At the end of a BookTV interview of Harry Markopolos, the guy who discovered Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, Markopolos says
No one’s going to care about you like [= as much as] you do.
He meant this as financial advice: Make up your own mind about how to invest your money. Don’t assume someone else has done the necessary thinking.
My self-experimentation led me to the same conclusion, as I wrote here. My self-experimentation uncovered helpful treatments (e.g., how to sleep better) that the experts (in this case, sleep researchers) had missed. I theorized that this was partly because I cared more than they did about the quality of my sleep. I had “the motivation of a person with the problem”; they didn’t.
Or, as Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, who is for me?”
Tell this to our ruling class who seem convinced that those of us in the great unwashed masses cannot be trusted to make our own choices. They will enact policies that nudge, and force, us in directions that are in our best interests.