To be selfish…..

It rules the world, people say, it rules motivations actions adventures risk taking behaviors and even something as delicate as feelings of love and affection. Selfishness is the utter cause of animal behavior, books say, including that of us humans. It’s the ultimate truth, essential for survival… for combating the demanding situations, and for gaining what that is required. Male quadrupeds fight for area of food, for females; females go for strongest mate to have safe future… even single cell organisms do changes in themselves only for the sake of survival, and no one can even compare the selfish acts of animals called as humans; in Darwin’s world even deepest human relations, families can be reduced down to one or other form of commensalism.

After all we’re animals, biological things, and effects of some molecules and physical forces leading to some chains of chemical reactions or electrical or physical activations; why shall we bother to behave as selfishly as some unicellular organism swimming with its flagella or something in search of a better place of survival even without understanding the meaning of it? But we do bother, all of us, as per the capacity of structures called as brains or more broadly as per the complexity of the bodies of the organisms. Responses of a more evolved multicellular organism to a stimulus are different than those of a unicellular, biologically backward animal. I’m not sure about the plants, fungi or animals with extremely primitive nervous tissue development; but in humans and animals with developed brain there is something called as cognition… we have a picture of the outer world in what is called as ‘our mind’ and we all live in our own private worlds formed in our minds due to the trillions of experiences we get from the outer world. We all are gifted by the universe with our capacity of ‘feeling’ the world… and humans form the most gifted species with astonishing capacities of ‘feeling’ the feelings of others, of peeping into the mental worlds of others and even that of changing them, of seeing the future and dreaming and doing efforts to bring the dreams to life.

We’re not flagellates swimming in response to some chemokines, neither are we quadrupeds thinking nothing except food mates and then shelter… we’re humans, though we’re biological things our joys are far more wider as we’ve intelligence, and that makes us vulnerable to become most selfish species on the planet or most selfish person in the universe… but it is the only thing- ‘our intelligence’ which awards us the ability of being completely altruistic doing the acts of helping others and caring others without any direct benefit to us. We might have inherited selfishness from our selfish brainless ancestors, but altruism is a product of evolution, I think. And for us it’s as true as selfishness, and for some of us it’s even truer than selfishness, and those ‘some’ are legends, responsible for the survival and evolution of humankind. We would have been extinct by now, if altruistic people were not there to save the world from destructive acts of selfishness…

I think we must honor this gift of evolution to us, we must allow at least a bit of altruism to survive in us… then and only then we’ll be able to build a world full of altruistic people, and that world will be filled with true love, affection, with a guarantee of being cared and without any fear, without any stress, that is that will be like what we call today as ‘heaven’.