Mistakes

A sick culture mistakes happiness for selfishness, indifference for callousness;
a shallow culture mistakes sternness for meanness, profoundness for depression.

"Do You Still Love Me?" - Weakness And Selfishness

My Weakness Is None of Your Business (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I found there is a type of persons, who would always let others make choices for them. Or, if they know what to choose, they would "design" a complicated scenario to force others to choose for them. The "benefit" of acting like this is that when things don't go as they expected, they don't have to be responsible.

i.e., when they no longer love or like someone, instead of saying: "sorry I don't love you." or "I am sorry to say that I've been feeling very difficult to be your friend." they would say:" Do you still love me or not?" "Do you still want to be me friend or not?"

Does Kindness Require Intelligence? - A Few More Words On My "Wicked" "Wicked" Old Friendships

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If we agree that helping others when they are in need is one of most important ways to show kindness, can I propose, that it is impossible for those who are not able to "notice" the situations where others are in need of helps to offer helps, thus it is impossible for them to be kind?

In a couple of my previous posts I mentioned how I lost a few life time friends of mine during my middle age hazard. I also said I moved on, and I did. However, the recent unexpected visiting from one of these friends inevitably brought the issue back to table, and I just have a few more words to say, before I move on once again.

"God Is Just" - A Truth Or An Excuse Of Selfishness

I say "God is just" is another convenient excuse for practice of selfishness, because if God is just, why do we have to help the poor? That's God's will!

Another argument for religious people on this subject would be, letting some people to be poor so others can help them is one of God's lesson, or "design", in order to let people to learn kindness. Really? How about those helpless, those who died in pain, suffering without cure? And is the lesson of kindness really worth thousands, millions sacrifices of life? Would those who were burned alive agree that their excruciating pain (actually I doubt "excruciating" is enough to describe how they felt) was a means used by God to educate others? If so, I would say this God is either unspeakably cruel, or incredibly dumb. Or both.

Selfishness

For the practice of (conscious or unconscious) selfishness, what is more convenient than being indifferent to others' suffering, is to deny the existence of it.

Is Suicide Selfish?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The logic reason that some people believe suicide is selfish is because they think survivors' grief is greater than the dead (suicide) ones' suffering. Truth is, if you never grieved enough to kill yourself, you never know how much those who took their own lives suffered, or how it feels like to suffer so much that even life is no longer bearable.

Is Suicide A Selfish Act?

Freewill & Selfishness

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To believe that anyone can help themselves absolutely in any conditions, or in other words, that we all have "absolute freewill" - under which indifference becomes virtue, is nothing but selfishness in the guise of intellectual concept.

"Is Selfishness Always Bad?"

The Virtue of Selfishness (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My previous post "Is Suicide A Selfish Act" triggered a deeper question by a facebook friend of mine (Dale Cooper): "Is selfishness always bad?" To answer this question, I think we first can look at the definition of "selfishness":

By Wikipedia: Selfishness is placing concern with oneself or one's own interests above the well-being of others.
Dictionary.com: (selfish is) devoted to or caring only for oneself; concerned primarily with one's own interests, benefits, welfare, etc., regardless of others.

It seems, according to these definitions, suicide is indeed a "selfish act". So the real question is: is selfishness always bad? (Since I don't mean to get into the discussion about fundamental questions of morality, "good" or "bad" in this post simply mean their general use based on common moral standard.)

My answer are both "yes" and "no". I think we have to put selfishness in context. First of all, if a selfish act did not bring harm to others, I think it is not a bad thing at all. We all have right, and should, to treat ourselves kindly, do our best to live a happy life. Secondly, in case that a selfish act did cause others' pain, we still need to examine the circumstance: if the act were motivated by greed, by "entertainment", it is bad, if the act were caused by pain, by suffering, it is not. Of course, there are many more layers between these two conditions, but for me, this differentiation can temporarily serve as "benchmark".

I think in our daily use of this term - "selfishness", we usually mean the kind that brings harm to others, and is motivated by negative reasons, such as greed. That's how this term usually bears a negative "countenance" in most people's eyes. And because of this general use, we tend to ignore some exceptions, some more subtle layers in between, or some extreme conditions, such as suicide.

So here we go again: relativity. I believe most of time we cannot judge things by look at them alone. Because things do not stand alone, instead, they exist as parts of a whole. As parts, things tangle with each other, so we better look at them in context, in comparison, to see how they relate to other parts. So many time I found people (myself included) easily jump into judgement by certain notions, with simple "black and white" thinking style. Certainly "black and white" is a pattern easy to understand, an formula easy to follow, but unfortunately, reality is so much more complicated than just black and white.

Based on this understanding (relativity), I would even go farther, that not only "selfishness" is not always "bad", but altruism is not always "good". However, I better save this topic for some other time.