Selfishness Like Any Other Sort of Human Essay

Selfishness

Like any other sort of human vice, selfishness -- or the excessive concern with one's own individual desires and appetites -- can be threatening to the established social order if it slips out of control. Our own definition of selfishness takes into account its social effects: we establish selfishness as a vice by emphasizing not only the excessive self-regard it demonstrates, but also the excessive disregard for the well-being of others that accompanies it. Selfishness can thus be considered as an active potential threat to the established order under certain circumstances, but here we reach a paradox. The structure of American society is such that the economic and ideological system which serves as its underpinning, and which we may loosely define as "capitalistic," to a certain degree presents selfishness as a virtue, or at least regards it as an amoral process with no deleterious real-world effects for society.I hope to indicate, with reference to examples from both literature and life in America, that selfishness poses a distinct problem to our established social order. But to the extent that selfishness poses us with a problem, I hope to demonstrate that it might also indicate the way forward toward some solution.

Let me begin by posing a hypothetical scenario: an individual finds his own desires or appetites come into conflict with those of the state. Now of course it is not literarally possible for a social construction such as "society" or the "state" to have desires and appetites of its own: we are engaged in a form of rhetorical personification, in which the collective will which finds its expression in official state policy is conceived to have the same modus operandi as the individual will. Yet this is a false….....