Selfishness Like Any Other Sort of Human

Selfishness

Like any other sort of human vice, selfishness -- or the excessive concern with one's own individual desires and appetites -- can be threatening to the established social order if it slips out of control. Our own definition of selfishness takes into account its social effects: we establish selfishness as a vice by emphasizing not only the excessive self-regard it demonstrates, but also the excessive disregard for the well-being of others that accompanies it. Selfishness can thus be considered as an active potential threat to the established order under certain circumstances, but here we reach a paradox. The structure of American society is such that the economic and ideological system which serves as its underpinning, and which we may loosely define as "capitalistic," to a certain degree presents selfishness as a virtue, or at least regards it as an amoral process with no deleterious real-world effects for society. I hope to indicate, with reference to examples from both literature and life in America, that selfishness poses a distinct problem to our established social order. But to the extent that selfishness poses us with a problem, I hope to demonstrate that it might also indicate the way forward toward some solution.

Let me begin by posing a hypothetical scenario: an individual finds his own desires or appetites come into conflict with those of the state. Now of course it is not literarally possible for a social construction such as "society" or the "state" to have desires and appetites of its own: we are engaged in a form of rhetorical personification, in which the collective will which finds its expression in official state policy is conceived to have the same modus operandi as the individual will. Yet this is a false equivalency, as human beings are capable of all sorts of complicated responses to the issue of volition, including the pursuit of activities not obviously indicative of pure self-interest. What, for example, do we make of suicide? This must be an expression of individual will, yet it is not an activity that the state allows to exist unregulated, and committing suicide is not defined as a right. It is, in fact, a gesture of the individual's abdication from the state, and if we permitted the free exercise of such then it is possible that the state would collapse entirely: no-one considers it a good idea for the American government to encourage suicide. But there are so many different forms of suicide, it becomes hard to say whether suicide represents selfishness in its most socially problematic form. If I may take one ambiguous example, as presented in history and literature, then I would suggest an examination of the case of Giles Corey -- a real-world victim of the seventeenth century Salem witch trials, also depicted in Arthur Miller's classic drama about those trials, The Crucible. The litigious Corey, falsely accused of witchcraft, decides to respond with a form of passive resistance during the trial, refusing to give evidence which may incriminate him. Because of his litigious nature, it can be argued that Corey knows well the legal penalty for his failure to speak: it is the archaic method of "peine forte et dure" which entails physical torture of the subject by piling stones upon his chest in an effort to force testimony. Yet Giles Corey -- in life as in Arthur Miller's play -- refused to speak unto the very end of his life: his only words are the grim invitation for