This post is the result of an ongoing discussion on the group for my humanities course.
Here is what started it off. The rest of it I will post as comments to this post.
"If human beings were truly selfish, and had no love or compassion (asthese feelings or concepts have been introduced by the society,religion, etc. and are not inherent to us) as claimed by certain philosophers, then how could the human civilization have survived;because would not the mother or father have killed the child as soonas it was born, or prevented it from being born if it were in their power?
Would that not make self preservation easy? The lesser the people, the longer the resources last."
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2 comments:
Anshul wrote-
I read ur views.they are surely different and i must say original as i never heard such theory before.but,you didn't consider a chief character of human nature while proposing this theory else you would not ended up with such doubt.that factor is fear factor. each human is selfish to last extent so that he would like to be last one on entire planet but human is a clever animal and he knows that every other person is also thinking same and if he would try to raise his life on his own then he might also get eliminated from the scene by someone more mightier.so he invented a solution....SOCIETY.
humans make society on various basis viz.linguistic culture hobbies etc. but in core there is only one thing...a urge for protection,a fear of being eliminated by others. for this only reason he compromises to share his resources with some people of his society ; but is always ready to attack other human who are not part of his society for satisfying his greed and comfort.
I wrote-
Let us consider a completely selfish person; in fact something more- that every person is completely selfish. Let us also agree that he compromises his resources only for the sake of self-preservation, because a larger group would mean more strength, more protection. And this, as you say, could be the result of fear. Let's move on.
I think that such a person, when he makes a group, would like to have only able bodied and shrewd persons in the group. An infant is a liability in many senses to such a group- it cannot protect itself, it cannot help in protection and it consumes resources.
Moreover, given that everyone is completely selfish, that infant, when it grows up, might kill its parents (simply for resources).
And so, given also that man has some brains, he will think about the above possibility and would not see any reason to keep the child alive.
Also note that forming of groups will be necessary for a person only till he lives- a selfish person will not care about the survival of the human race. And so the groups formed by him will only be meant to last as long as he lasts. I see no reason for him to attempt to form societies that last forever. I see no reason as to why such a group will feel the need to carry the burden of raising children.
What I am trying to claim is this-
the fact that the human civilization survives is proof that at least some people (e.g. at least some mothers) at any given time in the human history had something in them that cannot be called selfishness- and it came naturally to them.
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