“Other than pleasure-seeking and consumerism, it seems that the only fruit of our social development is a cancerous overgrowth of "the rational economic man": maximize personal gain, and that's all.”

— Liu Xiaobo

The Spiritual Landscape of the Urban Young in Post-Totalitarian China" (2004)
No Enemies, No Hate: Selected Essays and Poems

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Liu Xiaobo 18

Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human right… 1955–2017

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“Central to this book is the further assumption that man is a rational utility maximizer in all areas of life, not just in his “economic” affairs, that is, not only when engaged in buying and selling in explicit markets. This idea goes back to jeremy Bentahm in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but received little attention from economists until the work of Gary Becker in th 1950s and 1960s.
The concept of man as a rational maximizer implies that people respond to incentives.(…) From this proposition derive the three fundamental principles of economics.”

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“We believe in peace and peaceful development, not only for ourselves but for people all over the world. Our main preoccupation is with economic and social development at home and peace and friendship abroad.”

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“As conceived in this book, economics is the science of rational choice in a world─our world─in which resources are limited in relation to human wants. The task of economics, so defined, is to explore the implications of assuming that man is a rational maximizer of his ends in life, his satisfactions─what we shall call his “self-interest.” Rational maximization should not be confused with conscious calculation. Economics is not a thoery about consciousness. Behavior is rational when it conforms to the model of rational choice, whatever the state of mind of the chooser.(…) Nor is perfect rationality assumed; rational-choice thoery allows us to assume that rationality is “bounded” because of human cognitive limitations, although another way to think of those limitations is as costs of absorbing and using information.”

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“All rational action is economic. All economic activity is rational action. All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.”

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“By the study of their biographies, we receive each man as a guest into our minds, and we seem to understand their character as the result of a personal acquaintance, because we have obtained from their acts the best and most important means of forming an opinion about them. "What greater pleasure could'st thou gain than this?"”

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“The development of rational thought actually seems to have impeded man's appreciation for the significance of time.”

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Context: The development of rational thought actually seems to have impeded man's appreciation for the significance of time.... Belief that the ultimate reality is timeless is deeply rooted in human thinking, and the origin of rational investigation of the world was the search for permanent factors that lie behind the ever-changing pattern of events.<!--p.22

“The theory which follows is entirely based on a calculus of pleasure and pain; and the object of economics is to maximize happiness by purchasing pleasure, as it were, at the lowest cost of pain.”

William Stanley Jevons The Theory of Political Economy

Source: The Theory of Political Economy (1871), Chapter I, Introduction, p. 51.

“Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society.”

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“Other than pleasure-seeking and consumerism, it seems that the only fruit of our social development is a cancerous overgrowth of "the rational economic man": maximize personal gain, and that's all.”

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Liu Xiaobo 18

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