Duh

I basically work from the belief that people are rational creatures, driven by their self-interest and acting accordingly. That needn't be a bad thing. For example, it could be that Mother Theresa served her self-interest by helping the poor. That made her happy, made her feel good, and so that's what she did. If I were an economist, I would speak of this in terms of maximizing my utility. But I am not an economist, so I just call it self-interest.

And let me say again that I believe everybody does this. It provides structure to the world, the fact that you can count on people to be rational and self-interested. It is a basic human assumption that people want to live. That's why terrorism is so scary: terrorists don't care if they live and thus are willing to take action that the rest of us will not undertake. And now I am starting to wonder whether Kim Jung-Il of North Korea is rational in the traditional sense. Because if he's not we've got ourselves some serious, serious trouble.

I like to assume that elected government officials are actually worrying about this as well. But I sometimes fear that assumption is irrational.