Time to stop “Protecting Our Legitimate Interests”

In school we are taught that the line between selfish behavior and respectful (with the community) behavior is sharp, and it is: jumping the que is selfish, following it is respectful. In most cases, it is easy to know if you are being selfish or not.

What is not taught in school, and what no body talks about, is that selfishness is, usually, relative.

Selfishness is relative to the group within which the act occurs so that an act is selfish only if it affects people from within that group. On the contrary, an act is not perceived as selfish if it is done on behalf of a group of people, even if it’s not respectful with other groups of people.

Applying tariffs to imported goods so that those produced by our own country’s companies can “jump the line” and reach the consumer more easily is not considered selfish.

And in general, each group of people, whether it is a nation, a political party, a company or a family, can take selfish decisions for themselves, and are even expected to do so, without the risk of being considered selfish by others.

There is even a sentence for it: “protecting our legitimate interests”.

Interestingly enough, one aspect of social advancement consist on expanding the group of people we consider “us”, so that selfish behavior gets reduced. Some years ago people would only care on protecting their own families, now they are much more sensitive to respect their own neighbors, colleagues, or even connationals.

“Protecting our legitimate interests” might make sense for closed and completely disconnected groups that share independent destinies, say tribes thousands of years ago, but it doesn’t make sense today, when it is clear that we all share a common destiny, and that you can see, feel and understand, that other groups, no matter how far and different they seem, are made of people “just like you”.

Acknowledging this is the most important social development step we can make as a society at a global scale.

We needed a commandment thousand of years ago to overcome our personal selfishness: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”. Maybe something similar would help us overcome our group selfishness today:

“You shall love and protect the members of other communities as you love and protect those of your own community”.

And, so, it’s time we stop seeing “protecting our legitimate interest” as a morally valid behavior and start seeing it as what it is: “protecting our selfish interests”, and is also time we see as selfish people those who say that sentence, instead of considering them our heroes.

Although nationalist and xenophobic political parties are one of the worst manifestation of this selfish behavior, there are several other cases which might not seem selfish at first sight, but that are. In fact, this group-selfish behavior is so common that is usually invisible to most of the people. Here are some examples:

• Political parties when they are insensitive to (or actively hide) the inconsistencies and problems derived from their own policies.
• Wealthy individuals when they are against effective social development policies.
• Worker unions when they defend the legal protection of the workers and ignore checking if they might have an impact on youth unemployment.
• Developed countries citizens when they complain about extreme poverty but are against opening their borders to give the poor access to the same opportunities they have.
• Football fans when they celebrate a goal, and ignore the disappointment it causes on the other team fans.
• Companies when they publish misleading publicity to make their product appear better compared to that of a competitor.
• And many more…