Selfishness is Self-Denial

The key problem in human societies has always been selfishness. It puts us in the position of competing with each other when cooperation is the way to maximise our creativity and make sure that the needs of all are provided for.

But how well do we actually understand selfishness?

Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering or insecure individual. If you hit your thumb with a hammer you find it hard to think of anything else. It is a natural process that our attention focuses where there is a need or a threat.

Sometimes we are encouraged to feel guilty about being selfish. This doesn’t help. Guilt is a source of pain and pain makes us more selfish. It’s a negative feedback loop.

We may think that we have to chose between selfishness or self-denial. This is a false dichotomy. Selfishness is self-denial.

The fact that we want pleasure for ourselves is not a problem. It may very well be the solution. Selfishness consists less in the seeking of personal pleasure than it does in lacking the courage to truly maximise that pleasure.

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Think of the society within which we live as a garden. Each of us lives in a hut within that garden. The garden has run to seed. It is a tangle of weeds.

We can hide away in our huts most of the time. We can spend our time and resources putting up new wall-paper, shag-pile carpet, decorating with fancy adornments, buying a new 4K television… Our hut provides us with a place to hide from other people and from looking at the weeds. Sure we have our pleasures, but they are meagre.

With more courage we could learn to spend more time outside of our hut. Instead of decorating it we could be pulling weeds and planting flowers and fruit trees. Instead of being alone we could be doing this with others - talking and joking.

The more we transform the garden and the closer bonds we form with our fellow garden-dwellers, the longer we will want to spend outside.

Eventually we won’t want to return to our huts unless it is cold or rainy. We will wander around tending to the plants, eating the fruit, smelling the flowers, singing and dancing and making love with our neighbours.

And finally we realise that our selfishness was really a perverse form of asceticism. All we were doing was shutting ourselves out from paradise.

Why Do We Quarrel? : (The Example of the Religious Person and The Atheist)

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Sometimes something someone else says gets under our skin. We feel compelled to express our contrary view.

This is not a sign that we have confidence in our ideas. Quite the contrary. Confidence in an idea gives an individual the viewpoint which Jesus expressed in the parable of the mustard seed. A valid idea will bring forth a good harvest when it falls on fertile soil, so the best strategy is to spread it as widely as possible and waste no time on cursing the rocks who are immune to it or the barren soil incapable of giving it sustenance.

If we feel the need to enter into a quarrel it is because there is a threat to the security of our beliefs from within.

A person secure in their own religious faith may try to spread it, but will not feel the need to argue with members of other faiths or with atheists. However, for some, religion is a way of trying to maintain discipline over what is perceived as sinfulness. This is an insecure position, and in the extreme, if reason appears to threaten the structure of restraint, then reason itself must be denied and argued against. (Religion need not be like this. Some religious people do not feel at all threatened by the contrary views of others. And some of the great contributors to the progress of reason have been religious.)

Once again, when we come to atheists, there are some who are secure and some who are insecure. Reason has two main roles - 1. As a strategy for pursing understanding of ourselves and the world which gives us greater capacity to manage both. 2. As a defence against the irrational aspects of the human psyche. Emotions are not rational, and rational arguments have a limited ability to quell them.

If an atheist and a religious person are quarrelling, then each is also shadow boxing with his denied self.

If the denied self of the quarrelsome religious person is doubt in the reality of his system of belief or in its effectiveness to maintain his state of self-discipline, then what might the nature of the denied self of the quarrelsome atheist be?

Here are a couple of arguments made by atheists against religion :

1. It is irrational.

Someone using the discipline of reason to try to quell irrational feelings of fear or guilt, may see in the religious person an ally for such feelings, especially since attempting to inspire fear or guilt is a major strategy of the insecure religious individual.

2. It falsely claims moral superiority.

None of us are really morally superior, but it may be very important to our conditional self-acceptance to convince ourselves that we are. Deep down we know that it is a sham in ourselves and this is why we would rather attack what is, to us, the more obvious sham of another.

A religious individual may believe that an atheist is mad. An atheist may believe that the religious individual is mad. Believe me, as a person who has actually been clinically insane, you do no good arguing against insanity, because it is a defensive mechanism the purpose of which is to protect the individual from reality.

What lies at the heart of insecure individuals, be they atheistic or religious? Fear and guilt. Fear is sometimes useful to alert us to real dangers and motivate us to take action against them. But when the danger is not real, fear may paralyse us or drive us to counter-productive action. And guilt is useless. It pretends to be a corrective, but all it does is cause us pointless suffering and thus make us more selfish.

Unconditional self-acceptance is the solution to such feelings of guilt or fear. Freed of them, the believer can be a more appreciative servant of their God and the atheist can be immune to the compulsion to argue with the rocks who refuse his seed.

