What is Selfishness?

Selfishness is the tendency to prioritize one's own desires and needs above the needs and desires of other people.

We are all born with a drive to stay alive and healthy, and selfishness may be a misplaced manifestation of this. A certain degree of selfishness is normal. For example, many people would choose to ensure their own food needs are met before giving food to others. But selfishness can also be a pathological personality trait. Selfish people may prioritize their own petty needs above the significant needs of others. For example, a person is exhibiting selfishness when he or she steals money from their mother to buy a comic book.



Some mental health problems can contribute to the development of selfishness. Many personality disorders, particularly antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, cause people to be so wrapped up in their own desires that they either do not notice or do not care about the needs of others. Many other mental illnesses can cause extreme self-involvement, which can contribute to selfishness. A depressed person, for example, might be so wrapped up in his or her own feelings of suffering that he/she is unable to provide for his/his children or communicate with his/her partner.

This may sound ironic but it's true.

Selfish people don't know they're being selfish.



They just assume they're nice people who care about their own happiness more than anything else.

But on their journey towards finding their happiness, they carelessly and intentionally walk over people.

Selfishness means being concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself; Having no regard for the needs or feelings of others.

In every relationship, be it platonic or romantic, partners give and take from each other in equal measures without keeping count

But a relationship with a selfish person means that they extract your love and affections, without giving back in return. They think that they are needed more than they need you.



Unfortunately, the traits of selfish people are not easy to notice. Most of the time, they are people pleasers and hide their dark side very well.

Barth says that dealing consistently with someone is selfish can make your life miserable:

"Books have been written about narcissism, "Generation Me," even "healthy" selfishness. But when someone you have to deal with regularly is consistently self-involved and self-centered, they can make your life miserable"



According to Art Markman, Ph.D., professor of psychology, narcissists and psychopaths "tend to be quite selfish and manipulative".

Not until you let them in and drop your guard down that they start showing their true colors.

So watch out for these early signs that I believe make up a selfish person.

Selfish people are very good manipulators:

Ultimately, with a selfish person, all situations and relationships are about them.

According to emotional healing expert Darlene Ouimet, manipulative people simply don't question themselves:

"Controllers, abusers, and manipulative people don't question themselves. They don't ask themselves if the problem is them. They always say the problem is someone else".



Psychological egoism is the view that humans are always motivated by self-interest and selfishness, even in what seem to be acts of altruism. It claims that, when people choose to help others, they do so ultimately because of the personal benefits that they themselves expect to obtain, directly or indirectly, from so doing.



This is a descriptive rather than normative view, since it only makes claims about how things are, not how they "ought to be" according to some. It is, however, related to several other normative forms of egoism, such as ethical egoism and rational egoism.

Psychological hedonism:

A specific form of psychological egoism is psychological hedonism, the view that the ultimate motive for all voluntary human action is the desire to experience pleasure or to avoid pain.



Immediate gratification can be sacrificed for a chance of greater, future pleasure. Further, humans are not motivated to strictly avoid pain and only pursue pleasure, but, instead, humans will endure pain to achieve the greatest net pleasure. Accordingly, all actions are tools for increasing pleasure or decreasing pain, even those defined as altruistic and those that do not cause an immediate change in satisfaction levels.



Whether or not Sigmund Freud was a psychological egoist, his concept of the pleasure principle borrowed much from psychological egoism and psychological hedonism in particular. The pleasure principle rules the behavior of the Id which is an unconscious force driving humans to release tension from unfulfilled desires. When Freud introduced Thanatos and its opposing force, Eros, the pleasure principle emanating from psychological hedonism became aligned with the Eros, which drives a person to satiate sexual and reproductive desires. Alternatively, Thanatos seeks the cessation of pain through death and the end of the pursuit of pleasure: thus a hedonism rules Thanatos, but it centers on the complete avoidance of pain rather than psychological hedonist function which pursues pleasure and avoids pain. Therefore, Freud believed in qualitatively different hedonisms where the total avoidance of pain hedonism and the achievement of the greatest net pleasure hedonism are separate and associated with distinct functions and drives of the human psyche. Although Eros and Thanatos are ruled by qualitatively different types of hedonism, Eros remains under the rule of Jeremy Bentham's quantitative psychological hedonism because Eros seeks the greatest net pleasure.



