You know...it's funny that the Depeche Mode song in fact does NOT talk about self-interest as the guiding principle for all people in general. It moreso talks about how our *DIFFERENCES* are the driving force for our conflicts and about how we'd rather not learn to be different (and change or understand another point of view) but how we'd rather remove offending different things, including other people, from our lives for the sake of our personal comfort or validity of our beliefs (like say...thinking self-interest is the guiding force for all people).
People are people not because of self-interest, like this article seems to make a beautiful leap of logic. People are people because, in spite of all our cultural differences, what seems to be universal is that we, not on an individual level necessarily but on a mass group level, are intolerant of other people different from us.
But yeah sure - I guess everyone likes to jump onto the 'people are shit' bandwagon around these parts and ignore the fact that self-interest is primarily propagated only in western cultures rather than say...certain eastern based ones where you have millions of people that have been taught to believe that self sacrifice is worth far more.
People can exist just fine wether or not they are taught nothing but self-interest or self-sacrifice, even to the point where either extreme becomes harmful. But people will always be people because, the bigger the number of our crowds, the more intolerant we become of our collective cultural differences. A good case in point is how the Escapist community as a whole has grown more and more intolerant the more popular and numerous it has become, up to the point where in many ways it has become blind to this intolerance of outside opinions and actions. The same goes for game developers with mostly respectable reputations too, like Bioware and Valve. I like both of them, but I cannot stand their communities - primarily because they have grown completely intolerant to all other alternatives.
Funnily enough this still translates to Valve's move. As the ones they percieve to be dicks (wether they actually are such or not) slowly stop paying and playing, their community will grow more and more insular and hence, once again...intolerant of all other alternatives...and thus their 'ideal customers' will ultimately, and on the whole, grow to be dicks themselves. Perhaps elitist dicks...but dicks nonetheless.
It would instead be a lot better to be moreso subtle than just slapping on extra monetary costs, but eh...I guess this time Valve decided not to be subtle. Their loss.
That's ultimately what the song refers to for me moreso than the overtly-simplified 'people are shit' version. But believe what you will I guess.
