Selfishness - Holier Than Thou or Scared Little Child?

 Bienvenido a mi blog, and I am feeling a bit melancholy today for all the people in the world labelled as selfish and excommunicated from society constantly. As I was sitting there, waiting for my breakfast, I realised something quite peculiar. We as a society tend to discriminate not just on race, color, language, cast, socio-economic status, but also on the basis of ideologies. Simply put, when you see someone with a different view of the world from your own you tend to judge them for everyone thinks that they are the ones in the right. Every now and then, a man comes around that looks at the world differently and you feel awed by him, mesmerized, entranced even. But that is rare, the more common situation is when you consider yourself as a very generous person, a very kind and nice person, come across a "selfish" person. Bet you a hundred bucks that you are thinking of that one person in your life, maybe more than one, but you surely have encountered someone who is so selfish and jealous of others that they simply want all the attention and everything that comes with it on themselves and nowhere else. And you wonder, how can someone be so self-centered, right? And I don't know about the rest of the world, but some of us think to set it right, to make their behaviour better. Our incentives are usually the fact that doing so would make our lives easier. Imagine how much more peaceful your life would be if that one selfish bitch that you have to interact with everyday for work reasons or because they are a friend of a friend would just think about others for a change, right?

Well, surprise surprise, they actually think a lot more about others than we realise. Let's break it down, shall we? Ignoring the times where they are kind to someone for personal gain, or those rare moments of compassion they exude, the selfish folk actually think quite a lot about others. Not to be confused with narcissists, to be clear. For narcissism isn't simply selfishness, there's a few other components to it like grandiosity and preoccupation with power and beauty. Selfish people are often a result of their insecurities, and how can one develop insecurities if they don't compare themselves to others around them. So perhaps, they aren't selfish because they only think of themselves, maybe they are selfish because they think of others and feel inferior in comparison. This changes quite a few things when you think about it. It changes perhaps the way you respond to them, it changes the way we understand them and in turn realise that they are, simply, just like us in more ways than we ever thought possible. They simply let their intrusive thoughts win more often than we do. When a person chooses to act selfishly, they possibly aren't doing it so that they can benefit from it, but instead so that the other person involved doesn't benefit. In their own twisted way, they do think about others, and this isn't always true, yes. But realising it enables us to treat them accordingly and maybe make our experience with them a bit easier. Perhaps the next time I see someone rob me of an experience by being selfish, I'll remind myself that they needed to feel superior a lot more than I needed that seat. Because, at heart, they do feel immense levels of inferiority and a great deal of complex from people around. Perhaps indulging a bit and letting guilt and their inner sense of compassion hold them accountable is a better way to deal with it rather than calling them out and rewarding this behaviour and reinforcing it as a way to get a reaction...