that brings real love and affection. Everybody needs love. Everybody needs affection. Everybody needs validation. It's a central problem of human life, and very few people really get those things.

RJ: I'm not sure I agree. Let me tell you what motivated the question. Someone might say, "I'd really like a fancy car, but I'm going to commit my life to activism and I know I'm never going to get that kind of car." But I never wanted a big car in the first place. I don't mean that I live like a pauper. I make more money than I need. I eat regularly and well, and I have an apartment to myself. I'm incredibly privileged. But I live in the same little apartment that I've lived in for 10 years, and people who come to visit often say, "You can afford it now, so why don't you buy a house?" The truth is that I don't want a house. I never wanted a house. I feel like my one-bedroom apartment is too big.

My point is, as long as people want the goodies, the perks of affluence, for most the temptation will be too great. Should we be challenging people to rethink the value of those things, not only in relation to other choices but in some more fundamental way? Is the politics of reducing consumption not just about being ecologically more responsible, but about creating a way of life that is more likely to sustain people in radical political activity, making it more likely they'll resist the goodies, because they see that the goodies don't mean much?

AO: You see, we come from different places. I don't know where you come from, but I grew up in the slums...

RJ: I didn't grow up rich. It was lower middle class when I was young, and eventually middle class. But I understand your point: It's easy to not want lots of things when you've never really been deprived of the basics of life. And I've certainly never gone hungry or been homeless, or been threatened with anything like that.

AO: I lived my youth in a place that didn't have hot running water, didn't have electricity. Radio had been invented, but we didn't even have a Victrola. I lived in an environment in which we weren't destitute, but we sure didn't have a lot of money. I lucked out by becoming a leftist, because it opened up another path that wasn't about money. So when I faced that bribe, I discovered there was a part of me that wanted the money, but luckily there was something else I wanted more of, something I had learned about through leftist politics. And I can articulate that now, even if I couldn't always: The only thing in human life you can give away and not be left with less is love and affection. It's simple, but not everyone understands this. If I give you a little of my money, I have a little less. If I give you a lot of my money, I have much less. That's true of many other material things I can give you. But if I give you love and affection, I don't have less, I have more. It's the only thing in human relations that is guaranteed to grow like that. I've learned that the hard way, and I still have, even at this rate, things to learn about it. But that's at the center of what I try to teach activists -- the importance of the role of love.

RJ: That sounds a lot like therapeutic talk.

AO: I don't care what the fuck it sounds like, it's true. What should we value more than material comfort? Love and affection, respect and validation. I'm lucky because I'm bathed in it all the time, as a result of my political activism. And it's one of the big motivations for what I do. It's one of the things that keeps me going, even though my life these days is dominated by pain, very often physical agony, because of the spinal surgeries. I spend most of my day here in this chair, reading or on the phone, sometimes watching a movie, because I can sit in this chair in a way that relieves some of my pain a little bit. This would be impossible if I didn't have what I'm talking about, that love. Without it, I'd be just a lonely old man in pain, suffering like most. And I'd be worrying about my pain medication, which alone is $600 a month, and insurance and all that shit. But I'm not. I have an incredible old age. Nobody I know at my age has this kind of life. I can't think of anything that's more important to a human being than having that. No other form of success can match that.

When I used to talk at schools, I would tell kids that I'm richer than Bill Gates. It stops the audience because they don't at first know what I mean. I say, "Bill Gates is not stupid. He looks in the mirror and he sees what we all see: A nerd. And when he gets affection and love, he can't help but wonder why he's getting it." I don't have that problem. I certainly don't get attention because of my physical appearance. I have no money or jobs to offer anyone. All I have to give people is a connection to activism.

RJ: That's great. I understand the appeal of your life, of what you have. But I'm back to my question: Will that sustain most people, or do the comforts of an affluent society obscure their ability to see that? It's pretty obvious that one of the reasons capitalism can continue at all is because it plays to that instinct in people. It's based on a certain conception of human nature that says we're all, in the end, greedy in the material sense.

AO: In some ways, that's right, of course. I don't believe in a perfectibility of human beings. I believe a lot can be done to make life different, to change the way we relate to each other. But I don't think we'll ever eliminate greed. It's part of being an animal. That force cannot be totally eliminated from human life. But the other side of it is they can never totally silence certain other forces in life, other parts of our nature. There will always be also in the human community -- sometimes on a larger scale and sometimes on a smaller scale -- a deep-seated resistance to greed as the dominant feature of life. Even without being political, people live that way, just out of being loving people.

I'll give you a wonderful example. About two years ago, a dozen or more miners were buried underground, in an accident in Pennsylvania in a coal mine. And that incident revealed the incredible strengths and weaknesses of different ways of living. On the one hand, that accident was avoidable, and the only reason it took place is that the owners of the mine were greedy, period. We have to abolish that kind of ownership. The other side of it is, which was totally missed, not only by the press but by much of the left, was that it also exposed some of the most wonderful qualities of human beings. Every single guy who worked on that mine and everyone on that shift volunteered to go down to help those guys out. So the press was talking about the enormous technological success of drilling with such accuracy and such shit. But the real point was that it was a marvelous story to explore what it is to be a human being, because to me that incident represented the finest and the lowest.

RJ: So, if those forces are always going to be in conflict, how should those of us who want a more just world with less suffering try to present this to people? How should we think about greed?

AO: I think we need to talk about what I'll call, for lack of a better term, "enlightened selfishness." Selfishness, in the capitalist sense, will play a negative role in human life in our kind of culture. People may buy the big house and get the big car, and even think of themselves as happy, but there's a big vacuum in them. You don't overcome loneliness, human loneliness, by accumulating.

But at the same time, in some sense everything I do is selfish. The Peace Mobile -- totally selfish. I've never engaged in any political activity in my life that didn't turn out to be highly rewarding. And the only one that really could have cost me my life was the Spanish Civil War, and occasionally maybe in Mississippi and Nicaragua. But the risks involved in that were more than counterbalanced -- because I happened to be one of the survivors, of course -- by the benefits I derived.

To be successful as an activist, you have to be able to teach people -- not only verbally but by example -- that it's a good way to live. It is not martyrdom. It is not just sacrifice. I'm involved in the highest paid profession in the world -- social activism. Take this little exchange right now between you and me. What does that mean to me as a person? Okay, it means that you, an intelligent human being that's got a fairly decent life, finds it of value to give up a piece of that life to fly to Seattle to learn something, hopefully, from me. You can't even attach material value to that -- it's enormous. To me, it's very pleasant to know that somebody -- and somebody I have a fair respect for -- thinks they have something to learn from me. It's a marvelous feeling, and it's another example of what I'm talking about.

Part 6 - Religion and/or politics

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