Self-Interest: Is it Compounding?
Is everything we do in our self-interest?
My friend Pat Kallal posed this question to me recently, as we traversed the pristinely white Mississippi River, crunching our way through the snow to his apartment. He explained with an example. “I have this jacket, Jacob, that I bought, because it keeps me warm, but also because it makes me look good,” he said, “which is subconsciously important in order to promote myself as a potential partner for women.” Is everything, he wonders, related to reproducing?
It’s easy to answer that not everything is related to reproducing - consider Zen Buddhist monks that take lifelong vows of celibacy. But could this be related to self-interest? The Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who runs the center Plum Village in France, seems to have built a community full of people who admire and revere his personal discipline, maybe because he’s kept his promise to himself not to have sex.
When I hear this question, I think first about ethics, the question of what we should do. But Pat, here, is really asking about what we really do, the lowest common denominator of human action. It’s what all marketers search for - why do people really act the way they do?
The ancient Greeks, especially Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, took it for granted that everyone would pursue Eudaimonia. From their observations, everyone acted toward this one goal. Eudaimonia can be roughly translated as happiness, but we can interpret it as self-interest. Pursuing my personal happiness, in the largest, most fulfilling sense of the word, is basically pursuing the best life I can have, the most self-interested actions I can take. The goal for Plato, in his work The Republic, is to say, “Great. We all are working toward self-interest. But I want to prove to you that the best way to achieve self-interest, Eudaimonia, is through virtue and noble actions.” He spends the rest of the book comparing human souls to cities, in the goal of proving that self-interest really means virtue.
That’s not always evident. Plenty of people in American society do everything they can to make money, sacrificing sleep, health, their friends, and their principles. Why? Because they think that money leads to Eudaimonia. I think Pat’s right, but I’d go even further. People don’t do what’s best for them, they do what they think is best for them. Or sometimes, what they feel is best for them. If I want to lose weight because I think it will be good for me, but I see a delicious piece of cake, sometimes I eat it. Why? Because my feelings say, “mmm, delicious, good for you,” whereas only my educated, rational brain can help explain why it’s not.
A marketer doesn’t decide what people want. Because heaven knows it’s difficult to change what people think is good for them. There are plenty of well-meaning religious advocates, self-help gurus, and philosophers who have great ideas about what is important, but they invariably fail to impose these ideas on others. Thich Nhat Hanh has perhaps a better idea, that the best way to change others is by changing ourselves, rather than trying to force others to see a truth.
If a marketer doesn’t choose what people desire, she capitalizes upon it. This is why marketing is a cultural art. Different cultures want different things, deep down, and so the same product may need to fill different niches in different cultures. How do phone scammers have such enormous success with older, single women? They capitalize upon the frequent loneliness, the need for company. But those same phone scammers use different tactics with middle-aged fathers; they may capitalize upon fear, the fear of a computer virus, by sending out a fake fix that will actually hurt the computer. And phone scammers are, in general, excellent marketers.
But please be wary, and don’t become a phone scammer; taking advantage of others in that way is not, in the long-run, in your self-interest.