“..if we imagine that the whole incalculable store of energy used in that global tendency had been used not in the service of knowledge but in ways applied to the practical—selfish—goals of individuals and nations, universal wars of destruction and constant migrations of peoples would have enfeebled man's instinctive zest for life..”
It is almost one and half century ago that Friedrich Nietzsche made these critical comments in “The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music” saying in effect that it is the selfishness of the human nature that would one day bring about the genocide and it would not come as a horror or an ordeal that would make one shudder but as a necessity that people would agree on. Between self interests and a sense of fairness, it is always self interests that drive a person to act or in some case, not act in a certain way. The power of selfishness manifests itself nowhere as clearly as in collective actions. We feel more driven by a cause motivated by selfishness than ever by a cause motivated by justice or fairness. A person making choices in his/her personal life, a political outfit shifting shades and sides in a blink, a corporation’s balance sheets driving its actions in what are sometimes detrimental to the society, A country framing their foreign as well as internal policies solely on perceived self interests of what are considered the people who matter… the examples are every where. The blatancy of this is higher as they stakes get higher. There is no better example of the last scenario than governments of India and Pakistan trying since the last 60 years to hammer out a solution on Kashmir not with intent to fairly solve the problem but to do it with advantage to their respective country.
We genuinely believe that there is a difference between self-interests and selfishness and shrug off suggestions that this all consuming stress on self-interests is nothing but a half concealed euphemism for selfish needs has become ingrained in our DNA & thought process that we feel these needs are legitimate and are our right. Once this becomes a general outlook, then the only thing that stops from aforementioned genocide from happening is the limitations of executing the ideas. When those limitations are breached or perceived to be breached, we get events like say World War II, like USA’s decades old history of meddlesome foreign affairs across the world, the unreasonable veto power for the big 5 countries on UN security council, or for that matter like India’s arrogant stand on Kashmir and North East. There is no principle involved in any of this, except that of selfishness.
It is perhaps to the credit of Nietzsche that he continues to be proven closer and closer to truth with every passing day, but where does it leave us?
