Remarking that rational-choice theorists (he called them English psychologists) claimed that all human behavior was motivated by rational self-interest, Nietzsche asked what motivated them to make this claim. His answer was not rational self-interest, of course, but rather a desire to make all other human beings seem to be as insipid and colorless as they, the rational-choice theorists, knew themselves to be. The fundamental inadequacy of the rational self-interest postulate, which assumes that all human beings naturally maximize utility, can be exposed most “economically” by drawing attention to four empirical facts about the human mind: human desires are unstable and contradictory (we often want and do not want the same thing at the same time); human beliefs about the world are unstable and often mutually inconsistent; desires irrationally shape beliefs (wishful thinking, fearful thinking); and beliefs irrationally shape desires (we often cease desiring what we are taught to believe is unobtainable). Taken together, these four components of motivation explain human behavior more straightforwardly than convoluted fantasies about the prisoner’s dilemma or attempts to reconcile the self-destructiveness of observed behavior with the empirically implausible hypothesis that human beings are naturally oriented toward benefiting themselves.