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Carrion Luggage #1095155 added August 12, 2025 at 10:54am
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Allergic to Selfish
A bit about human nature from BBC:
Everyone's selfish. The only question is how much your selfish desires overlap with helping others. Like, if you give money to disaster relief, you've helped someone (mostly the charity's organizer, though some might actually get to the victims). But it also feels good. Doing something that feels good is selfish.
Whenever I fly, one line jumps out from the pre-flight safety briefing. Somewhere between "welcome aboard" and "use this whistle for attracting attention", we're reminded to "put on your own oxygen mask before helping others".
This is, essentially, an official instruction to be "selfish".
What? No, it's not. It's pure, undiluted practicality. Most of the pre-flight videos I've seen illustrate this by showing an utterly calm and in no way panicking woman sitting next to a little kid, presumably her offspring. She methodically fixes the oxygen mask over her face while the kid's sitting there like he's waiting for the dentist, also, in the words of Tyler Durden, "calm as Hindu cows." Then she reaches over and masks up the extraordinarily well-behaved kid.
In reality, the kid would be screaming, freaking out, and squirming all over the place (if, that is, it hasn't been sucked right out of the plane by whatever depressurized the cabin enough for the masks to drop). And there's a reason it's always a woman in these videos: it's generally women who are socialized to put everyone else before themselves. So, it's a clear reminder that a) you should try to stay calm while the plane you're on drops 10,000 feet in 2 seconds; b) adults are responsible for kids and c) the kid's not going to be in any position to help you if you put their mask on first, so make sure you're relatively stabilized before assisting the little brat.
But on the other hand, in a world that often seems to reward narcissism, there could be a risk that that same line speaks to a somewhat troubling life philosophy. The idea that you should always put yourself first – and that selfishness trumps altruism.
Again, in reality, there's a balance to be struck between pure self-interest and pure altruism, both of which are probably, like, infinity and negative infinity: useful concepts, but there's a whole infinity of range between the two extremes.
Or, to put it another way if math(s) freaks you out, life isn't about one or the other; it's about balancing your own needs and desires against the needs and desires of others.
Elements of psychology, economics and biology – not least the ideas of selfish genes and neo-Darwinism – have normalised the assumption that competition means humans are intrinsically cruel, ruthless or selfish, says Steve Taylor, a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University.
Even in competition, there's an element of cooperation. If you're playing a football match (either kind), you're obviously cooperating with your teammates while trying to score more goals than the other team. But you're also, in a way, cooperating with the other team: you've agreed on the rules of the game (or had them imposed upon you), and there are penalties for breaking the rules.
Take the "bystander effect", which first emerged in the 1960s. This is the widely cited idea that people typically avoid intervening in a crisis when others are nearby. The theory followed outrage over the 1964 New York murder of Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old bartender who was reportedly raped and killed in front of nearly 40 witnesses, none of whom helped.
But the final detail of the story behind the "bystander effect" appears to be an apocryphal one. While, tragically, Genovese really was sexually assaulted and murdered, investigations suggest that reports of there being 38 passive bystanders were inaccurate.
I know I've pointed this out before, but I still keep seeing people referring to this incident as if it proceeded in accordance with the early tabloid sensationalism, so I'm quoting the above to emphasize that the bystander effect isn't nearly as pronounced as people think it is.
Research suggests that people are actually more than willing to prioritise others' safety over their own in many situations.
I expect it depends on the person, but, okay, here's something I see a lot of:
Some asshole leaves a kitten by the side of the road. Someone who's probably not as big an asshole hears the poor thing's plaintive cries, and catches the feline, takes it to the vet, and generally ends up keeping it, or at least ensuring it's got a proper home with caring people. What's the big takeaway here? Usually, there are a lot of "people suck!" involved, emphasizing the cruelty of the kitten-abandoner. But I, as cynical as I am at times, draw a different conclusion: there's someone who cares enough to rescue the kitten; there's someone else whose entire job is to make kittens (and puppies) healthier; and there are a whole lot of anonymous internet commenters who would do the same thing in the same situation, and yet, they'd rather condemn the one person who did a bad thing.
And for fuck's sake, that's not even our species. The vast majority of us are altruistic enough to take the time to help an entirely different expression of life. Even the act of condemning the asshole who dumped a kitten off to fend for itself speaks volumes about one's priorities. Never, not once, have I seen anyone comment on such a story with "Well, it's just a cat" or some version of "I'm sympathetic to the kitty-dumper."
Are there bad people? Absolutely. Are they the majority? Do they represent humanity as a whole? Hell, no.
There are evolutionary reasons for human altruism, Taylor says. For most of our history, we have lived in tribes as hunter-gatherers – highly cooperative groups.
Oh, for... stop with the evolutionary guesswork. Most of our evolution happened before our ancestors could even be considered "human." I've ranted about evo-psych before, though, and I won't go into that again right now.
"There's no reason why early human beings should be competitive or individualistic," says Taylor. "That would not have helped our survival at all. It would have actually endangered our survival."
Within a tribe, sure. Between tribes, well, we see the result of that every day. And yet, there are still things we agree on. Mostly.
Science suggests that most of us have the hardware to be selfless, often extraordinarily so. But that doesn't mean we can – or should – be selfless all the time. Whether we prioritise ourselves or others depends partly on circumstances, our prior experience and our culture.
The rest of the article, which is moderately long, continues in the same vein. But, again, my takeaway here is that no one is completely selfish or completely altruistic; there are only gradations in between. That hypothetical pet-dumper I mentioned? On a good day, I might guess, without evidence, that the reason they did what they did was because they had limited resources, and prioritized their own family over the life of a cat. I've been in dire situations, myself, and I know that you don't always think things through when your main concern is feeding you and yours. And they might even think, "the cat has claws and teeth and can catch mice" (however wrong that is when you're talking about a domesticated animal). Point being, it's entirely possible they thought they were doing the right thing.
Or, possibly, they're just a terrible person. Plenty of those around. But they're outnumbered. |
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