Selfish vs. Unselfish: Who Wins?

Are humans naturally selfish or altruistic? Have they evolved to value their personal survival above all else? Or to form cooperative social relations with others?

The questions are perennial ones, raised anew by a recently released roster of books. Philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists all weigh in, for there is much at stake.

How should we parent, educate, and legislate? What values should we hold, what social norms should we advance, and what means are necessary for helping people adopt them? Must we punish or can we merely entice? What are the resources of nature and the limits of nurture? What can we create ourselves to be?
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I grew up believing that there is a difference, a big one, between selfish and unselfish. Selfish is doing what you want when you want for yourself, following your desires and pursuing pleasure, often at others’ expense. Unselfish is generous, loving and kind, doing with others in heart and mind. Selfish is bad. Unselfish is good. Period.

I no longer believe it.

Scene 1. A girl attends summer camp with 350 other girls, ages 6 to 17. The camp counselors admonish the girls to value unselfishness, to put others first before themselves, and to compete for the coveted honor of being tapped as a model for all the rest. The campers scramble to be the most unselfish of all, missing the irony.

Wouldn’t the most unselfish act be to act selfishly and so let another girl win?

Scene 2. Leif, my five-month-old son, wants to nurse. Now. Writhing and wailing, he refuses any attempt to divert, distract, or entertain. I stop what I am doing and sit down to give him some milk. Is he being selfish and me not?

If he didn’t ask me for what he needed, he wouldn’t be giving me what I want: I want him to thrive.

Scene 3. A man is in a long-term relationship, afraid to ask his partner for what he needs. He keeps quiet, wanting to preserve the peace, and finds himself less and less able to feel the love for her he knew he once had. For the sake of the relationship, he has silenced his sensory spaces. She feels his distance, and is unhappy.

Before it is too late, he comes to the realization: if he asks for what he needs, he will have more to give. If he asks for what he needs, he will be giving her what she needs to succeed in what she wants to do: love him as he wants to be loved.

Sometimes the greatest gift we can give another is the gift of receiving he or she is giving us.

Sometimes our greatest pleasure lies in giving a gift that requires us to exercise an ability in ourselves that we didn’t know we had.

Scene 4. I tell my kids all the time: I am here to help you get what you want. Am I raising spoiled, self-righteous egotists who feel entitled to whatever they desire?

I don’t tell them that I will give them what they want. I tell them that I will help them get what they want. I will help them figure out what they want, and then help them test the idea, research it, plan for it, experiment with it, and try it out over time. For I have no idea what seeds my kids carry; I have no idea what genetic potentials for thinking and feeling and acting that passed dormant through me have been sparked to life by my partner’s chromosomal pairs.

What I do know is that I want whatever seeds are there in them to grow. I want the world to benefit from what they have to give. And I know that such seeds sprout in unprompted desires to spend time learning and creating in one realm or another. These desires can signal the presence of talents and skills, and the reserves of energy, interest, patience, and attention needed to help them develop. Their bodies know.

If I don’t help my kids move towards what they want, they will not learn what it is they have to give.
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Are humans selfish or unselfish?

It’s the wrong question to ask. There is no such dichotomy. The belief that there is rests on an illusion of ourselves as individual minds-in-bodies that we continue to rehearse as if it were true. It’s not.

Despite what we have learned to believe, and as I have noted before, we are not individuals first. We become humans who are able to think and feel and act as individuals by virtue of the relationships with others who have supported us in becoming who we are.

We are wired from the first inklings of our lives to create relationships with others as the condition for our own maximal health and well being. Who we are is nothing more or less than this impulse to connect with whatever and whomever will enable us to unfold what it is we have to give.

As a result, there is never a moment in which the “self” that acts is only and simply a “self,” and it is impossible to disentangle selfish from un. Every act we make is necessarily both. Our health and well being depends on the balance.

If we only act “for the other” we will soon have nothing to give. It we only act “for ourselves” we will miss out on the pleasure of connecting with those who will support us in our becoming.

The most “selfish” actions we undertake are those that create mutually life-enabling relationships with other persons. The most “unselfish” actions are those that nourish in us in the ability to give whatever it is we have to give.

Fruitful questions to ask, then, are these. What must we do to nourish our ability to keep giving the very best of what we have to give? How do we create mutually life-enabling relationships that will support us in exploring, improving, and becoming who we are?

The we-in-me wants to know.