SELFISH – to be or not to be?

(A psychological, social, moral and scientific perspectives)

Dr Kuldip Sidhu, PhD

Part 3 of the series

Rosen and Deuter say that the key to healthy selfishness is being self-focused instead of self-involved. Schedule some “me time,” and you might discover these four benefits:

1. You’ll be healthier

Selfish people tend to take better care of themselves instead of giving too much energy away serving the needs of everyone else, says Rosen. He interviewed several executives for his book and found strong physical health to be a common trait of a good leader.

“Instead of spending all of their time at work, these men and women carve out time for themselves,” he says. “For example, Dennis Nally is global chairman of PwC (formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers), and he travels more than any other person I know. Exercises all the time, and eats well. He knows in order to sustain his travel agenda he has to take the time to take care of himself.”

2. You’ll have an advantage when it comes to leadership roles

Studies have shown that acting in your own self-interest you may give you an advantage in leadership roles, says Deuter.

“Selfish people are more confident and less likely to give up on goals,” she says. “They go after what they want unapologetically, and they’re not afraid to ask for the raise or promotion.”

Rosen agrees. “Selfish people have a drive to succeed,” he says. “There is often a higher purpose to be a great leader–taking care of other people. But if you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t care for others. Being selfish is critical.”

3. You’ll have better relationships

People will have a harder time manipulating or taking advantage of you if you’re selfish, says Deuter. “Setting boundaries means knowing where you end and other person begins,” she says. “If you have trouble being self-focused, you might have trouble saying no.”

“To be a healthy, grounded person, you need to be selfish,” says Rosen. “If you’re looking to a partner to fill your emotional needs, your relationship is vulnerable. The best relationships happen when two adults show up and enjoy each other.”

4. You’ll be happier

Selfish people spend their time doing activities they like to do.

“If you have a well-developed sense of who you are, what you enjoy and the ability to communicate this to others, you’ll be a happier person,” says Deuter. “Putting yourself first is not a negative quality; it’s your job to take care of yourself and get what you need.”

Rosen says Linda Rabbitt, founder of Rand Construction, is a good example of someone who takes care of herself emotionally. “She is very self-aware and is always asking for feedback,” he says. “And she’s a generally positive person. When you’re able to focus within, you’re much more authentic and much happier.”

Loretta G. Breuning in her book, ‘Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels’ explains about the selfishness of altruism. Altruism feels good because it stimulates dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin. We’re tempted to repeat altruistic gestures whether or not they help those they purport to help because our brain is designed to repeat behaviours that feel good. This conundrum has been called ‘Pathological Altruism’. When you understand the neurochemistry of altruism, the selfish motives are clear. Many people have also learned to think it’s selfish to focus on your own needs.

‘But natural selection built a brain that also rewards you with a good feeling when you do what it takes to promote the survival of your genes.’ See later more discussion on selfish genes.

SOCIAL, MORAL, ETHICAL

The prosperity and progress of any society depends on how strong the bonds of love and sympathy are among its people. The education system plays a vital role in this regard. It is strongly realised that young children are a part of society and they cannot be successful if they don’t care for others.

It is a matter of common observation that if the members of a given society are strongly connected with one another through the bonds of brotherhood and oneness, the society remains firm and united during the days of adversity and crisis. Such people don’t lose hope in any calamity and they remain steadfast in any testing hour. They put a combined effort in steering their society towards development and progress. Their goal and efforts are uniform. Such society is an ideal one. And their unity becomes their greatest strength. On the contrary, a society where the forces of individualism and isolation loom large, is a deeply broken and weak one. History tells us that societies fall when there is the dominance of selfishness, when people live for themselves and attach no importance to the wellbeing of their countrymen. Hence, it is not difficult to conclude that anything that promotes wanton love for one’s own benefits is destructive for the whole society.

However, here is a leadership lesson from Harvard: Be selfish. Be very selfish.

Selfishness is typically defined as “concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself.” If someone hears that the CEO is being selfish, the thought that is likely to come to mind is, “The leader is maximizing personal financial rewards even at the cost of the company’s interests.” If that is the case, it is unfortunate and unacceptable. But there is a fundamentally different way to view selfishness. If leaders selfishly take care of their feelings, it will benefit not only them, but also everyone around them, including the companies they lead.

In order to achieve this, leaders must stop harming themselves and, instead, start benefiting themselves. Consider these questions: What are the mental aspects of selfishness that will help us as leaders? What are the mental states that cause us harm that we should reduce or eliminate, and the mental states that will give us benefits that we should acquire or increase?

