I have often been asked in recent days if there is any connection between my objection to the military research of the NAS [National Academy of Sciences] and to Chagnon’s election. There is indeed a strong anthropological connection, insofar as the one and the other would impose cognate versions of bourgeois individualism, taken as given and natural, on the rest of humanity.

On the basis of their common assumption of an avaricious human animal, intent on maximizing his own being at the cost of whom it may concern – economically, politically, and/or genetically – the social and biological proponents of this native Western folklore have been feeding off each other since the seventeenth century. If the developing science of economics socialized the contentious self-pleaser of the Hobbesian state of nature, Darwin in turn biologized the fellow, upon which the social Darwinists returned him to society, at least until the sociobiologists redefined his self-interest as reproductive success. Indeed, capitalizing (pun intended) on the peculiar Western category of ‘inheritance’ – peculiar for its conflation of the transmission of wealth to offspring with the transmission of genes – the social Darwinian notion of the competitive accumulation of wealth could virtually become synonymous with the sociobiologists’ doctrine of differential reproduction. Thus William Graham Sumner (1883: 73): "The relation of parents and children is the only case of sacrifice in Nature….The parents…hand down to their children the return for all which they had themselves inherited from their ancestors. They ought to hand down the inheritance with increase. It is by this relation that the human race keeps up a constantly advancing contest with Nature. The penalty of ceasing an aggressive behaviour toward the hardships of life on the part of Mankind is, that we go backward."

Actually, the Western notion of an avaricious human nature underlying and subverting human culture is at least as old as certain Greek sophist arguments of the fifth century BC. The same sense of the human condition got a bad name as the Original Sin of Christianity. But where in Augustine’s influential reading, Adam’s sin condemned men to become slaves to the desires of their flesh, recent centuries of capitalist development have progressively turned around the moral value of material self-interest until, in the modern neo-liberal view, it became the best thing both for the individual and the wealth of the nation. Indeed, it became freedom itself, this right to satisfy one-self unhampered by governmental constraint – and thereby the grand mission of American global policy, military and otherwise.

Commenting on Donald Rumsfeld’s notorious ‘stuff happens’ in response to the looting that followed upon the US conquest of Iraq, George Packer (2005: 136-37) observed that it implied a whole philosophy of the liberation of human nature from an oppressive political regime. Rumsfeld, he said, saw in such anarchy the beginnings of democracy. For the US Secretary of Defense, ‘Freedom existed in divinely endowed human nature, not in manmade institutions and laws’. People everywhere want to be free to seize the main chance. If only the innate human desire to maximize the self could be relieved of its local political and cultural idiosyncrasies, as by applying the kind of force anyone can understand, then the others ‘will become happy and good, just like us’ (Sahlins 2008: 42). Not that this mission of making the world safe for self interest was born yesterday. Recall the memorable line from the classic film about the Vietnam War, Full metal jacket: ‘Inside every Gook there’s an American waiting to come out’. – Marshall Sahlins, The National Academy of Sciences: Goodbye to all that