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 Post subject: Selfishness
PostPosted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 4:53 am 
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Lady Scryer
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Joined: Sun Nov 17, 2002 5:11 pm
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Location: Michigan, USA
Well, my old topic on evil seems to have vanished with the ezboard hacker attack.

Hopefully this one will interest people and stick around a bit longer.

Here is a quote from a wonderful book called Inversions from science fiction writer Iain Banks:

Quote:

The only sin is selfishness. So said the good Doctor. When she first expressed this opinion I was young enough intially to be puzzled and then to be Impressed at what I took to be her profundity.

It was only later, in my middle-age, when she was long gone from us, that I began to suspect that the opposite is just as true. Arguably there is a sense in which selfishness is the only true virtue and therefore that - as opposites are given to cancelling each other out - selfishness is finally neutral. Indeed valueless, outside a supporting moral context. In later years still - my maturity, if you will, or my old age, if you wish - I have with some reluctance again come to respect the Doctor's point of view, and to agree with her, tentatively at least, that selfishness is the root of most evil, if not all.

Of course, I always knew what she meant. That it is when we put our own interests before those of others that we are most likely to do wrong, and that there is a commonality of guilt whether the crime is a child stealing coins from his mother's purse or an Emperor ordering genocide. With either act, and all those in between, we say: Our gratification matters more to us than whatever distress or anguish may be caused to you and yours by our actions. In other words, that our desire outranks your suffering.

My middle-years objection was that only by acting on our desires, by attempting to bring about what pleasures us because it feels agreeable, we are able to create wealth, comfort, happiness and what the good Doctor would have termed in that vague, generalizing way of hers "progress".

Eventually, though, I came to admit to myself that, while my objection might be true, it is insufficiently all-embracing to cancel out the Doctor's assertion entirely, and that while it may sometimes be a virtue, selfishness by its nature is more often a sin, or a direct cause of sin.

We never like to think of ourselves as being wrong, just misunderstood. We never like to think that we are sinning, merely that we are making hard decisions, and acting upon them. Providence is the name of the mystical, divinely inhuman Court before which we wish our actions to be judged, and which we hope will agree with us in our estimation both of our own worth or otherwise of our behavior.

I suspect the good Doctor (you see, I judge her too in naming her so) did not believe in Providence. I was never entirely sure what she did believe in, though I was always quite convinced that she believed in something. Perhaps, despite all she said about selfishness, she believed in herself and nothing else. Perhaps she believed in this Progress that she talked about, or perhaps in some strange way as a foreigner, she believed in us, in the people she lived with and cared for, in a way that we did not believe in ourselves.

Did she leave us better off or not? I think, undeniably better. Did she do this through selfishness or selflessness? I believe that in the end it does not matter in the least, except as it might have affected her own peace of mind. That was another thing she taught me. That you are what you do. To Providence - or Progress or the Future or before any other sort of judgement apart from our own conscience - what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by.



(edited for my usual poor typing/spelling)
******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i>Edited by: Duchess of Malfi  at: 6/18/05 9:44 pm
</i>


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 Post subject: Re: Selfishness
PostPosted: Sun Jun 12, 2005 11:06 pm 
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Master Pilot
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I'd have to disagree. That, or I'm a very evil person. I believe everything stems from the self. Until you're aware of yourself, you cannot be effectual. No, the problem is being self-absorbed and so short-sighted you can't see outside of yourself. If people didn't believe that "I" end where my skin does, there would be no crime... or at least very little, the only crimes committed by people who don't like themselves. Of course, you could argue that that's already the case. ________________
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and cleansing I've endured within my shadow. Change is coming. Now is my time. Listen to my muscle memory. Contemplate what I've been clinging to. -Tool, "Forty-Six & Two" <i></i>


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 Post subject: Re: Selfishness
PostPosted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 4:49 am 
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Lady Scryer
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Location: Michigan, USA
I have never thought of you as any sort of an evil person, Syl.

I think some selfiishness is a normal part of being human. It helps us survive and/or protect those who are dear to us in times of war, famine, and other disasters. It can help us strive to work harder and better our lot in life.

I think you are onto something when you said "self absorbed". When selfishness becomes a potentially evil thing is when people are hurt for no real reason other than another person's greedy desires... ******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
<i></i>


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