Take a step back to recall the story that this book tells, and consider how it might come to a very unhappy ending. Imagine the history our disappointed descendants might write. For centuries, the moral teachings of a civilization held self–interest and self-trust to be the sins of frail and deluded humanity. These traditional teachings denied that societies could discern distinct and viable principles of order and design their own institutions accordingly. The denounced such efforts as doomed hubris. Then, in an unprecedented experiment, some people rejected the old wisdom. They took the heart’s desire and the body’s appetite as compass points and rededicated human ingenuity to serving them. They created new forms of order to house these inverted values. For a time, the experiment succeeded, changing life so dramatically that the utopian visions of one century became the pedestrian common sense of the next. Then, suddenly and drastically, the experiment failed. Self-interest and self-trust proved to be formulas for devastating the world. Democratic polities, the other moral center of the great experiment, could not stop runaway self-destruction and turned out to abet it instead. Faced with overwhelming evidence that they were on an unsustainable course, the freedom-loving peoples of the twenty-first century wrung their hands, congratulated themselves on their hybrid cars and locally grown food, and changed little, because it never made sense for anyone or any country to do so. . Jedediah Purdy
About This Quote

The above quote by John Dos Passos is an excellent depiction of the belief that humans are always striving for self-interest, but that this striving for self-interest leads to the downfall of the human race. The history of humanity has shown that this is not true. Humans have, in fact, achieved great things for themselves and others based on their own self-interest. Is it possible to be so greedy as to ignore this truth? Only time will tell if humans can be successful without having an eye on self-interest.

Source: A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, And The Making Of American Freedom

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