Answer my simple question please instead of running all over the place.
It is not so simple as you want me to believe. For your benefit, please ready this piece of mind and if you responds to it, we shall discuss further. Lets try to uphold professionalism in our contributions for our sake and readers alike.
Thus self-interest and self-preservation are clearly inferior emotions and impulses.
1) Greed, lust for power, and self-preservation aren’t just individual.
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2) The majority will crush the minority if their power is threatened.
3) Today I feel cynical, or pragmatic, based on your vantage point. Either way.
Now, listen to me before you jump up and down and jump to another topic. I know most of us won’t admit to self-interest and greed as our primary key drivers. We’d rather think of ourselves as ambitious, a neutral and “positive” euphemism that means nothing.
Even a dog is ambitious. So are plants that crowd others and kill them by denying them the sun. The male lion, for example, chooses to exercise its ambition by being unashamedly lazy.
It lays around all day long waiting for the indefatigable lioness to kill for their dinner. In fact, the lion is the perfect paragon of ambition – do as little as possible while reaping a most humongous reward.
My argument is that humans – whether its genetic or environmental, or both, isn’t the point – are driven largely by self-interest and greed. Many of us like to perch ourselves at the pinnacle of altruism and philia for the multitudes of humanity.
I say. We are always looking out for numero uno, even when there are no material benefits accruing to us. Of course, two things can be true at the same time – we can look out for ourselves while also being altruistic. In fact, that’s more often the case.
Altruism allows us to bask in public adoration, an emotion of utter vanity. So, those who “donate” to churches on Sunday do so for vain or crass strategic reasons.
It’s particularly in politics where self-interest, vanity, and self-preservation are clothed in the language of “do-goodism.” Every politician holds themselves out as holier-than-thou, even the incredibly corrupt.
So are all the political initiatives by politicians. They are all meant to “save” the poor huddled unwashed masses. But in reality, everything is about power and control of resources by politicians for their own self-aggrandizement.