Selfishness Can Save the World

The Widow’s Mite

When I was in primary school around age 7, we had a religious person come into our school each week to tell us a story in the morning assembly.

One of the stories that particularly stuck in my mind was the “Lesson of the Widow’s Mite”. This was the story of many people giving donations, a lot of them fairly large. Then a poor widow donates two small coins which is all she had.

The story, and most of the people in the hall that day agreed that this widow’s donation was much better than the other donations as she had given all she had whilst the wealthy still retained a lot of their wealth.

I had a problem with this. To me, this wasn’t a story about helping people at all. The donations lost their meaning. It was a story that focused on the loss to the donors, rather than on the gain of those receiving the donations.

It seemed illogical. By giving all she had, the widow had a negative impact upon the bigger picture as now she herself was in need of donations. The other donors however could use what they kept to maintain themselves and likely make more wealth to donate in future leading to more people being helped.

The Present Day

I think this idea of relative loss to ourselves compared to the actual gain to those we are helping has very much become part of our culture. It’s a culture that punishes self love and stands in opposition to activities such as taking selfies or treating yourself to something.

Now I am not suggesting we don’t help other people, far from it. Helping people is incredibly important and people should do it when they can. What I am suggesting however is that by focusing inwards and making sure we take care of ourselves before we focus so much on other people, not only do we ourselves live a much better life, but we increase our means to help those other people.

No longer is it the relative loss of sacrificing something to give somebody else a small gain, but the universal gain of both the person helping and the person being helped.

There are some areas in which it is considered vital and logical to help yourself before others, look at aircraft for example, they say to “put your own oxygen mask on first”. If you don’t help yourself first in that situation, you’ll probably be unconscious before you can help anybody else.

I think we need to apply this idea to other areas life. It’s not an immoral or wrong thing to do, it’s the logical thing to do. In my opinion, I think it is very much the moral thing to do. If we truly care about helping others as much as possible, it would make sense to put ourselves in the best position to do that.

Not only would this self first approach lead to more people being able to help in bigger amounts, but I think we’d also see less people requiring help. People need to learn that it’s okay to put themselves first and look after themselves first and foremost.

The Effects

Helping aside I think that the focus on collectives, groups, and sacrificing yourself for others has had an adverse effect on other areas of life.

In a world of individuals, a person’s actions are seen as those of an individual. In a world of groups and collectives, a person’s actions are seen as those of a group.

It creates a very much an us and them. Different people in different groups. Where I am from, most of the people there are very staunchly proud working class. They distance themselves from other groups of people and have very much built up an idea of different groups rather than everybody being an individual.

When considering rich people, the individual actions of certain rich people doing huge amounts to help make the world a better place are swept under the rug because as a group they are seen as evil and a blight to society.

This focus on groups and others is a negative experience. If an individual in this society does something seen as negative, it is seen as that group all being the same and being just as bad. People focus on groups and other people and so actions are seen as being the result of other people, not just the individual who performed the action.

So many people in this society think they have an opinion on how others live, and often in cases where they are helping people (often in the form of taxes rather than voluntary donations), they are very vocal about what exactly the people being helped are doing with this money. This is seen to the degree that laws are enacted preventing certain people from spending that money on things they want because of the old “I don’t pay my taxes for you to do that”.

We very much have a forced society of grouping and projecting outwards.

It makes people think they have a say in the lives of others, it leads to more people needing help and less people receiving help, and it leads to people being unfairly grouped together and stereotyped.

Selfishness can save the world. In my opinion, it’s immoral that we aren’t letting it.

Arcana Corvus is a technology entrepreneur and a co-founder of the software petitioning site On This Platform.