Thought for the Day, 26 July 2006

THE LIMITS OF SELF-INTEREST

Before I first started work, no one told me how much time I'd be spending in meetings. I've tried to get better at meetings, but eventually they become a trial. So many points of view, so much repetition! The pressure builds and irritable thoughts bubble up, which at root are saying: why can't they all just agree with me!

Pity, then, the officials who've had five years of meetings on world trade only for them to collapse this week without an agreement. We've since heard recriminations as participants accuse each other of sacrificing the shared benefits of more trade for the sake of self-interest and domestic lobbies. Leaving aside the actual benefits of the economic growth that trade fosters, the failure of these talks suggests the limitations of self-interest as a motive for cooperation.

Self-interest seems to be hard-wired into us. Some regard society as a pragmatic alliance of self-interested individuals. We've found ways to channel competition into economic systems that produce wealth from which, it is said, everyone will benefit. The attempt to create a world trading system is a step in creating a global society that allows trade and competition. But negotiators are stretched between the short-term interests of their own nations, and the long term benefits they believe trade will bring both them and their trading partners.

For Buddhism, the problems of a society based on self-interest stem from the very nature of the self. The Buddha saw that we try to find security by identifying with roles and labels, property and possessions, and the groups or nations of which we're members. This sense of separateness may assuage the insecurity that grows from the unpredictability of our lives; but the Buddha believed that a rigid sense of self creates suffering for ourselves and others.

Instead he encouraged people to embrace change, uncertainty and connection. Self-interest is an illusion, the Buddha said, because the separate self is an illusion. In truth we are interconnected with all life. Why should the hand respond to a pain in the foot, asked one Buddhist thinker? Not because of its own interests, but because both are part of a the same body.

A society exemplifying this way of thinking will value cooperation above competition. That means setting aside narrow self-interest to take in the legitimate needs of everyone, and the needs of the planet that sustains us. But one thing you can't escape. In my experience cooperating usually means having even more meetings.