Be Selfish.
Be selfish. Look out for yourself above anything else and do everything in your power to make sure that you have the best future possible, the best of all futures, the best the world has to offer. Don’t settle for pedestrian selfishness, the kind that keeps your wallets fat and hearts empty. Every one of us will die someday; only some will be remembered long after that. So be selfish about your legacy.
You, America: be selfish. Invest jealously in your citizens. Mine their creativity, drive, and passion; keep them healthy and motivated, connected and educated. Buy their hopes and dreams to make your own, and remind them that only America could treat them so well.
Be selfish. Steal the world’s immigrants. Make America’s future the brightest it can be by stealing the best and brightest from every country on the planet. Steal their physicists and doctors and scientists, their thinkers. Lure them in with the promise of freedom, and keep them here with high paying jobs. I don’t care what you look like or what you believe, so long as you make my country better.
You, millennial: be selfish. Post your donations on Facebook for the likes. Make sure everyone sees. Protest and march and take selfies and post those for the likes. Join an organization that cool kids are joining, because it makes you feel good. Tell everyone about it. Show people how popular it makes you. How connected it makes you. Bask in that adoration. Post your selfies, buy your t-shirts. Show off your protest gear. Make it cool to care again.
You, lawmaker: be selfish. Sign bills into law that you want to be remembered for. Secure your legacies. Make generations remember your name when they think of the freedoms your actions have awarded them. Look at the story being told, and make sure you are remembered as a hero, not a villain.
You, wealthy elite: be selfish. Build great, memorable things in your name. Build a women’s shelter. Put your name on the building. Pay an artist to sculpt a bronze bust of you to put in the lobby. Make generations of women think of your name when they think of safety.
People criticize the wealthy, saying that your wealth makes you selfish. I think you aren’t selfish enough. You have mountains of wealth, but nobody can see how great you are. No one will speak your praises. No one will remember you. No one but you can secure your legacy, so show off. Be that mover of men. Be the Rockefellers and Carnegies of our generation. Start universities and grants and endowments. Fund the futures of people who will go on to remember you forever as great men and women.
And you, Mr. President: be selfish. You already know how, but you’re thinking too small. And you have fought so long for greatness, and found it so distant, that you would confuse fear with love. So now, you must choose how you want to be remembered. You can have that thing you want, that undying adoration and affection, that praise that accompanies good work. You can be remembered as a great man, a terrible tyrant, or an ineffectual buffoon.
But we will remember you. And right now, we will not remember you fondly. Your name, worse than being forgotten, will be dragged through the book of history like toilet paper stuck to a boot if you do not take the time to listen—not to the circle of sycophants you’ve surrounded yourself with, but to the people of the country you were chosen to lead. It is the steepest price you’ll have to pay. You will have to admit to being wrong. You will have to grow. The growing will hurt, more than you could know.
But know this: we remember the people that build roads, not walls. Roads are travelled everyday, the sinew connecting people to people. Walls are always forgotten. No one remembers who built the Berlin Wall. Everyone remembers who tore it down.
So be selfish. The world is watching.
