The answer, I bet, won’t surprise many of you and it is yes we are. Long time ago my friend @hr1 wrote an article curiosity vs. greed now I want to mainly look at greed but in more general way I want to explain why everything we do is self motivated and why we can’t do anything about it. We are selfish we have to be otherwise we wouldn’t be alive but we can use our selfishness to help the society.
Life has to be selfish
Every living thing on this planet is selfish but selfishness is a bad term people created because they wanted to look less selfish in society we should see selfishness as self preservation or preservation of the lineage. We think selfishness is a bad thing driving our society down but that is really bad misconception, if your ancestors weren’t selfish we wouldn’t be here we are selfish because we have it written in our genes and partly in our society, selfishness prosper in the world. Everything, living organism does, must in some way help them achieve its ultimate life goal, which is mostly to reproduce. If we were to do something which would have zero benefit to us, an altruistic act, we would have no motivation to do it. Living in a world where every organism competes with every other organism we are bound to do things that would benefit us because all the others do it too and if we stopped doing it they would profit more and be better and only better genes survive. Maybe we are forced to be selfish by each other but even if the society was formed only by altruistic, opposite to selfish, beings thanks to evolution someday there would appear a selfish gene and the individual with this gene would benefit more, it would have more offspring and the gene would spread.
Everything we do is selfish
Humans have very complex psychology and culture has enormous effect on us but still everything we do is selfish because every time it has some major or minor benefit. It only depends on our moral code to determine which act is ok and which is beyond the line therefore selfish. It differs through the world and depends on family, society, culture, law and also our genetic code. Ultimately everything we do, must somehow help us to reproduce or to keep our offspring alive as long as we can and help them reproduce as well. Even the smallest acts which seem to have no impact on our lives are selfish because our brain rewards or punishes us for behavior with accordance to our morale. We must embrace the fact that we are selfish and use it to our advantage because even selfish acts can help the others. Charity and all similar staff are examples of this it is socially beneficial selfishness it helps the society but also positively benefits the one doing it. Unfortunately not all people benefit when helping others it either doesn’t give them social points over others or they do not receive the reward for acting in accordance with their morale and unless we find a way to encourage altruistic behavior by making it beneficial for the one helping others we won’t see it globally among people. Another problem is that in certain societies you could get negative social points for helping certain kind of people because we are social animals and our social life has gigantic effect on our lives we must consider every act we do from the point of the society we want to accept us, therefore we sometimes even don’t act like we want but rather how the society would want us to.
We are selfish and we will be, we can’t change what is evolutionary written in us but we can be positively selfish help ourselves when at same time helping others, unfortunately it mostly depends on the people around us and we are all selfish :D , we can’t be altruistic if most of the others are not.
What do you think are there some ways to change our nature, am I too negative?
Can we make us act less selfishly?
Image source: https://pixabay.com/cs/photos/oppression/
Our world is not like that. You compete only with those that need the same resources as you do and only if the resources are not sufficient for both of you.
Another thing is, that it is seldom the case that "the more the better". For example eating more after you just ate won't make you any better.
Frankly speaking, after covering the basic needs all you can do to increase the chance of your survival is to engage in activities which will help you cover your needs in the future. And such activities don't have to be zero-sum. In other words, we can compete - then only one of the two of us can win; or we can cooperate and both win.
Anyway, I maybe got too far from your topic. I just wanted to point out that greed is not the same as selfishness. But I agree with you that selfishness is natural, because everything you do have to (directly or indirectly) increase your chance of survival - at least from the biological point of view. On the other hand, greed is more about "I wanna have more than others, I wanna win and I want you to lose", which in my opinion is rarely necessary.
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