Introduction

Imagine a movie scene cliché.

The bad guy is about to shoot the movie hero's loved one - but just as he pulls the trigger, the big hero jumps in front of the bullet and sacrifices his life out of love.

Surely, he acted out of selflessness and only wanted to save his loved one, right?

I say wrong.

I say that with what little time he had to think, the hero imagined a world where he would have to spend the rest of his existence without the love of his life, drowning in a sea of endless what ifs - and refused to accept that fate.

Thus, he decided to sacrifice himself, instead.

The point I'm making with this is that often times what looks like a selfless act on the surface is actually an act of pure selfishness. Always, even.

If a person volunteers to work for orphanage, why does he ultimately do it? Because he feels like it's the right thing to do.

So, my claim is the following:

Whatever we desire becomes our self interest

We all desire basic things like food and shelter, even love could be classified as a basic need. But on top of that many people also desire the feeling of being a good person, doing the right thing. This then leads to actions that are generally considered altruistic by nature.

This division between actions for one's self interest and actions that are altruistic has caused confusion over the concept of a selfish person. I would argue that ultimately it's impossible for us to act in a non-selfish manner because whatever we want to do is, by definition, what we desire, and what we choose to do is always what we want to do.

Luckily for us humans people being egoists isn't as grim as it's generally thought to be.

Sharing is Self Interest

The road to happiness for us humans often goes through sharing our happiness and making the people around us feel happy. And I don't mean government mandated "altruism" or collectivism, I mean legitimate, voluntary sharing.

If we hear a joke, we want to tell it to our friend - not just to take credit for the joke, but we have this innate need to have the people around us feel good. This is ultimately acting out of self interest, since it is in your own best interest to make the people around you feel, good, but it doesn't make the action less altruistic in the "short term", if you will.

You could say that we best accomplish our goals in self interest by being altruistic.

I think this just goes to show how government isn't all that necessary in making people share.

Whenever the government steps in to force altruism on people, it skews things up in the sense that altruism is best accomplished when the person has the resources and means to be altruistic. In a forced collectivism this may not always be the case.

And is it even possible to work against your own self interest?

Is it even possible to be altruistic, if by altruism we mean the most common definition?

I can't think of a way.

In the short term, you could say that sacrificing your life to save another is acting against your own self interest, but only if we forget that value is subjective; the person sacrificing his life clearly values death more than a life without the person that he is sacrificing himself for - otherwise he wouldn't do it.

Something I don't often see being brought up, though, is the fact that I think it's possible to work against the best interests that we consciously recognize . We may be sincere in thinking that we work against our self and best interests because we often function with a pretty limited knowledge of ourselves - as funny as it may sound.

I have a theory as to why there is so much misunderstanding regarding the idea of self interest:

In modern philosophy, as well as modern societal discussion in general, we often assume that the "moral agent" is rational. Rational in the sense that we think the agent acts according to his own self interest to the best of his knowledge.

And the "to the best of his knowledge" part is the key here.

Obviously, the average human being is as far away from rational as Pluto is from the Moon, and I don't think we have the mental capacity to always work towards our best interests on a conscious level - to the best of our knowledge.

What our best interest is is decided by subconscious factors, rather than our conscious self.

This is why people think that people who say they act according to their own self interest always scam and step over people, backstab them and lie to them, and only care about themselves.

This is very short sighted, however, since we are all a part of a community; whether it's a societal community in the city, or the nature around your cabin in the woods (my own personal dream) your surroundings matter to you, and by and large, the better your surroundings are doing, the better you will be doing.

This isn't always a conscious thing, and a lot of the "right" things we do, we just do them because it feels, well, right to do the "right thing" and be a decent person. And this is a good thing.

In the short term, it's possible for a human to work against his own self interest, but the reason it's done is to satisfy a bigger need - whether it's the need to feel like a good person, the need to do virtue signalling, or whatever - so ultimately it is all done in your best interest, even if you don't acknowledge it on a conscious level at the time.

In conclusion

It's actually been studied that helping others is a form of masturbating: when you help others, it releases a hormones in your brain, such as oxytocin, that will give you a warm and fuzzy and good feeling that is otherwise difficult to attain. And yes, it is possible to become a sort of helping junkie; addicted to the high you get from helping others.

This post is by no means designed as a post to speak against the idea of helping others and acting in an altruistic way, not at all. I'm a pretty altruistic wuss when it comes down to it - I just recognize that I do according to my own self interest of wanting to "express myself" and "self actualize", if you will.

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