Philosophical Questions 8 Selfishness: A human trai

I am only giving my opinion, and please feel free to disagree. Please don't hate/bully/dislike the "novel" just because of my opinions. The purpose of the Q/A is to prompt YOUR thinking. Thank for reading this. (I'm, by all means, just an amateur. I don't study psychology nor philosophy. I'm just giving my point of views on these broad, undefined questions.)

Again: if you used my ideas in any of your published material/assessments/homework/anything, please give me credit. Drop me a comment and I will probably be okay with it. (You can join discord if you want to speak to me personally about this kind of stuff/just wanna chat)

Why are humans so selfish?

Why are we inherently so selfish? Selfishness is a trait that is found in everyone, and it seems like that it's a human gene. It's perfectly fine and normal to be selfish, but why is selfishness an human's characteristics?

Perhaps, selfishness leads to evolution. There are now more than 7 billion people on Earth, and the majority of us are in highly competitive situations. In order to be the cream de la cream, we must be selfish as that's the only to be significantly better than everybody. To survive and live that top-quality life, we have to be better and selfish. Because we are constantly seeking to be better than others, we have to have some unique traits. Wanting to be the only who has those "special skills" or "traits" makes us selfish.

If you consider yourself to not be selfish, please reconsider it. Suppose you have a choice right now to become a billionaire. However, a stranger will die immediately if you say yes. Will you take it? I believe that some of us will say no, as wealth isn't everything. However, this is an extreme scenario, so you shouldn't be too proud that you said NO to this.

Now, imagine this: you can become a billionaire immediately, but everyone on Earth has to give you one dollar. I believe 99% of us will say yes because one dollar is quite insignificant for the majority of us. Well, the point here is not about that consequence, but your desire. You wouldn't mind taking advantage of others if you come out on top.

OK. So now that we have accepted the truth that we are all secretly selfish people, what now? Well, ask yourself why you choose to take that 1B. Well, it's obvious. It's because we want it. 1 dollar isn't that much, so it's OKAY if I take that choice. Now imagine you just lost one dollar for the exact same scenario. What would you think? Personally, I won't be very happy about that. I treat money quite seriously, but for the majority, you probably won't care about that one buck. However, you will probably think this: Why am I not the one who get to take that 1 Billion? That's not fair.

Well, yea. So you all want to take that 1 billion, and you WANT to be the only who take it. But why does everyone want that extra money, and forget about others!?

I personally think that, as mentioned before, it's for evolution. Because everyone wants to be better, we all share a common goal: to improve. We want to better than everyone else, so we naturally improve as a species. Of course, don't use the example just now as it's purely hypothetical. But we are all seeking to be better, to get some "benefits" off others. Everyone thinks the same, and hence we are improving as a race.

I don't know if that's correct, but it's my opinion anyways. Thanks for reading. Leave a comment on what YOU think. I will check it out.

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