Word: self-interest
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Most American writers would applaud a talented colleague's fat advances, if only out of self-interest: big, highly publicized deals raise the negotiating floor for everyone. But Amis' grab offended the sensibilities of some of his English literary colleagues. One was novelist Julian Barnes, who had a good reason: he's the husband of Kavanagh, Amis' former agent. Another was A.S. Byatt, whose novel Possession was published by Jonathan Cape, who also brought out Amis' previous novels. "I don't see why I should subsidize his greed," said Byatt, "simply because he has a divorce...
...rhetoric now is exactly the same as it was during the Vietnam War-driven by greed and self-interest...
Lerner's vexation is the "narrow self-interest" which he believes pervades America and is the causal force behind all of our social dilemmas. It is such a mind-set, he says, that has fostered the recent burgeoning of anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism. He writes: "These kinds of sicknesses are expressions of the dominant selfishness of American society, and we do not believe they can be fully defeated without addressing the need to shift the dominant discourse from an ethos of selfishness to an ethos of caring...
...incubation of eggs, Cheez-It diets, tenure committees. Most of all, she knows men, women and the distance between them. Most men, she notes, are "competent in groups that mimicked the playground, incompetent in groups that mimicked the family"; many of her women assess love interests in terms of self-interest. Much of the fun of the book, in fact, comes from the way in which a canny student of human nature trains her eye on people who know nothing about any kind of nature...
...quite like American Tabloid-is most safely done to close friends, whose tastes and tolerances are familiar. Where do they stand on wall-to-wall violence? What is their position on over-the-top sleaze and the reduction of nearly all human conduct to the narrow, insistent lust of self-interest? Pushing such stuff to total strangers could get a person arrested...