some words on seflishness--from Abe Osheroff

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RJ: How can we overcome that problem of affluence?
AO: Well, the first thing is to do as much as you can by personal example, though I never totally
succeeded. I still feel guilty about living in this house, for example.
RJ: This house you’re in, which is a very modest bungalow?
AO: Yeah, but this house can certainly support more than two people. When I was a kid we had
a one-bedroom apartment with no private bathroom for four people, and we had a good life. We
thought it was pretty good. My mother could turn the handle and water would come out, and she
had just come from a place where she had to walk a half a mile with a couple of buckets. You
know, people on welfare in America have a richer life than more than half of the people in the
world. We have to remember that once in a while.
RJ: There’s a UN statistic that half the people in the world live on less than $2 a day.
AO: That means they don’t have clean water, they don’t have medical attention, they sleep on
the fucking ground. In the U.S., we whine all the time, but a skilled worker in this country lives
like aristocrats used to live. They buy cars, buy a house.
RJ: So is this the problem of greed? Is that simply an enduring reality, that people will…
AO: I don’t want to put it that way.
RJ: Then should we call it self-interest? You’re saying that whatever calculation we make, our
own self-interest is going to be part of the mix?
AO: Exactly, exactly. We have to get people to understand that it is in their self-interest not to
yield to that crasser kind of greed. Let me give you an example. When I was young I was offered
an uncontested seat in Congress by the Democratic Party in Brooklyn. This was an era in which
there was no Republican Party there, and the machine decided who the candidate would be. They
came to me and said, “You are our next congressman. All you’ve got to do is publicly separate
from what you’ve been doing.”
RJ: Which would have meant denouncing the Communist Party, to which you belonged at the
time, yes?
AO: Yes, and even more than that. But that was pretty easy for me to turn down because at that
point my Marxism was almost an obsession, almost a religious experience. But later, when I
lived in California, in Venice, I had a much tougher decision. We fought a land redevelopment
project, a multi-multi million-dollar project. We lost, but we held them at bay for about seven or
eight years and protected that community for those years. These were very poor people living on
the banks of shitty canals, but it was in many ways a nice place to live, and it had a good
community life.
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During that battle, a member of City Council offered me a bribe. In a very private discussion,
isolated from any possibility of observation, he offered me two corner lots in the canals, which
today would go for between $2 and $5 million. They offered me a house built to my
specifications. They offered me a dock and two boats, sail and motor. And I’ll tell you, it took
me a hard, painful night to turn that down.
RJ: If you had taken it, the deal would have been you that would abandon the organizing? And
that was an offer you had to think about before saying no?
AO: That’s it. I was the principal organizer in that struggle. And I did think about it. I was very
tempted. It appealed to a side of me that wasn’t totally gone. I’d love to get into a powerful
position. I’d love to design the house I’m going to live in. I love the idea of my kids being
guaranteed certain things. There’s a part of me -- it’s not a big part of me, but I was surprised to
find that it was still a part of me -- that wanted all that shit. And if it’s a part of me, with my
politics and background, then it’s a bigger part of a lot of other people. I could see that my real
self-interest was with the people in my community, that was where love and affection come
from, but it was tempting.
Human nature and “enlightened selfishness”
RJ: Let me push this a bit. There are two different paths to go down here. One is to say to
people, “Listen, I understand that you want all these material things, but if you put aside that
greed there is something in the long run that will serve you better.” Or you could say, “I know
you want these things, but you have to train yourself not to want them because they aren’t of any
real value.” Which is politically more effective and more realistic?
AO: I recognize that people want these things, and I’m saying there is something else that is
even more valuable. You don’t have to get rid of the instinct for material things to do this. You
begin to practice, to learn that it’s more rewarding to pursue a path that brings real love and
affection. Everybody needs love. Everybody needs affection. Everybody needs validation. It’s a
central problem of human life, and very few people really get those things.
RJ: I’m not sure I agree. Let me tell you what motivated the question. Someone might say, “I’d
really like a fancy car, but I’m going to commit my life to activism and I know I’m never going
to get that kind of car.” But I never wanted a big car in the first place. I don’t mean that I live
like a pauper. I make more money than I need. I eat regularly and well, and I have an apartment
to myself. I’m incredibly privileged. But I live in the same little apartment that I’ve lived in for
10 years, and people who come to visit often say, “You can afford it now, so why don’t you buy
a house?” The truth is that I don’t want a house. I never wanted a house. I feel like my one-
bedroom apartment is too big.
My point is, as long as people want the goodies, the perks of affluence, for most the temptation
will be too great. Should we be challenging people to rethink the value of those things, not only
in relation to other choices but in some more fundamental way? Is the politics of reducing
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consumption not just about being ecologically more responsible, but about creating a way of life
that is more likely to sustain people in radical political activity, making it more likely they’ll
resist the goodies, because they see that the goodies don’t mean much?
AO: You see, we come from different places. I don’t know where you come from, but I grew up
in the slums...
RJ: I didn’t grow up rich. It was lower middle class when I was young, and eventually middle
class. But I understand your point: It’s easy to not want lots of things when you’ve never really
been deprived of the basics of life. And I’ve certainly never gone hungry or been homeless, or
been threatened with anything like that.
