Rigdon tried to advance in prestige in the Campbellite movement to no avail. That's probably why he needed a "partner". He always viewed himself as the rightful leader of the church. Throughout his life, he continued to attempt to persuade those who still believed in his mission to send him monetary support, and when his sanity became questionable at the end of his life, even threatened those who didn't comply adequately. He was cohorts with Joseph Smith in many of the more questionable monetary activities.
So I don't see how Rigdon wasn't also after prestige and money.
Personally, I think that human beings tend to hide our true motivations even to ourselves. We fool ourselves before we fool others. I shared this on RFM, from Robert Wright's book The Moral Animal:
Page 263,
Chapter 13 Deception and Self-Deception
"What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame; the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly. "
Letter to J. D. Hooker (1848)
Natural selection’s disdain for the principal of truth in advertising is widely evident. Some female fireflies in the genus Photuris mimic the mating flash of females in the genus Photunis and then, having attracted a Photunis male, eat him. Some orchids look quite like female wasps, the better to lure the male wasps that then unwittingly spread pollen. Some harmless snakes have evolved the coloration of poisonous snakes, gaining undeserved respect. Some butterfly pupa bear an uncanny resemblance to a snake’s head – fake scales, fake eyes – and, if bothered, start rattling around menacingly. In short: organisms may present themselves as whatever it is in their genetic interest to seem like.
People appear to be no exception. In the late 1950s and early sixties, the (non-Darwinian) social scientist Erving Goffman made a stir with a book called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which stressed how much time we all spend on stage, playing to one audience or another, striving for effect. But there is a difference between us and many other performers in the animal kingdom. Whereas the female Photuris is, presumably, under no illusion as to its true identity, human beings have a way of getting taken in by their acts. Sometime, Goffman marveled, a person is “sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality.”
What modern Darwinism brings to Goffman’s obsession is, among other things, theory about the function of the confusion: we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better. This hypothesis was tossed out during the mid-1970s by both Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers. In his foreword to Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, Trivers noted Dawkin’s emphasis on the role of deception in animal life and added, in a much-cited passage, that if indeed “deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray – by the subtle signs of self-knowledge – the deception being practiced.” Thus, Trivers ventured, “the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naïve view of mental evolution.”
It should come as no surprise that the study of self-deception makes for murky science. “Awareness” is a region with ill-defined and porous borders. The truth, or certain aspects of it, may float in and out of awareness, or hover on the periphery, present yet not distinct. And even assuming we could confirm that someone is wholly unaware of information relevant to some situation, whether this constitutes self-deception is another question altogether. Is the information somewhere in the mind, blocked from consciousness by a censor designed for that function? Or did the person just fail to take
note of the information in the first place? If so, is that selective perception itself a result of specific evolutionary design for self-deception? Or a more general reflection of the fact that the mind can hold only so much information (and the conscious mind even less)? Such difficulties of analysis are one reason the science Trivers envisioned two decades ago – a rigorous study of self-deception, which might finally yield a clear picture of the unconscious mind – has not arrived.
Still, the intervening years have tended to validate the drift of Dawkin’s and Triver’s and Alexander’s worldview: our accurate depiction of reality – to others, and, sometimes, to ourselves – is not high on natural selection’s list of priorities. The new paradigm helps us map the terrain of human deception and self-deception, if at a low level of resolution.
We’ve already explored one realm of deception; sex. Men and women may mislead each other – and even, in the process, themselves – about the likely endurance of their commitment or about their likely fidelity. There are two other large realms in which the presentation of self, and the perception of others, has great Darwinian consequence: reciprocal altruism and social hierarchy. Here, as with sex, honesty can be a major blunder. In fact, reciprocal altruism and social hierarchy may together be responsible for most of the dishonesty in our species – which, in turn, accounts for a good part of the dishonesty in the animal kingdom. We are far from the only dishonest species, but we are surely the most dishonest, if only because we do the most talking.
>>>>On self deception, justification, and the murkiness of motives
Page 273
Reciprocal altruism brings its own agenda to the presentation of self, and thus to the deception of self. Whereas status hierarchies place a premium on our seeming competent, attractive, strong, smart, etcetera, reciprocal altruism puts its accent on niceness, integrity, fairness. These are the things that make us seem like worthy reciprocal altruists. They make people want to strike up relationships with us. Puffing up our reputations as decent and generous folks can’t hurt, and it often helps.
