This is the biggest problem of today

Keith Hudson

If we are honest we have to confess that each one of us, at our core, are totally selfish.  The crucial thought-experiment is this: Let us say you were in a situation of extreme danger with one other person randomly selected from the total population of the world. Only one of would could escape and only you can take the decision.  What would you decide?  The answer is obvious.   In short, we are selfish because, like all living forms, life is about surviving.

But, like our all instincts, we have counter-balancing . . . instincts — or very closely counter-balancing anyway — because some situations we meet in everyday life require a subtle mental ‘debate’ beween one instinct and an opposing one rather than one full-blown automatic response. Thus, the ‘anti-selfishness’ insitnct emerges early in life (spontaneously, at about two years of age actually).  It pays not to be totally selfish about the toy we are playing with.  If another toddler wants your toy then you allow your co-operative instinct to take over and let him or her have it. This behaviour is consolidated later when another toddler gives you his toy to play with.

As we become adults, we discover that various levels of care for others naturally comes into play.  Unselfishness moderates, to a lesser or greater extent, our basic selfishness.  To what extent depends on the the ‘social distance’.  The more the social distance, the less that unselfishness moderates selfishness.  Thus a man may care for his wife a very great deal, but will have only affection for his friends, has only a certain amount of temporary loyalty to his colleagues in a working group, may vote for an MP he doesn’t much like but only because he belongs to the same class, will fairly easily dispense with loyalty to his own culture or nationality if great .material advantages appeals to his selfish desires. Thus, the larger the social distance, or the larger the social group in which a person is involved, the less the loyalty and, as a consequence, the greater the total selfishness of the organisation.  Countries can act totally selfishly when faced with the selfish behaviours of other countries.  The fierce selfishness that can so readily occur between different nation-states is the biggest problem of modern times.