The Guardian view on the common good: more Hobbes than Calvin | Editorial
The belief that we are naturally and fundamentally selfish, from our genes upwards, may be the most powerful of all the acids eating at the foundations of the welfare state and of the wider postwar liberal order. It gains its power from the fact that it is half true. It gains its danger from being half a lie. Everyone but the most miserable knows from personal experience that people are full of goodness as well as of its opposite. We are fairly generous, unselfish, even sometimes thoughtful and trusting in our private lives, most of the time. Public life, however, is increasingly conducted as if universal selfishness defined human nature, and politics must be a zero-sum game. In countries where the economy is stagnating, as Britain's has been for the past 10 years, this is horribly credible. Each pound in lower taxes for the rich is taken from health or education for the poor; security for the old (if they're lucky) is funded by vastly inflated house prices and insecurity for the young. The interests of immigrants are set against those of the indigenous population. The interests of Britain are set against those of the EU.
None of these oppositions are inevitable. Groups need not be selfish any more than individual people have to be. What most of all makes them so is mistrust. One of the motors of distrust and meanness in ourselves is the belief that others are cheating. The belief that the others are in it only for themselves is at the root of almost all assaults on the welfare state, and even on the ideology of welfare. It contributes to the gleeful trashing of the reputation of charities. Acts of breathtaking selfishness like the Republican tax cut - which has just awarded $29bn to the profits of one firm alone, Berkshire Hathaway, controlled by one of the world's richest men, Warren Buffett, at the expense of healthcare and even food for millions of poor Americans - are justified and made politically possible by the belief that the poor are endlessly grasping and can never be given enough: so why not give them nothing.
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