The Meaning of Selfishness

I am a selfish person. I am going to try my best to develop and perfect the art of being selfish. I will do this by giving to people in both emotional and material ways. This is not a contradiction, allow me to explain. The dictionary definition of the word selfish, is, "devoted to or caring only for oneself; concerned primarily with one's own interests, benefits, welfare, etc., regardless of others." This definition, however, is flawed. This definition does not describe selfishness, so much as stupidity.

Humans are selfish, in general. This is not a flaw, it is a survival instinct that by redefining its meaning has been turned into a harmful behavior. In our society, being selfish means, for example, taking all the food on the table without letting anyone else eat. However, if you were truly looking out for yourself, this would not be a smart thing to do, because assuming that everyone who was at the table brought some of the food, you would effectively have made it so that next time around, no one will want to bring their food to the meal, thus making your dinner much more meager. It would be in your best interests to eat only what you needed, and if you happened to have extra food, to give that food to someone who didn't have as much, simply because one day you will be the person with the empty plate who will need to rely on another diner for your bread and drink.

This can be applied to relationships as well. If a friend needs someone to lean on, the most selfish thing you can do, the thing that is in your best interests, would be to hold her up and offer her your shoulder, because there will inevitably come a day when life is weighing down on you like a ton of bricks and you will need a hand to keep you up.

In his award winning novel, My Ishmael, Daniel Quinn looks at this concept through the tale of a young girl and a gorilla named Ishmael. The following passage is taken from a chapter in which Ishmael is giving the girl a lecture.

"Of course, when people from your culture look at tribal peoples, they don't see wealth of any kind, they see poverty. This is understandable, since the only kind of wealth they recognize is the kind that can be locked up, and tribal peoples are not much interested in that kind.

"The foremost wealth of tribal people is cradle-to-grave security for each and every member. I can see that you're not exactly stunned by the magnificence of this wealth. It's certainly not impressive or thrilling... There are hundreds of millions of you, however, who live in stark terror of the future because they see no security in it for themselves anywhere.

"To be made obsolete by some new technology, to be laid off as redundant, to lose jobs or whole careers through treachery, favoritism, or bias-- these are just a few of the nightmares which haunt your workers' sleep.

"This is unthinkable in the tribal life... not just because tribal peoples don't have jobs. As surely as any of you, each member of the tribe has a living to make... But there is no way to deprive any member of the tribe the means to live. He or she has those means and that's it. Of course, this doesn't mean that no one ever goes hungry. But the only time anyone goes hungry is when everyone is going hungry. Again, this isn't because tribal people are more selfless and generous and caring-- nothing of the sort.

"In the movies it happens this way. Let's say you've got explorers on an expedition to the North Pole or something. Their ship gets iced in and they can't get back on schedule. So the problem is how to survive... When they're on their last legs and ready to expire, guess what? The bad guy has a secret cache of food that he's been careful not to share with anyone.

"Now the reason this doesn't happen in a tribal situation is that they don't start out with a store of food. They go along and go along and for some reason food gradually gets scarce. There's a drought or a forest fire or something. On day one, everyone's out looking for food and it's slim pickings for everyone. The tribal chief is as hungry as everyone else. Why wouldn't he be, since there's no store that he has first pick at? Everyone's out there scoring as much food as they can and if someone makes a good score, the best thing he can do is to share it with the others, not because he is a nice guy, but because the more people who are on their feet and out there hunting for food, the better off they will be-- including him." (180-181)

It is unreasonable to expect people to act selflessly all the time. When ones frames actions as giving up something, or as thinking of other people before oneself, you have immediately created a Utopian fantasy that will never be achieved. People don't just spend their lives selflessly doing service for others. There is always a selfish motive, even if that motive is as simple as having a clean conscious.

When one starts to look at things such as supporting others, giving, building and interacting in local communities, preserving the land base, halting global warming and the things which cause global warming, as selfish acts, suddenly you cease to be in the realm of feel-good-idealist-lala land, and you start getting a grip on and a foot in reality. And with the state of the world today, reality is the most important place for our race to be.

Works Cited

Quinn, Daniel. "Wealth, Leaver Style" My Ishmael Ed. Claude Anderson. Bantam Books.

New York, New York. 1998. 180-181

"selfish." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 20 Apr. 2007.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/selfish>.