This is a fun thread. I have read the whole thing, unfortunately, but I’m particularly interested in the twisted sentiment pushed by OP more than his inconsistency or his ability to understand that non-religious people do, in fact, exist. It really bothers me that someone asserting what he asserted can so loosely define self-interest so that it covers literally every decision you ever make in order to try and prove his claim rather than actually craft a coherent argument, but it’s been done for millennia in order to make humans appear as some scourge-of-the-Earth breed of sinners. The idea that we operate solely and always out of self-interest exists in order to convince us to repent, follow the rules provided to us, and believe in things, such as God or faith, that we otherwise would never even consider. Religion is, as it turns out, among the greatest drivers of self-interest that ever existed among humans, and Christianity in particular tells us that if we don’t repent and spend our lives trying to make up for sins that we never actually committed then we are re going to hell. That is supposed to make us beings of self-interest.
Charity is a funny one, because yeah, a lot of people do charity work out of self interest. When I was 13, I had to do a certain number of hours of community service in order to have my Bar Mitzvah. In the last four years, I have been doing constant community service at a local 501c3, a charitable organization, that I won’t name specifically because I profit substantially from it even though I have no financial stake in it at all. As of right now, I participate in a partnership fund where a little bit of money from every one of my paychecks is withheld by the company I work for. If something were to happen to an employee of the company, the fund would help them stay on their feet while they can’t work. I contribute to that not because I want to surrender parts of my paycheck to a fund that I will never need since I have good insurance and a good support system but because I know the owner of my franchise quite well and I’ve seen him damn near strangle new employees that don’t want to contribute to the fund.
On the other side of the coin, I was 9 years old when I gave away one of my favorite stuffed animals to a friend’s sister whose house had just burned to a crisp with said friend along with her mom and dad inside it. The sister happened to be sleeping over at someone else’s house. 9-year-old me got absolutely nothing out of that deal; in fact, if you’re thinking of charity as a tradeoff, you might say that I lost something in that deal because I surrendered something dear to me, something that I had never been without overnight in my entire life and something that helped me sleep as I battled what would later turn out to be diagnosed as bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. I had to learn how to sleep again and survive without that little bear. It took a long time.
I was 15 years old when I was in Chicago on a school trip, hungry as fucking hell because I was too picky of an eater to eat lunch at the place we went to. Before we got on the Megabus back home, we all got Jimmy John’s. I love Jimmy John’s. I was just about to dig into that BLT, cookie, fries, and an All-American way-too-large soda when I saw a guy with no legs in a mangled wheelchair covered by a tattered windbreaker and a newspaper to protect him from the wind off the lake in January. I gave him my lunch, because I would eat when I got off the bus. He probably wouldn’t.
I have done more charitable things than those, and I’m sure that I’ve done grossly horrible things to people that tip the scales the other direction. I don’t gain anything from these things. (Sure, I posted them here, therefore I did these things, years ago, in my self interest, because I knew down the road that I would be using them to make a point, right?) A fuzzy feeling? Cool, it wears off. Feeling good about myself? Feelings of self-validation? Do you truly think me so terrible a person that the only reason I could do something good for another human being is in order to validate myself and make myself feel like more than I truly am?
In some ways, as pangloss and others have said, you can try your best to be right by defining self-interest as vaguely as you like, allowing yourself room to twist it when you want to. You should feel bad about playing a part in convincing people that all they have driving them is their own interest and that they cannot do the good things that they do simply for the sake of being a good person, doing good for the world, or making change for something that they believe in. It has to be because it helps them in some way, even if they don’t consciously realize it. It’s that fuzzy feeling, or the fact that the cause, even if they don’t live to see it come to life, somehow benefits them. That is a gross belief that perpetuates so many irrational thoughts and ideologies.
If I were acting in my own self-interest and only in my own self-interest, this thread would be locked, fall deep into the depths of this never ending abyss that we call the forum, and never cross anyone’s minds ever again. Alas.
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Who wants to play 1600?
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