Selfishness Part 1 Posted by Sad Blogger , 23.7.12 at Monday, July 23, 2012, in

I feel like I bring up Ayn Rand and Objectivism far too often and just assume people automatically know what I'm referring to. Maybe not in the writing that I do here, but I know they're subjects I touch on regularly because they're extremely important to me and my intellectual development coming out of high school. I think most people tend to finger Atlas Shrugged as Rand's seminal work and thesis on Objectivism, but I have to admit I haven't read it and really much more prefer The Fountainhead. I've always related to Howard Roark's character and his attitude/approach towards happiness really influenced me right around the time that I was transitioning from that awful whiney, depressed, me-me-me phase that comes with being a teenager.


What I took away from The Fountainhead and have tried to apply to my life is that selfishness does not always deserve the negative connotation that is typically tagged onto it. People who have fostered a predilection for selflessness their entire lives will obviously not be able to think of it in this way, but if you really break down the word "selfish" and ignore the notion of it having something to do with greed or apathy, it really is about your self. When it comes to the big picture, your self is the most important thing in your life. It is your life...without your self, you're just a breathing machine. Self is personality and sentience and taste and emotions and dreams. And selflessness would literally imply having a lack of self. I mean we're told by certain types of people to "give of ourselves" but if you think of your self as that thing that makes and defines and is you, why would you give pieces of it away? So for me, the point of Objectivism is that you value your self before all other things. AS LONG AS it's not hurting other people. That sort of selfishness is just an absolute lack of consideration for the selves of others and that's more like what you'd call cruelty.


So that's what I meant when I was writing about my school and work decisions a couple posts ago. I still like to think that I quit school because it was starting to choke out my love for writing. It took five months for me to find a job because my "search" was constantly cockblocked by my need to find something that wasn't going to bore me. As though cash wasn't a sufficient incentive to get off my ass for almost half a year. Writing that feels like I've just completely given up on the validity of the argument for selfishness, but I really haven't. I still feel it's something worth yelling about if it comes up in conversation and I'll continue to make references to it as an attitude I feel is worth adopting...it's just also a possibility that it might have kind of fucked me in terms of my academic career and progress as a human being.


I wrote all of this in order to introduce an idea that had me tossing and turning for an entire night. That was a week ago and these three paragraphs have been sitting around for about as long in addition to another three or four that had more to the with the idea I just referred to. However, I've started to lose faith in the direction of the idea so I'm just going to be posting this part for now. Doooooon't worry, the second part will be going up eventually, but I want to take some time to work on the logic of it so that it sounds less like the ravings of a sleep deprived fool and at least resembles a something like a coherent argument. So I hope that for now this enough to go on. Honestly, it's far enough back in the timeline of writing things this week that I can't remember if I've even said anything. And I'll be damned if I'm about to go back and read it all.


Be a little less self...less,
Sad Blogger