nested interests

As a great employee you are supposed to consider the company’s interests above your own’s, as a great citizen you are supposed to consider the country’s interests above your company’s, and so on. Our interests have a nested structure like that of a matryoshka doll.

What is interesting is that there is constant conflict among the dolls and the way we choose to resolve such conflicts depends mostly on one single parameter. During times of crisis we care about the largest entity relevant to the nature of the crisis, and during times of peace we care about ourselves as much as we can. (That is essentially why centralist macroeconomic policies work better during times of crises and decentralist ones work better during times of peace. Unfortunately communists and capitalists could never see their relative contextual strengths while fighting for absolute dominancy.)

Dysfunctional prioritization algorithms that do not exhibit this basic linearity result in dysfunctional societies that do not exhibit the right cohesiveness dynamics. That is why constant self-obsession is considered as a bad behavior. (Of course, what is bad is defined by the society, not by you. In other words, ethics is actually a sub-discipline of sociology. Only in academia it is considered as a sub-discipline of philosophy, as if one can reason a set of ethical values into existence by thinking alone in a room.)