Fatal Errors of today’s prevalent Philosophies 2

Selfishness is immoral and unethical. Today, this is preached virtually everywhere. You hear it at Church, you are taught about it by your parents, you see it in the movies, spoken directly by its heroes or embedded deeply into their lines, you read about it in books, and you are told so by the radio commentators. It is so deeply rooted into our culture that it is not even brought into question – it is automatically assumed that everyone agrees with it. Even the world’s most selfish people – and here I expect to hear a near unanimous approval when I say that it’s the businessmen (except from the businessmen themselves, and I salute the exceptions) – will preach against selfishness out of passionate conviction that selflessness and sacrifice is the way to go. It is, however, imperative to change this deeply rooted conviction by speaking the words that need to be spoken. Selfishness is moral. Selfishness is ethical.

Let’s see what we are taught about selfishness. I was raised as Christian and so I had my share of religious education back when I was a kid. What do preachers who give religious education tell kids? Kid’s stories. One of the stories went thus: A kid buys himself a bag of candies. He is then approached by his friends and is asked to share some of the candies. However, the kid is then called selfish because he decides not to share and keep all the candies for himself. His friends abandon him for his “selfishness” and he is left all alone with his candies. He eats them all and then decides to play with his friends. However, his former friends don’t want him any more, because he would not share the candy with them. And so the kid is all alone. This is a story carefully crafted for the ears of the children. It is an attack at something that’s called “selfishness” in the story. It doesn’t really matter what selfishness really is; what matters is that it has been denounced. But, a clever ruse has been played against the children who listen to the story – much too clever to be noticed by young children, and is rarely, if ever, questioned by adults. From the above story, what do children learn about selfishness? They learn that selfishness means keeping everything for oneself. They learn that it is the opposite of sharing. However, this is incorrect. While the word – selfishness – remained the same, it’s meaning has been twisted. A selfish man is not the man who claims everything as his own and keeps them for himself. A selfish man is the man who claims as his own the things he’s earned and these things he keeps for his own sake. I’m not sure whether you understand the subtle difference between “keeps [...] for himself” and “keeps for his own sake”, so I shall clarify. The former means what you probably already know – to keep for the sole purpose of consuming on one’s own, without sharing with others. But the latter means to keep in order to improve one’s life, by means of any action that was done with the use of the thing that was kept.

There are many ways in which one man can improve his life, and also many ways do make it worse. One may wish to improve his social life. This he could do by meeting new people, doing someone he already knows small favors, taking them out for a drink, merely talking to them in a friendly manner, etc. All of these actions can have profoundly selfish motives, as great pleasure in life can be derived from having close friends. Take the kid from the story – it is the perfect example of this. The kid is left without friends in the end, and has nobody to play with. He is sad because of that, because he is denied the pleasure of playing a game with his friends. To this kid, and undoubtedly to most of the children in the world, a game with their friends is a high value. However, kids aren’t always clear about what they want more, but as adults we can tell that a little candy is by far a lesser value.

What is selfishness in regard to values? Selfishness is a a pursuit of a higher value. Given a choice, a selfish person would choose that which is more valuable to him, and remember, values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep. A higher value is the one which one desires or needs more than some other. A selfish person will, thus, take into account if keeping a value would mean the loss of another value, because this affects his “balance” in the end. If keeping a lesser value (such as candy) means the loss of a greater value (friends), then a selfish person chooses friends, and shares the candy. Therefore, the kid from the story was in fact selfless, because his actions resulted in a loss of value (whereas a selfish one acts so as to gain value). Of course, children cannot understand these kinds of implications, so if a kid from the story was truly selfish, then he woud eventually learn his mistake and apologize to his friends, and perhaps get some candy to share with them next time. That’s in fact, how I would end the story if I was to explain “selfishness” to anyone.

Note that I’m not here inverting our moral code. I’m just being consistent. If selfishness means pursuing a higher value, then a selfish person is the one I described and that’s so by mere implication. But you might say, that we don’t need to change terms now, that we’re used to saying that the person I described here is selfless, and that it’s all just how we decide to call the concept. In fact, that’s not true, because this inversion in terms is today not just a mistake. It is a mistake which is abused by many to scare people into not being consistently selfish, because resurrecting selfishness from the darker pages of our philosophies implies resurrecting pride, individualism, integrity, productivity, etc. as well as redefining courage and other virtues. Certain institutions today are so inherently collectivist that they cannot handle individualism, or even personal freedoms in their true form. For these institutions to work you need to preserve your double standard of living for your sake when you’re left alone, but paying your due to the collective as well. I’m not talking only by Church here; luckily, Church now survives by voluntary donations. This is also about taxes which you pay to the state/country, and that includes people you mainly don’t even know, don’t care about, or even hate. Naturally, with the compromised philosophical background, most people feel like paying their taxes is what makes them citizens of a country. I won’t get into the discussion why that view is incorrect. What I’m appealing to, however, is how far they are willing to go. Today, for an average businessman in Croatia, nearly 80% of the money he’s earned ends up as tax, as paid health care, pensions, etc. Now a new tax has been proposed, and many don’t seem to mind. Slowly the state is taking more and more money from its citizens claiming it’s their duty to give it to them. To bring back selfishness means to undermine that system; it means to say – no, my “duty” is to myself and my own, and therefore, you need to find other ways to finance yourself; it means to at the very least start criticizing the way the governments invest our money, and ultimately to decide to withdraw that money. The governments can’t have that. They’d rather go with the ethics of duty and selflessness.

To be continued…