Selfishness

This is the general theme of what I've noticed lately in my surroundings.  I was at Home of Hope on Sunday and we were talking about how people have just forgotten how the people before them have just suffered so much for certain rights, and people nowadays just don't even notice them.  And I'm really not talking about just political rights, but I'm also talking about religious rights too.  The other day, this guy on  campus was passing out these brochures for free bibles.  All you had to do was send your address to this e-mail and you got a free bible.  To all the citizens of non-Christiandom, this may not matter to you, but the lack of respect I saw was repulsive.  People were taking these brochures, and throwing them away on the ground not five feet away from him.  In America, it's hard to believe that there's places in the world where people would be killed for owning a bible.  And as I'm reflecting on what we discussed yesterday, I'm sort of thinking to myself what kinds of things I have taken for granted?  What sorts of metaphorical brochures have I discarded and stomped on?  

  Since I'm  ignorant of many of my rights (I'm being transparent here), I really can't say.  I mean, I think about the fact that I can drive a car, go to a university, talk on the phone to a male friend, dance freely, worship freely, say that I can't stand the president, etc., etc., the list goes on.  Really, there has to be more.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wonder to what extent selfishness (maybe due to ignorance, but selfishness nonetheless) will go.  I took an ethics course not too long ago and it seemed that the point of the class was to make some sort of direction towards some sort of egoism.  Every theory was refuted, and egoism was just left hanging.  Does that mean that the class presupposed some form of egoism as the only plausible moral theory?  I really wouldn't be surprised.  I think a good portion of the class defended it as the true moral theory, but in my mind I was thinking, do people really believe that they should be the center of their universe?  This certainly explains all the problems of the world.  Acting on emotions and self-satisfaction as the ultimate decision-maker.  It's quite genius really.  And the way Adam Smith just used this inevitable system of humanity to incorporate it into economics is just sensational.  I mean, what better proof do you have than order?  The way our world works is based on this theory of self-interest (and here I'm purposely using the terms self-interest and selfishness interchangeably, because in my mind, the former is just a synonym for the latter.  I know this is where semantics gets into the picture, but when people defend self-interest, I've noticed that they do it when they're trying to justify some sort of system. Like capitalism).  So 'self' then, in some form or the other, is a vital part of our world systems.  And I'm sorry, if you're still trying to defend self-interest by pulling the whole it's-necessary-for-survival bit, then unless you've hit absolute poverty or you're suffering, I don't want to hear it.  

Since "self" is so ingrained, it's no wonder people have adopted it.  When mercantilism was a dominant economic system, people actually had the idea that interest was wrong.  It was a crime called usury, and charging interest against someone else was considered completely unfair.  But at some point Adam Smith came along and started talking about how people were  just going to act according to their own wants and needs, how we had to allocate resources efficiently, how to do it, etc.  And the whole thing was based on self interest.  I haven't read his book about moral sentiments, but from what I remember being taught about him in class, I think he thought that people weren't really selfish at heart, but that we could somehow harness this concept of self-interest to run economic systems.  

This is the problem with revolutionary philosophers.  They're too optimistic.  Look at what happened with Karl Marx.  Look at what happened with Adam Smith.  It wasn't this so-called "self-interest" that got in the way.  It was selfishness.  So I guess my real problem with egoism is that it's just too darn optimistic.  It requires belief in people.  It requires belief in human wisdom.  This scares me to death.  Is this really what we've come to?  We've taken the theories of our philosophers, proof from our economic comforts, our fulfilled hierarchy of needs, and just applied these complacent satisfactions and call it "the right thing."  I swear, it's like infinite regress.  It just doesn't make any logical sense.  I guess that's why I was so frustrated with that class.  It was worse than the Euthyphro argument.  Which by the way, is easier to get out of than one may think.  

So.  I guess my goal is not to be satisfied with self.  I made a really hard decision tonight.  I really had to deny myself what I really wanted.  It would have been so easy for me to give in.  But I can't, because I know that that's not the path for me.  Self-denial is something that is completely counterintuitive to everything the systems of the world stand for.  How do you survive with it?  It's completely opposite from what one is expected to do.  You're expected to act self-interestedly, whatever the heck that means.  I wonder how off track the system would get if all of a sudden, people stopped doing it.  Just denied themselves.  I'm not talking about starvation or complete poverty.  I'm just talking about giving up the most convenient of decisions.  The cheaper deal.  The easy relationship.  The gratification of a well-paying job.  It's interesting how many self-interested decisions people make at a time.  I really wonder what would happen if people gave it up...

-Naders