Dear Editor, We are all self-interested. It’s about survival. We are driven to get what it takes to have food, shelter, clothing, and medical care; the minimal requirements to continue to exist. Pure self-interest is about ME ALONE.
Lots of purely self-interested fellows are on a second or third marriage, because existence is all about THEM alone. Others can look after themselves. Responsibility, community, society, these are foreign notions to the purely self-interested. It’s a lonely, mostly pointless way to live.
There’s another kind of self-interest called ENLIGHTENED Self-Interest. This tells us it does no good to have all the gold in a community that is wracked with disease, hunger, and despair. This tells us our well-being, our meaning, our joy and fulfillment does not come strictly from within.
