THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS

We are all selfish…there I said it.

But before this statement has the effect of rubbing the self-righteous part of you the wrong way, please do bear with me and read this through, albeit without any expectations of pacification.

What I have come to realize (the statement above), over the years is now so obvious that the fact that it took me years to realize it, has a moderately self deprecating effect. In retrospect, the very fact that the process of realization was marred with instances of definite frustration and shock at the selfish nature of those all around seems as humorous as it does naive.

Anyways, back to what I was saying…we (me, you and everyone around us) are intrinsically selfish beings. That’s how God created us, and not just us, but every other living species around us.

From the very moment that we are born, to the time that we die, pretty much anything and everything we do is to serve our self interests. While the spectrum of motivations underlying the self interests continues to broaden as we grow older, the common thread which conjoins all our acts and omissions continues to remain the same.

Any and every action, from the time we are born, of eating, drinking, defecating, crying, playing, and even breathing the air around us is a self serving action. As we grow older, we ‘broaden horizons’…we read, we write, we socialize, we make friends, we work, we travel, we indulge in material possessions and spiritual exercises…everything in self interest.

We find someone we love and care about, and get married…even that is selfish, for we seek to fulfil our need for companionship and our need to love and be loved. We compromise in love, we sacrifice immediate self interests, only to preserve our larger interests in maintaining the relationship for our purposes.

Probably the only act that humans commit their entire life, which has some semblance of selflessness though not entirely, is parenting. And here I distinguish between parenthood and parenting. Anyone, even an animal, can become a parent, but ‘good parenting’ is a totally different class of acts altogether. You may say that going by the foregoing logic, even parenting is done to satisfy one’s need to shower affection or fit into the social fabric, but it’s not as simple as that. For there is one thing certain in life…no child will ever love its parents as much as the parents love the child. On the contrary, with the increasing levels of moral and cultural degradation, children increasingly tend to desert their parents, forget all that the parents have done for them, or just not care after they become independent. Yet, a good parent still cares and loves selflessly, knowing full well that the child will ultimately belie parent’s expectations of reciprocity. That is probably the only selfless act that I can think of.

If you’ve read so far, the thought may have crossed your mind about the fallacious nature of the title of this article and what exactly is the point of this moralistic discourse.

Here is the point…

God made all beings selfish, but we humans made ourselves hypocrites.

Since time immemorial we have, in the spirit of denial and hypocrisy, juxtaposed over the basic reality of selfishness, layers of societal, moral and religious norms, which have inevitably had the effect of berating selfishness and aggrandizing selflessness and philanthropy.

From the religious texts which glorify the Gods for acts of self sacrifice and self destruction for the betterment of others to the taboo created around acts of selfishness and materialism by philosophical and moral thinkers, selfishness has become a vice of the devil. We are oriented from the very beginning to aspire to a higher standard than those of animals…think of others…do noble deeds and just not be SELFISH.

Well, like I said, everything we do is selfish. But most of us couple that with hypocrisy insofar as we choose to deny our selfishness and take the moral high ground of self sacrifice. The best and most extreme example of this being the so called religious saints and gurus.

We are perpetually engaged in justifying our actions as being anything other than selfish and when we see anyone around us act for their self interest, we feel victimized and flabbergasted. We impose on others idealistic standards which are best left to Gods and mythological characters, while we continue to delve in a gluttony of selfishness.

We show that we care and love our friends and families when the truth is that when it would really come down to the wire and it would be a trade-off between our self interest and theirs, all of us would make the obvious and unspeakable choice.

We play the pretence of being the good child, the loving spouse, the always there friend, the dedicated follower and even the philanthropist…while the stark reality is that all of these are again done by us to feed our selfish motives of psychological and social fulfilment.

Probably the degree of selfishness varies with person to person, but the simple test of this also is to see people’s actions rather than their words. Look around you…you will see plenty of people who will say that they care for you or that they will always be there…but see who has actually walked the walk rather than talked the talk…and even more importantly when it has come to a conflict between their self interests and yours, what path they have chosen.

But even more importantly, apply the same test to yourselves…introspect…what have you done/not done for others…where have you put your self-interests before that of others…and how many times you have pretended to be noble and selfless…this will tell you how selfish and hypocritical you have been. If not generally, everyone has been a hypocrite towards someone or the other in their life and that’s disgusting.

We all are selfish…that’s fine…let’s not  be hypocrites by pretending to be otherwise…or pretending to care about the environment…or pretending to ‘be there’…or making noble yet false statements and assurances. If you really wish to be selfless or noble, let your actions do the talking, otherwise just shut up and be SELFISH as God meant you to be.