Richard Alexander, in particular, has stressed the evolutionary importance of moral self-advertisements. In The Biology of Moral Systems he writes that “modern society is filled with myths” about our goodness: “that scientists are humble and devoted truth-seekers; that doctors dedicate their lives to alleviation of suffering; that teachers dedicate their lives to alleviation of suffering; that we are all basically law-abiding, kind, altruistic souls who place everyone’s interests before our own.”
There’s no reason moral self-inflation has to involve self-deception. But there’s little doubt that it can. The unconscious convolutions by which we convince ourselves of our goodness were seen in the laboratory before the theory of reciprocal altruism was around to explain them. In various experiments, subjects have been told to behave cruelly toward someone, to say mean things to him or even deliver what they thought were electric shocks. Afterwards, the subjects tended to derogate their victim, as if to convince themselves that he deserved his mistreatment – although they knew he wasn’t being punished for any wrongdoing and, aside from that, knew only what you can learn about a person by briefly mistreating him in a laboratory setting. But when subjects delivered “shocks” to someone after being told he would get to retaliate by shocking them later, they tended not to derogate him. It is as if the mind were programmed with a simple rule: so long as accounts are settled, no special rationalization is in order; the symmetry of exchange is sufficient defense of your behavior. But if you cheat or abuse another person who doesn’t cheat or abuse you, you should concoct reasons why he deserved it. Either way, you’ll be prepared to defend your behavior if challenged; either way, you’ll be prepared to fight with indignation any allegations that you’re a bad person, or a person unworthy of trust.
Our repertoire of moral excuses is large. Psychologists have found that people justify their failure to help others by minimizing, variously, the person’s plight (“That’s not an assault, it’s a lover’s quarrel”), their own responsibility for the plight, and their own competence to help.
It’s always hard to be sure that people really believe such excuses. But a famous series of experiments shows (in a quite different context) how oblivious the conscious mind can be to its real motivations, and how busily it sets about justifying the products of that motivation.
The experiments were conducted on “split-brain” patients – people who have had the link between the left and right hemispheres cut to stop severe epileptic seizures. The surgery has surprisingly little effect on everyday behavior, but under contrived conditions, strange things can happen. If the word nut is flashed onto the left half of the visual field (which is processed by the right hemisphere), but not onto the right half (processed by the left hemisphere), the subject reports the conscious awareness of the signal; the information never enters the left hemisphere, which in most people controls language and seems to dominate consciousness. Meanwhile, though, the subject’s left hand – controlled by the right hemisphere – will, if allowed to rummage through a box of objects, seize on a nut. The subject reports no awareness of this fact unless allowed to see what his left hand is up to.
When it comes time for the subject to justify his behavior, the left brain passes from professed ignorance into unknowing dishonesty. One example: the command walk is sent to a man’s right brain, and he complies. When asked where he’s going, his left
brain, not privy to the real reason, comes up with another one: he’s going to get a soda, he says, convinced. Another example: a nude image is flashed to the right brain of a woman, who then lets loose an embarrassed laugh. Asked what’s so funny, she gives an answer that’s less racy than the truth.
Michael Gazzaniga, who conducted some of the split-brain experiments, has said that language is merely the “press-agent” for other parts of the mind; it justifies whatever acts they induce, convincing the world that the actor is reasonable, rational, upstanding person. It may be that the realm of consciousness itself is in large part such a press agent – the place where our unconsciously written press releases are infused with the conviction that gives them force. Consciousness cloaks the cold and self-serving logic of the genes in a variety of innocent guises. The Darwinian anthropologist Jerome Barkow has written, “It is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management (rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker.)”
One could go further and suggest that the folk psychology itself is built into our genes. In other word, not only is the feeling that we are “consciously” in control of our behavior an illusion (as is suggested by other neurological experiments as well); it is a purposeful illusion, designed by natural selection to lend conviction to our claims. For centuries people have approached the philosophical debate over free will with the vague but powerful intuition that free will does exist; we (the conscious we) are in charge of our behavior. It is not beyond the pale to suggest that this nontrivial chunk of intellectual history can be ascribed fairly directly to natural selection – that one of the most hallowed of all philosophical positions is essentially an adaptation.