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...
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