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We could return to our medieval merchant with his hospital and ask: was he behaving egoistically or altruistically? And the answer must be: yes.

Yes, he was gaining some personal satisfaction. Yes, he was doing it by giving away vast amounts of wealth to the poor. We routinely seek personal satisfaction through generosity, kindness, sharing. There is no contradiction, because humans are not one-dimensional robots who have to choose between psychopathic selfishness and Ayn Rand’s caricature of altruism as destructive selflessness.

The tension is purely artificial. If we remove the fictional divide between value and values, between the social and the economic, and recognize them are inseparable parts of the same whole, then we experience no contradiction.

Socialism is not impossible because of some imagined human nature of greed. We do not have socialism today because of violence by the state and the capital class, but also because of stories about ourselves that so many of us have been convinced to believe.

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