Three epiphanies. They are what they are.
First, allow me to define selfish, as it has a rather bad EQ at this
time in society. For the purpose of my discussion, the term selfish
purely means that what you have done is done for yourself. Selfish
behaviour can also be charitable. A PURELY selfish act is one that
is done entirely for the self, and benefits no one else (it may even
harm others intentionally), and it is never charitable. PURE
selfishnes is a realistic extreme, not a hypothetical one.
PURE selflessness would be other extreme, but is is entirely
hypoethetical, as PURE selflessness is impossible to acheive.
Anything you do, no matter how much it benefits someone else and how,
much you give away to accomplish it, benefits you. You know this even
as you do it. Every action you take is weighed against a list of
possible consequences as you do it (though it is not always something
that is well thought out, so the consequences you consider may not
be all the consequences available).
Think about it... aren't you taught from a very young age to do
nice things for others? Consider the child who is taught that sharing
should make them feel good by some PBS television show. They're having it
spelled out right then. "This will make you feel good about yourself."
So when they grow up to be a young person, they help an old lady across
the street because it makes them feel good. It may help the old lady, sure,
but they will be happier for having done it.
Let's consider an extreme now. Consider that someone has asked you
to the wedding of someone who has, and will probably always be,
rude to you. You don't even like weddings (in this scenario). You
would happily watch the bride and maid-of-honor die horribly in
some scene from an 80s slasher flick. And yet, your friend has
promised to go and they really don't want to be alone.
Here are the options in this example. You can decide not to go, which
will make you feel better, though you will feel bad for having left
your friend to the wolves; or you can go with her and feel better for
making her happy, but remain miserable throughout the event.
Whichever you pick, you have done it for yourself. If you decide to not
go, you have simply said "The consequences of going would make me more
unhappy than the consequences of not going. I will therefore not go."
Similarly, had you chosen to go, you would have said the opposite. Either
way, you did what you wanted to do.
Now, this is not to say you have control over every aspect of your life.
Things can happen to affect you that you do not control. However, what you
do after those events is in your control. I do not mean, for instance, that
if you get hit by a car, it is your choice to die. Death would, again, be
something you do not control. However, if you get hit by a car, you do have
the choice of how you will respond to the changes that have occured. Your
options are continually limited by what happens, but your chosen course of
action is always your own; and it will always, in some way, be selfish.
Fact and fiction are 2 things that we generally accept as something that we
can seperate and distinguish between. This is balogna, plain and simple.
Consider a rock. Just a plain, grey rock. Ok, now, ask yourself this:
What rock am I (the author) picturing?
The fact is, you do not know. You can't know. We each have our own perceptions
on this rock, and all the scientific data in the world could never prove that
we are both able to see the rock, feel the rock, or perceive the rock in any
other way the SAME EXACT way another person did. This is because no observation
of the rock will ever tell you the fact of the rock. The rock may not even have
fact. It may be entirely what our perceptions make it. I prefer to think that
there is some underlying fact to the rock, but there is no way to prove it.
Any way we are able to observe something, or to perceive it at all, we must
invent. Say you measure the rock. That's all well and good, but you invented
the unit of measurement (or someone did). You try to bounce light off of it
to determine its color. The way you do this is also created. If you set 3 people
up next to each other and one is colorblind to a degree, they may see a different
color entirely.
At some point in all of this, you had to build your knowledge
off of the rock off of an assumption. Usually a typically acceptable assumption,
but not always. The point is, however, that if you try to objectively know what
something is, you will fail. There is no way to not have a bias or an assumption
in the mix; and the assumption is a lie. It is not a fact.
That's a fact.
Every event that has ever happened has changed every subsequent event. And I'm
not talking about just the holocaust or the day Ronald Reagan was killed and
replaced by an android. If a singular atom hits another singular atom, it starts
a chain reaction of similar effects, none of which are controlled. However,
they are real. The atoms do not move in those ways of their own accord, they
are responding to the stimulus that they have received. The fact is, they are
bound to what they do. It is what they are.
Now, the average human believes that he has some control over his life. He thinks
that he is going to have toast today. Fate did not decide he would have toast
today, he did. He decides to eat some butter on his toast too, because the doctor
told him not to (he's a lot like me). The reality is, he did choose to eat the
toast and have butter on it. Those were his decisions.
However, what caused him to make those decisions he does not control. Events have
conspired since the dawn of time to make him have toast that day. Not some
ancient omniscient fellow who vicariously decides to eat toast through our guy
some date umpty trillion years later. But the chaotic atoms bouncing around, the
movements set in motion by the movements set in motion by the movements did
make him take that action. However, they made him decide to take the action.
This is not to say that what you do is not your doing. Most people try to stand
on their toes here and say 'Either we have control or we don't. Our actions
are either meaningless, or we have have freedom.' I ask why either excludes the
other.
As I said above, your decisions are selfish. You decide what your response will
be. All I am saying in this section is that while the decisions are your own, you
were ever so slightly put on a path to come to the point where that decision was
the one you would make. No one intended for you to make it (unless you would
like to blame the USDA), but it was certainly a decision that you were going to
make. Destiny sounds like an inescapable idea full of conscious machinations to
force you to do something against your will.
Welcome to reality, your ability to choose is not freedom. It is the culmination
of every event before it, and part of every event thereafter.
Everything I said above is, I am sure, true. All of it. What does that mean to you?
Nothing.
1:
If you know that you are selfish, can you stop being selfish? Nope. How would
you? I already said that any response you make is selfish. What response to that would
not be what I said it would be?
2:
If you don't know anything, should you give up on measurements and perceived identities?
Of course not. Truth is, if someone whacks you with a 2x4, you're gonna get hurt. Just
because your perception of it is shifted slightly to avoid to be biased or subjective
does not prevent your perception from being what you base your life around. You can't
exist truly without feeling.
3:
So you have been told that your choices are not the free choices you once believed. Should
you go hold up a convenience store and say it isn't your fault? Well, really I can't
decide that for you, but if you are the kind of person who is going to do that after
reading the words of another, I don't see how the lack of freedom in your choices would
bother you. If I inspire you to do something that you "would not normally do", then you
are proving that the events that occur before your action direct your future actions.
If you're just doing it because nothing matters, then you'd be better off lying down
and dying. Of course, it'd be rather selfish of you to do it without benefiting me first.