What is the exact meaning of selfishness and unselfishness?
Selfishness is the pursuance of one's own good at the expense of
others. A mistaken idea, which it is necessary to guard against, is
that selfishness must be conscious, deliberate. It is not uncommon
for a person accused of selfishness to say, or think, "This is an unjust
accusation; I have not had a selfish thought!" But unconscious
selfishness is by far the commoner sort; millions of essentially good-
hearted people are guilty of selfish acts through thoughtlessness and
stagnant sympathy. Conscious cruelty is rare compared with moral
insensibility. It cannot be too often repeated that selfishness is
not a way of feeling about people, it is a way of acting toward them.
To be wholly free from selfish conduct necessitates insight into the
needs and feelings of others as well as a vague good will toward them.
The girl who allows her mother to drudge that she may have immaculate
clothes, the mother who keeps her son at home when he ought to be given
the opportunity of a wider life, is conscious only of love; but she
is really putting her own happiness before that of the loved one. The
owner of the vilest tenement houses is sometimes a generous and
benevolent-minded man, the luxuriously rich are often honest and glad
to confer favors, the political boss is full of the milk of human
kindness; but the superficial or adventitious altruism of such men
should not blind us to their fundamental, though often entirely
unrealized, selfishness.
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