ALTRUISM ALTERS GREED

Part of being greedy is not being able to see the common good. Sometimes I feel that people who are strongly focused develop tunnel vision.  I make an excuse for my conservative friends who, in the manner of Ayn Rand, think only they count and other people are just there. Like animals, the idea that other people matter never enters their mind; survival of the fittest. However, as part of our humanization we have “evolved” or learned to recognize that others exist therefore they do matter. We do well if they do well.

Human greed is not a matter of hate or dislike, it is a matter of bestial selfishness; the last pork chop on the plate is mine because I am the strongest and I am hungry; therefore, it is morally right that I have it. That is much different from the person who takes the last pork chop because he wants to hurt the person who does not have one. The ugly truth seems to be that this later form of exaggerated greed somehow evolved counter to an otherwise evolving world of altruism; it is something we could label as immoral. Perhaps, it is not the intent to harm anyone but evolved as a distorted throwback to the primitive sense of storage an outgrowth of developing memory. I don’t care about you but I know that in the future I will be hungry and will want that pork chop. A find this much more palatable than the Calvinist or religious interpretation of man being born evil. Being born with bestial greed and then overcoming it with learned or evolved altruism is much more biological. 

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