What the author is talking about is not even “allowing people to walk all over us.” It is laying out in front of them and forcing them to go out of their way not to step on us. I would not call it “nice” behavior, myself. Although it is almost always entirely well-meant, it actually makes life more difficult for people who really are “merely nice,” because they get the work of watching out for needs that only we really know.
YES!
Not necessarily, helping the people you care about is perfectly consistent with Objectivism.
I read the essay. Rand has very little influence on this culture which is primarily enmeshed in a blue-pilled, altruistic, Leftist frame. She is the antithesis of those awful things and is consequently despised by the American Left. To lump her in the Culture of Death is ridiculous, especially since her ethics are based on the value of life.
What is wrong about concern for my interests (the definition of selfishness)?
You seem to think that my quest for happiness comes at the expense of others. You are wrong. I have no desire to interact with other people except insofar as they offer value to my life.
The problem is that they were raised and still continue to believe that putting other people’s interests ahead of their own should make them happy and give them want they want. Of course this is doomed to fail which in turn leads to frustration. Since a genuine nice guy apparently does stuff with no expectations, he is not going to get anywhere either. Action without a goal is fruitless. So given the options, be a nice guy with no expectations, or be a nice guy with expectations and be told you are an awful person, a third option is necessary. Relentlessly pursue your rational self interest and have your own expectations. You can be the shoulder to cry on and be told that you will make great husband material one day, or you can be the one gets the action.
So long as your philosophy accepts that we may receive in giving, no problem. But focussing on “your happiness” is a limited statement of a life philosophy because it says nothing about our actions or beliefs about what brings happiness. Some believe a self-centered, selfish and hedonistic life will bring them happiness, so they too may espouse the same philosophy but adopt an entirely different attitude to their fellow man.
When we speak of “selfishness”, it is normally reflective of one’s disinterest in the needs of others moreso than one’s attention to the needs of self.
I agree with this, I think a lot of “nice” guys are actually really passive aggressive and manipulative.
Yeah, guys who say this often confuse “nice guy” with “dweeb.”
Of course not, few people are that blunt. The term is ‘exciting’. They rationalize it like this, “He’s so tall, and handsome as hell. He’s so bad but he does it so well.”. Ever since the rise of both women in the workforce and the birth of the modern welfare state, being dependable, supportive provider material was never going to be enough for the vast majority of women. Their need for beta bucks was addressed, now they had complete freedom to focus on the alpha tingles.
The nice guy is weak because he has been intentionally raised with cooperativeness and not competition. He has never been taught the values of strength and stoicism. The joy of conquest is foreign to him. He is told to let his emotions out, and be nice, be cooperative, and worst of all, that people ought to value him for who he is rather than what he does.
Plus, it doesn’t even mean for wolves what the manosphere guys says it does.
In my experience, that is almost never the case, at least not in a conscious way.
We’re humans, not animals. When we behave as animals, however, we absolutely are pack animals, with social pecking orders and animal politics. All of the great apes are.
Angry protests of “Women want bad boys” can be pretty reliably translated to “Women don’t want ME!”
The manosphere alphabet soup is a ‘Sexual Market Value’ measure.Plus, it doesn’t even mean for wolves what the manosphere guys says it does.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pack_(canine
“Wolves show deference to the alpha pair in their pack by allowing them to be the first to eat and, usually, the only pair to reproduce.”
Note that it’s an alpha pair, and that the mom and dad wolf are dominant within their family group to their former cubs–a not unfamiliar pattern.
That’s just Wikipedia, but I am on much surer ground talking about primates. As I recall from my college anthropology class (which had a lot of material about non-human primate culture), it’s a feature of life among some primates that while one male (the silver back among gorillas) attempts to monopolize all of the females in the group, there’s a lot of sneaking around by females to mate with lower status males.
This suggests that the manosphere guys have really botched the primate analogy–they envision human society as consisting of of pairs where the human females are all sneaking off to cheat on their beta mates with the dominant male, but by analogy with gorillas, it would be the other way around–a polygynous society where the females are all officially tied to the dominant male, but sneak off to cheat with the lower-status betas.
OK, fair enough in a way. Sometimes “nice guy” is the male equivalent of the woman described as having a “nice personality.” It sometimes does imply the person’s resume is a bit short on excitement, not a lot to say good or bad in other areas. It can mean someone who is in too much of a hurry to agree with you all of the time or to put the burden of decision-making on to you, even when you don’t want it all to yourself.