The first step in becoming a selfish leader is to remove the harmful emotions and negativities that distract us from clear and effective decision making. Take anger, for example. Anger releases neurotransmitter chemicals known as catecholamines that give us a burst of energy. Our heart rate accelerates, our blood pressure rises, and our rate of breathing increases. Our attention narrows and becomes locked onto the target of our anger, and we can’t pay attention to anything else. We are now ready to fight or flee. In the jungle, all this would have been very helpful, but in the modern world where it gets bottled up behind a desk, it has nowhere to go and thus gets tangled within — or worse, spent outwardly toward our employees. The adrenaline-caused arousal that occurs during anger lasts many hours, sometimes days, and lowers our anger threshold, making it easier for us to get angry again later on. In other words, we can easily get trapped in the vicious circle of anger. Just ask yourself a simple question: “As a leader, have I ever made a good decision when I was angry and out of control?”

All negative states of the mind have similar effects. They create a tendency to suck us into a vicious circle. This list of negative states includes hatred, ill will, revenge, fear, ego, entitlement, jealousy, restlessness, anxiety, and depression. The chemicals that cause these feelings can build up over time, and the result is a whole host of psychosomatic diseases. By realizing that we are harming ourselves through these feelings and attempting to stop them for our own good, we are in effect helping ourselves and helping others at the same time. After all, we distribute what we have, magnified many times over. What you feed grows. If you feed anger, it grows. So, when we have these negative states, we spread those negativities to others around us. This saps morale and reduces productivity. In other words, ‘the most selfish thing we can do — for ourselves and for others — is to reduce or eliminate negative state’.

The second step is to selfishly benefit oneself, and the biggest benefits we can give ourselves are positive states of mind: empathy, kindness, compassion, goodwill, pardon, ego lessness, and gratitude. These positive states of mind release serotonin, oxytocin, and other related chemicals called endorphins (feel good neuropeptides similar to opioids) that reduce stress, improve our immune system, and drastically reduce our tendencies for psychosomatic diseases. As leaders, when we have positive states of mind, we start distributing those to others around us. We distribute what we have, magnified many times over. This creates a more congenial atmosphere, and improves morale and boosts productivity.

Equally important for leaders and decision makers is the fact that these chemicals improve the clarity of the mind significantly, and help us to connect the dots and be creative, understand problems from multiple perspectives, get to the depth of problems quicker, and make quick decisions that are good for us and good for others. Who would have thought that focusing on yourself first can do so much?

There are many ways we can master this level of selfishness. One such approach is a meditation technique called vipassana, which means to see things as they really are (and not as they appear to be, as we want them to be, or as we imagine them to be). Business judgment of leaders is all about getting to quickly decipher what is not so evident at the surface level. When a leader is selfish, there is nothing clouding his or her understanding of the current reality as it is — not as he or she would like it to be, as it appears to be, or as the media describes it to be.

A word of caution: This is easy to understand, yet difficult to practice. But it’s incredibly worthwhile. Awareness of the fact that negative states harm us — whether or not they harm the person the negativity was targeted at — opens the doors to change.

‘We spread what we have within. When we are angry, we don’t limit that anger to ourselves. We magnify it and throw it on others. Similarly, when we have compassion, we spread that compassion. So as leaders, it is particularly important for us to be selfish — to care for our own state of being over anything else — so that we can then spread the selfishness far and wide’.

I have always seen people first care for themselves and then for others. On the contrary, it doesn’t seem wrong as self-interest is indispensable. But is acting for own interest and not caring about others, immoral and unethical.

Within ethics, there are a few different approaches one can take.

1. Aristotle- as stated above, virtues are found in the middle. Thus, what’s between selfishness and selflessness (altruistic) is what Erich Fromm describes as self-love, which is being able to love others as long as you can respect/”love” oneself.
2. Ayn Rand- her belief is that we must be selfish to be ethical. This creates development in the society. Ideally, this would be absolutely great for true capitalist market. However, to see this failing when put into action, see the deregulation of different industries in houndorus and the U.S. during the industrial revolution.
3. Utilitarian- if the selfishness helps the common good, then it’s good. However, selfishness and utilitarian ethics are incompatible in a general sense because you must always be following the common good. That following cannot always occur in selfishness (this could be a question by itself).
4. Categorical Imperative (Kant)- imagine if everyone was selfish. We all would always try for what we want and not necessarily what society needs. With this, the society would not be able to surviving long term. Assuming we were still selfish after that, everyone would probably be trying to kill everyone all the time, which would cause the human race to end. Thus, selfishness could be no more. Selfishness leading to its own end creates a contradiction. Thus, selfishness is unethical. But according to Hedonistic altruism- we’re all selfish, but it can be used practically towards a good and moral end.