The Oasis : A Parable

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There was once a people who lived happily at an oasis in the desert. There was plenty of food and water and the people were full of love for each other.

But one day a curse fell upon this tribe. It came with the wind which whispered in an ear here and an ear there a simple message : “You’re not good enough.”

No-one told anyone else about the voice that they heard. And each privately argued back against it. The more they fought this inner battle the less attention they had for each other, and so gradually the warmth of their love grew cold.

There seemed no local answer to their growing problem. And so, one by one, they were driven out into the desert in search of an answer. They were driven as a slave is driven with the crack of a whip across their back. And the name of that whip was You Are Not Good Enough.

Some lingered at the oasis, some set up camp at various distances from it, but those most cursed walked far out into the desert. Thirst, hunger and the blazing heat of the sun took their toll. Some grew weak, some went mad and some thrived by killing and stealing water and food.

Horror stories of life in the desert filtered back to the people at the oasis from those who had set up their tents along the way. Some of the tent dwellers would return to the oasis to replenish their supplies of food and water, but the further the tents were from the oasis, the shorter they would be of such supplies. So news would come often from the tents close by, but only occasionally would they hear from the outlying communities, and the stories were blood-curdling.

“We must help them,” the people of the oasis cried. So they gathered together supplies of food and water and maps of how to get back to the oasis. And they set out on an expedition to help those who needed these things the most.

But when they arrived at their destination, the desert dwellers - crazed by hunger and thirst and the blazing heat of the sun and embattled by constant fighting with each other - turned on their would be rescuers and killed and ate them.

“That didn’t go so well,” said those left at the oasis, when the news was relayed back to them by tent dwellers coming in for supplies. Then an idea occurred to one of them. “Why don’t some of you guys move back here. We can help you take out more supplies to those of you who decide to stay where you are. And then we can work together to get more supplies to the next lot of tents and maybe some of them would like to come back and help to get a steadier supply of food and water to those further out.

One day a man, not much more than a living skeleton, caked with blood, crawled up to an outlying tent. His plan was to steal some food and water, but he didn’t have the energy to do more than collapse. Hands reached out and picked him up and carried him into the shade. Cool water met his lips. The next day, when he opened his eyes, he knew that he must still be out in the heat of the sun, hallucinating as usual. Around him was a crowd of people, laughing and joking as they put up new tents and unpacked supplies. All of them were wearing garments emblazoned with the message “Everyone Is Good Enough”.

When his strength was restored, the desert dweller headed back out from whence he had come. He was carrying a message.

“It must have been a mirage,” they told him. But they couldn’t explain his state of health.

“They have enough food and water for us all,” he insisted. “And they can lead us back to the oasis.”

Some were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and came to the tent city. Others died in the desert. But soon the people of the oasis were as one once more and preparing a united effort to find more sources of food and water.

*     *     *

It’s easy to lose hope. I was reading recently about people who make anonymous threats over the internet to rape or kill people who happen to express a view contrary to their own. And then there are real murders and rapes and terrorism. And increasing incidence of suicide and chronic depression. All of these problems are expressions of deep psychological insecurity. If we are secure in ourselves - we have unconditional self-acceptance - then we want only good things for others as well as ourselves.

And so I came up with this story of people wandering away from an oasis. When we look at those who have been most damaged by life - those who are defeated or so embittered they live only to inflict suffering on others - the problem seems too big to be solvable. How can all of those people be helped when it can take many years for any one individual and even then they need to want to be helped.

I think that our hope lies in those things which can foster mental health in ourselves - unconditional self-acceptance - and a sense of fellowship in society - through encouraging a spirit of mutual acceptance. 

A major part of this is renouncing the idea of using mockery or shame or appeals to the conscience in order to try to persuade someone to do what we want. If we feel the need to make someone else feel bad in order to promote our interests or beliefs or to hold someone else up to distain then we haven’t yet realised what the roots of loving behaviour are. You can’t cure a dog of rabies by beating it. The violent and crazy behaviour of the desert dwellers comes from want. The need to respond with mockery, shame or guilt-tripping is an indication that we too are desperately in need of the sustenance that is love.

But love can be found. The voice that whispers “You are not good enough” can be silenced. Forgiveness is possible. We may not be able to offer love directly to those who need it too much, lest they suck us dry. But where open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication is possible, love can grow and travel to were it is needed  most.

The distance we travel away from the oasis isn’t a physical distance, but a distance which opens up between us as individuals. Community will form where it can.

Where do we want to be led? If we allow ourselves to get too caught up in the conflict which arises in and between the most insecure, then we will, unwittingly perhaps, take them as our leaders and follow them out into the desert. If we give them only the attention we must to protect ourselves, but remember that our own wholeness and the creative bonds we have with others are most important, then we can ourselves be leaders out of the desert and back to the oasis.