I have collegues who care about their work quality, and the impact their work has in their colleuges work. In short, they care about more than just a pay check and increasing that pay check. Like in non-selfcentered egomaniacs.

But the main reason they are there is someone paid them to be there. Of course humans like to do good, so why not do good while getting paid, but the glue for the whole system is individualism, that is what makes all the workers go to work every day so it is what keeps them together. Remove the pay and all the workers scatters and move to different places in almost every case.

Or in other words, that is an individualistic organization.

> care about their work quality, and the impact their work has in their colleuges work

Yeah, they care about their own ideals, not the organization itself. They can care about their coworkers, but they don't care about Wallmarts bottomline.

So as you see, this individualistic organization can still draw from the power of human collectivist needs, so you get the best of both worlds, you get the collectivist goodness at small scale and the greed that glues together them and make them power through even when they are too tired to care about the collective.

What, no!

In any system people have to work to live: food, housing and such cost money. Doing "good" has nithing to do with it, and I never said that. The question is, do you care about more than the monthly pay check for something you pass most of your day doing or not?

What keeps the workers showing up to work is the need to live. What keeps them at a particular place is a myriad of things. Individualism is not part of that.

And why do you go immediately to "remove the pay"? There is quite some territory between working for free and not valueing a sufficient salary above all else.

Funny so, how everybody working in a sector withbstrong labour unions is basically making more, for less hours, on average than those without them. Seems individualism is a great way to devide and conquer for people holding all the power, because once peoole are convinced individualism is better than cooperation, they voluntarily devide themselves.

> What keeps the workers showing up to work is the need to live. What keeps them at a particular place is a myriad of things. Individualism is not part of that.

Lets say an equivalent company with similar culture and people offered twice the salary, how many would say no? People saying yes in that situation are not there for the collective, they are there for their own sake first and foremost. The collective is an afterthought since they abandon it the instant a better opportunity appears.

I think it's more comparable to say "You have colleagues that would continue to work even if they got a better paying job offer?". A purely individualistic mindset would take whatever gets them more money for less hours. Someone staying despite that must have some sort of collectivist mindset that is non-financial qualities of life. Be it the company, the peers, the problem space, etc.

Some people should really read up on Pawlow's pyramid. Money isn't everything...

I didn't say they only cared about money, but that they stayed for their own reasons and not for the sake of the company. If they find the work at one place less demanding they might take that instead, but that is an individualistic reason as well.

You've made the rookie mistake of reducing the concept of self-interest to anything somebody does because they want to, and thus making egoism tautologically true.

You can convince people that radically different things are in their self-interest, from joining hands and singing Kumbaya to Genocide.

The notion of self-interest (or I guess in your case individualism, which is even shakier) is an empty vessel you can fill with nearly anything.

> You've made the rookie mistake of reducing the concept of self-interest to anything somebody does because they want to, and thus making egoism tautologically true.

No, that isn't the same thing. A collectivist would do things he hates and he doesn't believe in personally because the collective wants him to do it. He would sacrifice himself because the collective told him to. There are many examples of societies and organizations that worked that way, such societies are collective societies.

Military is the most common example, they are often run as a collectivist organization, most soldiers aren't there because they want to or they believe in the war, they are there because they support their country or they were forced to support their country against their will by authoritarian collectivism. And they wouldn't go and support their other country if they were paid more since they are there just to support their country, those are mercenaries.

Our capitalist societies aren't like that at all, we are so individualist that people like you don't even understand what it means to not be individualist. The closest to collectivism in USA wouldn't be corporations, but national anthems, school children saying the pledge, religion etc.

Maybe I'm not disagreeing with you at all, I'm just making the orthogonal point that individualism is very different than self-interest. I believe that other than basic human needs, most desires more complicated than that are in large part socially determined. Individualistic societies (as you describe them) inculcate individualistic desires into people and the health of a society is determined by how effectively it instills prosocial behaviors in its populace. American individualism is actually a collectivist enterprise!

So something like the stock market, as the engine of American capitalism, only works if everybody in your society believes that it is worth taking risks in order to possibly get a huge windfall. But is that really in people's self-interest? Maybe what one would interpret as some kind of natural individual desire is actually a particularly American level of risk tolerance that has been inculcated because it has led to a lot of collective success.