Constructive Selfishness

Svenson left this comment on the site a while back:

I need a word like ‘greed’, except that it means pursuing what’s truly best for yourself by pursuing what’s truly best for others. I feel like this is a concept that should be pushed into our language toolkit.

Reading the label on Dr. Bronner’s soap during my bath this afternoon, I found a line that seems to be a pretty good match. Here’s a page with OCR’ed text from the bottle. The line in question:

“Unless constructive-selfish I work hard, like Mark Spitz, perfecting first me, absolute nothing can help perfect me!!”

{Also check out the amazing documentary, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox}


- END -

ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)

This entry was written by happy thanksgiving, y'all!, posted on October 6, 2007 at 4:39 pm.

permalink.

RSS feed for this post.

Comments are closed, but you can leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

6 Comments

  1. Russellji
    Posted October 7, 2007 at 2:51 am | Permalink

    How about Selfull! Not quite selfish nor selfless.

    Requires a bit of innerstanding as opposed to understanding.

    Regards,

    Russellji

  2. alistair
    Posted October 7, 2007 at 8:20 am | Permalink

    unconditional love for the self.

    covers how we choose to relate to others, but most importantly how we relete to our self.

    imagine if everyone was doing this all the time.

  3. Brooke
    Posted October 7, 2007 at 12:16 pm | Permalink

    Constructive Selfishness. That’s good. Selfful, possibly even better (when you are full, your cup overfloweth). There does need to be a term like that. Totally! There needs to be new terms that reconcile all these false moral dichotomies, the kind that create one-dimensional characters (”good guys” and “bad guys”).

    pursuing what’s truly best for yourself by pursuing what’s truly best for others.

    And also, pursuing what’s truly best for others by pursuing what’s truly best for yourself. It works both ways.

    You don’t ultimately do yourself any good (in the true sense) if you’re not adding value to others’ lives, loving others and serving the greater good. And you won’t be much good (in the true sense) to anyone else if you’re not taking care of yourself, being true to yourself, mastering yourself and pursuing the life you truly want.

  4. Tim Boucher
    Posted October 8, 2007 at 11:42 am | Permalink

    The invisible hand is a metaphor coined by the economist Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations and other writings, Smith claims that, in a free market, an individual pursuing his own self-interest tends to also promote the good of his community as a whole through a principle that he called “the invisible hand”. He argued that each individual maximising revenue for himself maximises the total revenue of society as a whole, as this is identical with the sum total of individual revenues.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand

  5. Svenson.
    Posted October 8, 2007 at 7:50 pm | Permalink

    Wow, look at these responses! I’ve harvested a huge amount of valuable thoughts from you guys just due to that little post. Thanks.

    The topic here made me question why I post here though, and I don’t do it with any sense of self sacrifice, or “for” anybody, I just do it because I want to. So this is all kind of an example of Selfulness in itself! Gracias!

  6. Inestimable
    Posted October 10, 2007 at 6:20 am | Permalink

    I stumbled across the phrase “Selfish Altruism” this morning while going through my blog feeds:

    To say all behavior is strictly selfish would be misleading. It fails to account for acts of charity, ethics and why people don’t just cheat, swindle and lie all the time. Selfish altruism is a broader category that covers why people do nice things as a way to get what they want.

    By studying primates, researchers noticed four main categories of selfish altruism. I believe they are the same categories we use, even if slightly more sophisticated:

    1. Dominance - Some primates will give help as a way of asserting dominance in the group. It is as if they are saying, “Look at how powerful I am that I can give some of my resources to help you.”
    2. Reciprocity - You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. The idea is that I do a favor for you with the assumption it will be returned one day. If the cost to me is less than the benefit towards you, I might help you even if I can’t predict an immediate payback.
    3. Trade - If we both have something the other person wants, we have a reason to interact. While reciprocity is vague on the details of a payback, trade is direct.
    4. Familial - It makes sense, from an evolutionary perspective, to help those who might share your genes.

    By looking through this lens of selfish altruism, you can better make decisions. Viewing people as completely uncaring or selfish is incomplete. But expecting people to think of you constantly and do nice things for free is dangerous.

    From: Lifehack.org | Four Rules to Understand What Makes People Tick

Public Domain Where Applicable, Copy Left Where Not, Universal Free Realms Everyware Else for 2009 and for forever.the timboucher experience. No rights reserved.