JohnPV

I agree with you about the television business; at the higher levels it’s all about money and nothing but money. I don’t see, though, how Rather’s stonewalling is bad for business. Why isn’t it at least as likely to drive up ratings?

I agree with chuck that self-interest, even the perception of self-interest, is not the only thing that drives human behavior, although it is certainly one of the most powerful motivators.

I have a friend–a math professor who has done some work with Roger Penrose, he’s nobody’s dummy–who spends all his spare time thinking about the “Environment”. When he starts to talk about it, a certain starry-eyed look comes into his face. Walking with him once we passed some houses in his neighborhood which are being “popped up”, i.e., having a second or third storey added. He became livid. He went on and on for an hour about how horrible this is for the “Environment”. If you let him, he will spend hours telling you how evil it is that people have replaced the grass originally in their lawns, which had four or more species before the house was built, with a monoculture such as Kentucky Blue Grass.

I cannot understand his behavior as any sort of self-interest or even perception of self-interest. Rather, he has decided that the world needs to be a Certain Way. It doesn’t need to be that Certain Way because it is in his self-interest or even in the self-interest of the species; for all I know, he’d love to see the species disappear entirely. No, he has simply decided that this Certain Way is how the world needs to be, don’t ask why. The point for him is that moving the world to that Certain Way gives him meaning in life. Most folks need meaning in life. There are people, and plenty of them, who look out for number one only and seem to be content with that. I imagine this would well describe the top executives at the networks. But for many people there needs to be something else, some sense that their brief run around the track on the third rock mattered somehow. Such people need the feeling that their lives are important, not just from the viewpoint of helping themselves but from some broader viewpoint, whatever that may turn out to be.

For other examples, there are people who collect Barbie dolls for a sense of meaning. They really get into it. There are people who solve the Rubik’s cube in competitions. There are people who run grueling 200 mile marathons. None of that seems like self-interest to me either.

How and when a certain behavior or belief becomes meaningful, becomes the thing to which one dedicates ones life, is an interesting psychological question. It’s clear that many of our fellow citizens, apparently including Dan Rather, have settled on unseating Bush as the most meaningful activity with which they can while away their weary hours. There is a sort of entropy in the process of finding meaning, so that, once one has travelled down a certain “path of meaning” a certain amount, it becomes extremely difficult to pull back and pick a different “path of meaning”.

You may argue that a sense of meaning is a kind of self-interest. That may or may not be, but I would suggest that to view it as such is to miss the point. Life can be viewed through various prisms and picking the appropriate prism can yield enlightenment. Trying to force everything through the self-interest prism will not always yield enlightenment.

Dan Rather doesn’t want to be merely a guy who reads the copy he’s handed. He doesn’t want to be a mere talking head. He wants his life to be important, to be meaningful. If he can control the outcome of one of the most important elections in years, that’s meaning. If this isn’t necessarily in his self-interest, narrowly defined, so be it. It still makes sense.