When someone says, "You are being selfish," there is no doubt that you have just been criticized. The message from your critic is clear: You are paying too much attention to your own wants, needs, and well-being, and not enough attention to others. Selfish behavior is often described as immoral. A good person thinks of others first. This idea is instantiated in the oft-quoted "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35) and "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country



According to some experts, selfish behavior is not only immoral, but it is also bad for your own psychological well-being. Renowned positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky has written an essay claiming that research supports the Chinese proverb that ends, "If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else."



Nonetheless, if you read enough self-help literature, you can't help but notice a different view about thinking of yourself first that seems to contradict the bad press about selfishness. The label self-care refers to prioritizing your own physical health and psychological well-being by engaging in good eating habits, exercise, sleep, relaxation, and enjoyable activities every day. Proponents of self-care like to point out that unless we take care of ourselves first, we will not be well enough to help and take care of others. As flight attendants tell passengers, "If you are traveling with a child or someone who requires assistance, secure your own mask first, and then assist the other person."



So, is selfishness (thinking of yourself first) good or bad? When I am asked questions like this, my first response is to ask "Good for what (or whom)?" So the deeper question, as I see it, is "Who benefits from selfishness?" (Hence the name of this blog, Cui Bono: To whose benefit?)



The simple (and wrong) answer to this question is that when I behave selfishly it is always good for me but bad for others. True, there are many cases where people benefit (at least temporarily) at the expense of others. The most obvious cases are criminal acts such as assault, theft, and fraud. Harry Browne refers to the use or threat of violence to take from others what they do not want to voluntarily give up a one-sided transaction. Steven Covey calls this a win-lose transaction where one person gains while another loses. There are also noncriminal win-lose transactions, the most common one being emotional manipulation. If I pressure you to do something you do not want to do by making you feel guilty if you don't, or by yelling or withdrawing or being unpleasant in some other way, I got what I wanted at your expense.



The reason that one-sided or win-lose transactions are not always good for me is that there are negative consequences for me that outweigh the temporary gains. Obviously, criminal acts can result in fines or incarceration. But even mere emotional manipulation can have disastrous long-term consequences. If you exploit people they become less likely to cooperate with you voluntarily. They may even seek revenge against you or ask powerful relatives or friends to seek revenge against you.



More importantly, someone who engages in emotional manipulation to get what he or she wants develops a reputation as someone not worth dealing with, someone to shun and avoid. Reputation is no trivial thing, because happiness is very unlikely to be achieved alone, in isolation from the rest of society. To be happy, we need a network of people in our lives who like, love, and respect us, and to build such a network, we need to play fair.



I therefore call engaging in one-sided transactions "bad selfishness" because ultimately this behavior is bad for both the selfish person and the people victimized and exploited by the selfish person.



Then there is what I like to call "neutral selfishness." Neutral selfishness includes looking after your own well-being in ways that do not directly and substantially involve other people. If I take five minutes to brush my teeth to avoid the ill effects of tooth and gum disease, this is a form of neutral selfishness. In looking after my dental hygiene, I am neither taking away from someone's well-being nor adding to it. The same would be true if I take 10 minutes every morning to meditate.



I know there are people who might nitpick about whether there are really any neutral selfish behaviors. Some will say that I could have used the five minutes I spent brushing my teeth or 10 minutes I spent meditating to assist people at a homeless shelter. There are always people in need, so any behavior designed for my own benefit takes time away from what I could be doing to benefit others. But, as the self-care movement has pointed out, how much help can I be to others if I don't look after my own physical and psychological health first? Taking care of myself puts me in a better position to do things that benefit others. Therefore, I continue to believe that some selfish behaviors are nearly neutral; they do not immediately help or harm others. They may represent time taken away from directly helping others, but they also put me in better condition to help others.



In addition to bad selfishness and neutral selfishness, there is also what I call "good selfishness," which benefits both ourselves and other people. Harry Browne refers to good selfishness as a two-sided transaction, an exchange where two people willingly part with something in order to gain something they value. Because both people are winning something they want, Covey calls this a win-win transaction.



