Is there a way to uproot selfishness and plant anew a seed of moral virtues instead?
Although I am an agnostic, the runaway selfishness that seems rampant in today’s society, makes me think: In order to survive, one must be selfish & willing to crush anyone or anything that threatens your goal seeking and in such a society, it must surely be impossible to please God if one is not to be trampled to death. However, the social scientist in me sees that selfishness is the natural state (we are born completely unaware of others except as useful means for getting our needs met) and it is a necessary component of survival behavior. And then just to muddy the waters further, perhaps in the years since World War II, at least in America, things have been relatively peaceful and easy and the world I grew up in was one in which you could be a good person, good work was rewarded and I fell victim to the illusion that people should take pride in their good character and refuse to sacrifice moral values, etc. etc. It is very interesting to me that those with the very least – those wh
There’s no way to uproot human selfishness. It’s our species’ most enduring trait. What is more, selfishness isn’t always bad. It makes us concerned about our own safety, it keeps other people from walking all over us, and our economy would collapse without it. Conversely, selflessness is not always good. People who put selflessness on a pedestal forget how much self-sacrifice went into rise of the Third Reich, to say nothing of Stalinist Russia. Compassion is the virtue we need. Most people have compassion for themselves. More people need compassion for others. To promote compassion for others, we should model compassion for our children and give time or money to organizations whose missions are humanitarian. Some political reforms, e.g. opposition to pre-emptive war and capital punishment, are also needed.
It is not self’s needs that form the selfish phenomena, it is the insecurities of a tortured babyhood/childhood. When children are trained that they are in competition for their food and other goods, that hopefulness and predictability is illusion rather than parent determinant, that spirituality can only be a mystery, that shame and guilt are only punitive functions of self against self, hording as a way to cling to a sense of security and distrust for others becomes the sole understanding for human nature. ”Another peculiar characteristic of the human organism when it is dominated by a certain need is that the whole philosophy of the future tends also to change. For our chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be defined very simply as a place where there is plenty of food. He tends to think that, if only he is guaranteed food for the rest of his life, he will be perfectly happy and will never want anything more. Life itself tends to be defined in terms of eating. Anything e
