lol I thought maybe you were on the dev team or something…
Hmm… depends on how hungry I am and if the friend said, “No, you have it.”
So would the world be better if there were NO selfish people?
Well, I think he meant if we were completely selfish without any incentive to help others or interact with them.
there would be no people if there were no selfish people…
-Imp
Hows that?
Hows that?
If everyone was selfish there would be no democrocy, government, and nobody will be able to start a dictator ship so there would not be a creation of money but maybe a creation of work for me and ill pay you in food.
Now i currently think we need a population selfish, and a population not…
I also think there is an extent to being selfish, because theres being selfish and being heartless…
if you don’t want selfish people, you can’t have people. there is no such thing as a non-selfish person.
heartless? define “heart”
-Imp
I used heart in the sense of empathy.
empathy? sure… I feel your pain… now do as I say…
-Imp
you said that there was nothing tangible in return.
Did helping make you feel good. I bet that it did. When we are stressed and or sad our bodies release a hormone called cortisol. That chemical hurts our body as it breaks tissue down and prepares the body for action. Constant stress equals constant break down of tissue. This can cause heart problems.
When you do things for others you frequently feel good and your body relaxes. This is good for the body.
When you help other people you are helping your own health.
Also, if you help people you will develop a good opinion of yourself. This will also help you to feel less stressed and depressed.
Meanwhile, you are doing all of this for the person that you just helped.
So, it’s not selfish to enjoy helping people but rather it is in our own self-interest to help people.
All of these good feelings help to keep you alive so that you can help again.
I definitely agree, but in a different sense.
The ultimate motive for all of our actions and intentions is “happiness,” (not in a strict sense, it also works in the sense of biological/genetic fulfillment) and that is the ultimate motive for helping the people on the side of the road. It makes you “happy” to see others “happy”.
However, because “everything we do is selfish,” we must act as though selfishness is something otherwise. It is parallel to the relationship of ancestral cause/blame and free will. Marx did say “People make their own history, but they do not make it out of whole cloth; they do not make it out of conditions chosen by themselves, but out of such as they find close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp on the brains of the living,” in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louise Bonaparte. We inherit the cloth of our history from ancestral causes that in turn inherited their own, and we learn to sew our own future with our inherited cloth from social institutions that were created in the same process; the weight of this ancestral cause is impossible to remove, so our actions are in some sense “predetermined.” But if we act as though we do not have control over our lives, society (or even anarchy for that matter) will lose all of its fabric.
Consequently, if we act as though everything we do is selfish, all of the strong reciprocity that exists and holds society together will crumble.
Therefore, our view of selfishness, if we are to see its true nature, most come from a different angle. We must create in our minds a new selfishness, which happens to be our previous concept of selfishness from the immediate standpoint as well: Those who do not cooperate in society’s strong reciprocative norms, cheat for personal gain, and look after only their own interests are selfish.
So when you helped the people in the car, you executed a selfish action from the long view, just like everyone and everything else is selfish, but in sociological terms, you were being anything but selfish.
It is our inherent nature to help others. You acted without thinking - this is key. The moment we think, we place barriers between ourselves and others. We drop the mind, we are able to act selflessly - inherently recognising that we are all one.
A
Then how do you explain people who don’t?
There are, in fact, people who exhibit selfish behavior (in the sociological sense I’ve described). The helper in the car scene was not one of these people. He likes to help others. That (within the context of my previous post) is the logical explanation.
It would appear that the person who helped the people on the side of the road is more in tune with his inherent nature. Those that don’t help automatically likely have too much babble going on in their minds.
A
I’m telling you guys that people that don’t help others end up feeling sick in some way or another. It’s healthy to interact with other folks in a productive way.
Helping others is even seen as a “cure” for some kinds of mental problems.
Angelina Jolie mentioned that she stopped cutting herself after she realized that so many other people need help.
it is the exact opposite.
you must be conditioned to believe that we are all one… there is no inherent recognition of anything… the human drive is an animal instinct to survive. period. to say humanistic dreams are inherent is an error… if they were inherent they always would be obeyed…
no, those that don’t automatically do as you wish they would, does not mean they didn’t act as they are built to act.
-Imp
I always love these arguments about selfishness, it is a pet peeve of mine since I read an argument from a book dealing with Evolutionary Psychology which contended selfless acts were rooted ultimately selfish causes. (I believe Tab touched on this).
I believe this to be fallacious as it assumes that any act commited on the part of a member of a species is entirely reflective of the genus. It assumes a rationalization for the motivation to act is inherent in the act itself.
By its own logic rationalizations themselves are merely selfish, thus the argument for selfishness is ultimately a selfish one. If this is so, how can it necessarily apply to all individuals within a given domain considering said individuals may often have motivations that conflict with the motives of others, furthermore, but not considered, is the possibility of conflicting motivations within each individual himself or herself.
Thus what you can have is a selfless act being described as motivated by selfishness because genes always operate the way our words describe them.
To say that there is always a reward for a selfless act (thus making it selfish) does not seem to hold in extreme cases where someone gives their life, their ‘self’ to save a stranger. What appreciable reward is there in death? Certainly not one that can be realized by the individual that was just moments before a transient adrift in the world of evolutionary impulses. Since no one will argue that evolution works when our genes saddle upon us an omnipresent desire to die (well maybe Freud did with his Death Instinct stuff) then the most obvious answer is that, in at least some cases, individuals choose to act without any regard for the well being of the self.
If then, there are such cases, the monolithic answer of genetic predisposition is not absolute.
But there are still people who don’t help others. Just because you believe it’s the right thing to do doesn’t mean everyone who doesn’t is “out of tune with their inherent nature.” If it was really our inherent nature to help others, everybody would do so. But they don’t. That blows the whole theory to hell. It is not our inherent nature to help others. As far as I’m concerned, there is no inherent human nature. Sure, there are tendencies; sure, there are biological facts; but there is no strict, constant rule of man’s essence.
How can you prove this at all?
GateControlTheory and Impenitent both pointed out that humans do involve a lot of the mind in the way they approach things. People can be trained to be helpful and say, ethics, can make a person kill themselves to help others, so decision making is important.
However, I do not think that the human animal is individualistic by nature. We, since before the time humans were humans, have lived in some kind of group. So, if there are any genes that govern group behavior certainly humans would have them.
However, I suspect that it is the intellect and the ability to experience empathy that causes us to help others. I don’t think that woodchucks go around helping anyone else.
We talked about this before, but frankly I couldn’t give a rat’s ass if someone is having orgasms over helping me, as long as they are.
1.people that don’t help others end up feeling sick in some way or another
How can you prove this at all?
If you look at case studies for depression, sociopathic behavior, and a variety of other mental problems you can see a pattern of social isolation and poor relationships with others.
Sometimes therapy will encourage others to live in a therapeutic community (a special closed unit) so that people can learn how to function in a social environment.
Group therapy is designed to help people relate to others as well.