SCIENTIFIC

For a century, the primary account of evolution has emphasised the gene’s role as architect: a gene creates a trait that either proves advantageous or not, and is thus selected for, changing a species for the better, or not. Thus, a genetic blueprint creates traits and drives evolution.

This gene-centric view, as it is known, is the one we all learnt in high school. It’s the one you hear or read of in almost every popular account of how genes create traits and drive evolution. It comes from Gregor Mendel and the work he did with peas in the 1860s. Since then, this notion has assumed the weight, solidity, and rootedness of an immovable object.

But a number of biologists argue that we need to replace this gene-centric view with one that more heavily emphasises the role of gene expression — that we need to see the gene less as an architect and more as a member of a collaborative remodelling and maintenance crew. Thus, the replicability/functionality of genes is more important and relevant and the way they replicate and expressed. Some tend to replicate more than others and become larger part of gene pool in the population and hence called the ‘selfish genes.

 

‘If selfish genes are the part of our genetics, then why these should be treated as bad given that biology works in the most efficient and economical way for us.

 

The concept of the “selfish gene” has been around for more than three decades. First coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, the term describes sequences of DNA that spread by forming additional copies of itself within the genome and make no specific contribution to the reproductive success of the organism in which it is found.

 

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs. Dawkins argues, a group (or a species) can survive only if individuals behave in their genetic self-interest and form alliances, and make sure that their genes are passed on. And that the genes have the conditions and opportunities to become hardier and replicate themselves more fluently. According to him, “human altruism develops as a way of ensuring the survival of one’s genes. If I sacrifice my life for two or three of my brothers, I am ensuring the survival of my genes, since my brothers share half my genes.” Selfishness for Dawkins was something of a look to the future survival of the family unit, not necessarily the species as a whole. For Rand however, selfishness was a bit more practical and rooted not so much in the future, but in the present. She believed that “the truly selfish person is a self-respecting, self-supporting human being who neither sacrifices others to himself nor sacrifices himself to others”. Let us understand that altruistic behaviour is common throughout the animal kingdom, particularly in species with complex social structures. For example, vampire bats regularly regurgitate blood and donate it to other members of their group who have failed to feed that night, ensuring they do not starve. In numerous bird species, a breeding pair receives help in raising its young from other ‘helper’ birds, who protect the nest from predators and help to feed the fledglings. Vervet monkeys give alarm calls to warn fellow monkeys of the presence of predators, even though in doing so they attract attention to themselves, increasing their personal chance of being attacked. In social insect colonies (ants, wasps, bees and termites), sterile workers devote their whole lives to caring for the queen, constructing and protecting the nest, foraging for food, and tending the larvae. Such behaviour is maximally altruistic: sterile workers obviously do not leave any offspring of their own—so have personal fitness of zero—but their actions greatly assist the reproductive efforts of the queen.

 

But Darwin’s selection theory according to Dawkins explains altruistic behaviour as a clever strategy devised by selfish genes as a way of increasing their representation in the gene-pool, at the expense of other genes. According to Dawkins, we (our bodies) are simply the host of our selfish genes perhaps the same way as many viruses use human body as a host to propagate themselves, mutate and become more virulent.

 

Surely this means that the behaviours in question are only ‘apparently’ altruistic, however, they are ultimately the result of genic self-interest? 

 

Perhaps this will become clearer once an advanced understanding of the function of the genes i.e., their silencing and activation by epigenetic mechanism (environmental effects on genes that could be transmitted and expressed at the transgenerational level – also called ‘imprinting’ or memory of genes), and the continued decoding of the human genome and our knowledge of its complex interrelationship with environmental factors (epigenetics – on and off switches of genes) are properly decoded. It is envisaged this debate of ‘selfishness and altruism’ will require an open mind, innovative spirit and creativity from researchers across many walks of academia to give a scientific perspective to change the humanity for good.

 

I also recommend you to watch at your leisure, the following remarkable documentary on epigenetics from BBC, ‘The Ghost in Your Genes’:

 

https://ihavenotv.com/the-ghost-in-your-genes

 

 

Try also:

 

ALTRUISM QUIZ FOR YOU:

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/quizzes/take_quiz/altruism