On Psychological Egoism

Psychological egoism, an idea thought up by philosopher John Hobbes (yes, this is who the stuffed tiger hobbes in calvin and hobbes is named after, as his character can attest) suggests that every conscious action we commit as humans is done for ourselves, in one way or another. To put it simply: BY NATURE, HUMANS DO EVERYTHING FOR THEMSELVES. Humans will not commit an action that their mind does not perceive as benefitting them in some way. Lately I have thought up a few cases where this could be argued and then realized they do not evade the argument by any means. I will start off with a few examples to clarify this subject first.

1. A man walks to the store to buy bread. He buys bread so that he can feed himself. That one is obvious.

2. A soldier throws himself on a grenade to save his 5 other soldier friends. In this case, there must have been some mental idea present that being a martyr would benefit his name, that others might see him as a hero--he had SOMETHING to gain, whatever it was, he committed to the act because it benefitted him.

But here was an example that troubled me for a bit.

3. An immature teenager who is not all that bright gets bored so he decides to burn his arm. He doesn't know what will happen, he just does it. It hurts him, leaves a mark. Well it came to me that this example is the most obvious of all! The answer is within the very beginning of the sentence, too. He wants to free himself of boredom! Or his parents are perhaps neglectful of him and he wants attention, positive or negative, he doesn't care---just like in the case of a child trying to aggravate their parent just for the hell of it.

This can obviously be a horrible thing but on the other hand it gives me some hope for humans, as a race. The fact that we have enough nuclear weaponry to blow up the world over 6 times does not mean we would ever do that--why would anyone ever want to wipe out the entire human race? Perhaps they might wipe out a large portion of the race--but the human race itself is destined to survive.

Having said that I now feel like an idiot because nature could wipe out our entire race with ease by throwing upon us natural disasters of magnitude we could not comprehend. Then again, we do have space shuttles, but to where? There has to be somewhere else we could live, because the entire scope of our knowledge as humans is less than one millionth of what actually exists in entirety, and in addition to that, another thing outside of our scope of knowledge is what the FUCK existence even is, how the FUCK we know that WE even exist, god, its so overwhelming when you think that this could all be a dream, but what is a dream? What do we even fucking know? Do we know that there are 4 million other colors we cant see? We certainly dont know there aren't.

From all this, my conclusion (and digression) ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

Love youself.

Much love,
-Zephyr