Selfishness

To survive as a species this long, selfishness has been behind everything we do, and I’m not using selfishness as a negative here, because the most good acts that you have ever committed have selfish reason behind them. Would you give to charity if it made you somehow feel terrible? Probably not. You do it because helping someone out makes you feel good inside. See? Selfish, but not evil.

I have heard Dawkins believes we have a selfish gene, but I haven’t read about it too much extent so I can’t comment on how I feel about that. But I will say that without it being a gene itself, I believe that selfishness is so prevalent in us because it’s what has made us prosper as an animal. So what I am explaining is based on my own thoughts, not his.

The very fact that humans working in groups makes them more successful is testament to this. We do it because, if we do, we have a better chance of survival. Again this is not an evil thing, we just take advantage of each others strengths and weaknesses to better the chances of our survival.

A person on their own has a set of strengths and weaknesses. They might be an excellent hunter, but they can’t clean and cook an animal for shit. So they ask someone who is good at that, ‘Hey, if I hunt down a boar and you cook and clean it, you can share it with me’. But then when hunting the boar, it manages to charge him with its tusks and injure his leg. He can’t dress a wound to save his life (pun intended), so he asks the same of someone who knows about medicine, ‘Hey if you fix me up I’ll give you a share of this boar for dinner’. The ‘doctor’ agrees, and together they form a pack, or a community in which every contributes their skills to survive, all because their selfish survival needs beg it of them.

I almost said ‘but more often than not, selfishness is used for evil’, but that’s not true, considering everything we do is for ourselves… Selves… Self… Selfish.

The ironic thing is that the thing that is behind our survival as a species, is most likely going to be the reason we are wiped out.

Whether it be climate change, war, or whatever.