AO: I lived my youth in a place that didn’t have hot running water, didn’t have electricity. Radio
had been invented, but we didn’t even have a Victrola. I lived in an environment in which we
weren’t destitute, but we sure didn’t have a lot of money. I lucked out by becoming a leftist,
because it opened up another path that wasn’t about money. So when I faced that bribe, I
discovered there was a part of me that wanted the money, but luckily there was something else I
wanted more of, something I had learned about through leftist politics. And I can articulate that
now, even if I couldn’t always: The only thing in human life you can give away and not be left
with less is love and affection. It’s simple, but not everyone understands this. If I give you a little
of my money, I have a little less. If I give you a lot of my money, I have much less. That’s true
of many other material things I can give you. But if I give you love and affection, I don’t have
less, I have more. It’s the only thing in human relations that is guaranteed to grow like that. I’ve
learned that the hard way, and I still have, even at this rate, things to learn about it. But that’s at
the center of what I try to teach activists -- the importance of the role of love.
RJ: That sounds a lot like therapeutic talk.
AO: I don’t care what the fuck it sounds like, it’s true. What should we value more than material
comfort? Love and affection, respect and validation. I’m lucky because I’m bathed in it all the
time, as a result of my political activism. And it’s one of the big motivations for what I do. It’s
one of the things that keeps me going, even though my life these days is dominated by pain, very
often physical agony, because of the spinal surgeries. I spend most of my day here in this chair,
reading or on the phone, sometimes watching a movie, because I can sit in this chair in a way
that relieves some of my pain a little bit. This would be impossible if I didn’t have what I’m
talking about, that love. Without it, I’d be just a lonely old man in pain, suffering like most. And
I’d be worrying about my pain medication, which alone is $600 a month, and insurance and all
that shit. But I’m not. I have an incredible old age. Nobody I know at my age has this kind of
life. I can’t think of anything that’s more important to a human being than having that. No other
form of success can match that.
When I used to talk at schools, I would tell kids that I’m richer than Bill Gates. It stops the
audience because they don’t at first know what I mean. I say, “Bill Gates is not stupid. He looks
in the mirror and he sees what we all see: A nerd. And when he gets affection and love, he can’t
help but wonder why he’s getting it.” I don’t have that problem. I certainly don’t get attention
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because of my physical appearance. I have no money or jobs to offer anyone. All I have to give
people is a connection to activism.
RJ: That’s great. I understand the appeal of your life, of what you have. But I’m back to my
question: Will that sustain most people, or do the comforts of an affluent society obscure their
ability to see that? It’s pretty obvious that one of the reasons capitalism can continue at all is
because it plays to that instinct in people. It’s based on a certain conception of human nature that
says we’re all, in the end, greedy in the material sense.
AO: In some ways, that’s right, of course. I don’t believe in a perfectibility of human beings. I
believe a lot can be done to make life different, to change the way we relate to each other. But I
don’t think we’ll ever eliminate greed. It’s part of being an animal. That force cannot be totally
eliminated from human life. But the other side of it is they can never totally silence certain other
forces in life, other parts of our nature. There will always be also in the human community --
sometimes on a larger scale and sometimes on a smaller scale -- a deep-seated resistance to greed
as the dominant feature of life. Even without being political, people live that way, just out of
being loving people.
I’ll give you a wonderful example. About two years ago, a dozen or more miners were buried
underground, in an accident in Pennsylvania in a coal mine. And that incident revealed the
incredible strengths and weaknesses of different ways of living. On the one hand, that accident
was avoidable, and the only reason it took place is that the owners of the mine were greedy,
period. We have to abolish that kind of ownership. The other side of it is, which was totally
missed, not only by the press but by much of the left, was that it also exposed some of the most
wonderful qualities of human beings. Every single guy who worked on that mine and everyone
on that shift volunteered to go down to help those guys out. So the press was talking about the
enormous technological success of drilling with such accuracy and such shit. But the real point
was that it was a marvelous story to explore what it is to be a human being, because to me that
incident represented the finest and the lowest.
RJ: So, if those forces are always going to be in conflict, how should those of us who want a
more just world with less suffering try to present this to people? How should we think about
greed?
AO: I think we need to talk about what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, “enlightened
selfishness.” Selfishness, in the capitalist sense, will play a negative role in human life in our
kind of culture. People may buy the big house and get the big car, and even think of themselves
as happy, but there’s a big vacuum in them. You don’t overcome loneliness, human loneliness,
by accumulating.
But at the same time, in some sense everything I do is selfish. The Peace Mobile -- totally
selfish. I’ve never engaged in any political activity in my life that didn’t turn out to be highly
rewarding. And the only one that really could have cost me my life was the Spanish Civil War,
and occasionally maybe in Mississippi and Nicaragua. But the risks involved in that were more
than counterbalanced -- because I happened to be one of the survivors, of course -- by the
benefits I derived.
To be successful as an activist, you have to be able to teach people -- not only verbally but by
example -- that it’s a good way to live. It is not martyrdom. It is not just sacrifice. I’m involved
in the highest paid profession in the world -- social activism. Take this little exchange right now
between you and me. What does that mean to me as a person? Okay, it means that you, an
intelligent human being that’s got a fairly decent life, finds it of value to give up a piece of that
life to fly to Seattle to learn something, hopefully, from me. You can’t even attach material value
to that -- it’s enormous. To me, it’s very pleasant to know that somebody -- and somebody I have
a fair respect for -- thinks they have something to learn from me. It’s a marvelous feeling, and
it’s another example of what I’m talking about.