The clearest example of a two-sided transaction is a simple swap. If I trade my copy of The Beatles Love Me Do / P.S. I Love You single for your copy of The Beatles' first stereo pressing of Please Please Me because each of us values the other's record more than the one we own, we both feel like we are gaining in the swap. Of course, in modern economies we do not directly swap goods and services for all of our exchanges; money serves as an intermediary for two-sided transactions.



But two-sided transactions involve far more than economic exchanges of goods and services. Any time we do something with someone else because we enjoy the activity more than doing it alone, we have a two-sided transaction. If you go to a movie with a friend, you "exchange" knowing glances, laughter, and conversation, all of which enhance the experience for both of you. The same can be said for attending concerts, watching sporting events, and sitting on the beach. Some activities, such as putting on a theatrical production, playing basketball, engaging in sexual intercourse, and taking a course in positive psychology, actually require the participation of more than one person. As long as all partners in these activities are willing participants who are getting something of value that is worth what they are investing in the activity, these are all examples of two-sided transactions. All are forms of good selfishness-interactions that are good for both people.



A moment's reflection on the three kinds of selfishness tells us that if you want to maximize your happiness (and who doesn't?), you'll want to avoid bad selfishness (because it is likely to decrease your happiness in the long run) and willingly choose neutral and good selfishness.



As obvious as this might seem, why do so we so often hear that you have only two choices: to be selfish (which is bad) or to be selfless and serve others first (which is good)?



I have both an optimistic and not-so-optimistic answer to that question. The optimistic answer is that critics of selfishness are talking only about bad selfishness, and when they urge us to "do for others" they really mean to do for others in ways that are beneficial and rewarding to us (which would make the doing a two-sided transaction). So, I think these people have good intentions, but they confuse the issue by pitting selfishness against selflessness.



But I've also seen a darker answer that explicitly condemns self-interest in favor of advancing the interests of other people. While researching my blog post on seva (selfless service; part I, part II), I found that while some ashrams make every attempt to find meaningful work that fits a new member's skills and interests, other ashrams intentionally assign unpleasant, mind-numbing, back-breaking drudgery. A rationale for the latter is that practicing unpleasant tasks will liberate a person from ego-attachments. Perhaps this is true, but what if it is not? What if this is just a way to trick others into doing difficult work that you would otherwise have to do yourself?



other dark examples where talk of the virtues of sacrifice and service is a trick to exploit and manipulate others: "I'm thinking of preachers who fleece their flocks, becoming ultra-rich by preaching the virtue of charitable giving. I'm thinking of war-lords who gain power by exaggerating external threats and convincing patriotic young people to sacrifice their lives in unnecessary wars. And I am thinking of any kind of 'mandatory service' program, because, in the words of James Joyner, 'the idea of mandatory voluntarism is as creepy is it is oxymoronic'." The irony in all of these examples is that the people who are telling us that selfishness is bad are actually engaging in bad selfishness themselves.



Those who would manipulate us into doing their dirty work give us a false choice between bad selfishness (gaining at the expense of others) and selfless sacrifice (doing good for others at a cost to you). Given only those choices, it's no wonder that our moral sensibilities vote for the latter. A slightly different version of this false choice pops up when people say that good relationships are based on compromises, where my partner and I take turns sacrificing for each other. ("I'll agree to be miserable going shopping with you if you agree to be miserable watching the football game with me.")

Different Conceptions of Selfishness

Many religions decry selfishness and emphasize the virtues of compassion, empathy, and self-sacrifice. The pacifist movement, which draws on many religious traditions, is a radical answer to selfishness, and emphasizes non-violence even in the face of overwhelming hostility. Some religious gurus have advocated extreme self-sacrifice, emphasizing the primacy of others over oneself.



There is significant debate in evolutionary biology about the evolved nature of selfishness. Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, for example, argues that our genes have the "selfish" desire to propagate themselves and do nothing else. Some biologists argue that people are innately selfish. Others, however, emphasize that helping others can ensure the survival of the species and argue that compassion, empathy, and self-sacrifice are as innate to people as selfishness. People are sometimes more likely to show self-sacrificing behavior for close relatives, and some biologists argue that this is an evolved trait. Many parents would give up their own lives for the lives of their children; one interpretation of this inclination is that when a child survives, the parent's genes survive with the child