Of all the impossible tasks that spiritual leaders impose upon the masses is there any as impossible for us to do than transcend our selfishness? For us to not envision the world from our unique perspective, to somehow possess a view from nowhere. To refrain from our instinctual duty to order what we can of the world to best suit our self-interest. Instead, we are asked to manifest reality for the benefit of others or worse some abstract concept like the greater good.
Of course, we can’t do this. We see the world through our eyes alone. This is clear in the hermetic tradition, whose first principle mentalism is the acknowledgment that everything we perceive of the world comes to us through our senses. This does not mean as some suggest that what we perceive is not connected to objective reality. That the world is purely a fabrication of our minds. It simply means there is no way we can take in objective reality without filtering it through our psyche. Whatever bias, we have will taint what we are perceiving.
Let's use a simple everyday item like a hammer to illustrate this. We can each look at the same hammer from the exact same point of view down to the nanometer. A contraption that looks like it would be used in the Ludovico technique could fix our eyeball at similar enough angles to the hammer that any deviation between our view would be an acceptable rounding error in a NASA project. Even then we are perceiving the same hammer differently. Your eyes will be more attuned to different frequencies of light than mine. We will have differing abilities in how accurately we perceive length and angle. What a hammer symbolizes to you will be different from what it symbolizes to me. Now forget about the hammer. Realize we are perceiving all of reality through different mental filters. No wonder we are often at odds with each other.
Because of this difference in perception, it is only natural we order our lives around what we perceive as our wants and needs. No one knows what is best for us better than we do. For the most part, we order our practical reality around this taboo principle. No one works all week so they can hand over their paycheck to their neighbor thinking he will be able to provide better for them. No. Everyone keeps what they can as that best ensure they meet their own needs. Of course, there is charity but no one is expected to give to the point of sacrifice for “the Greater good”
Still, the undying idea that we need to be more selfless persists. Somehow it is thought that if we would all detach our efforts from our interests we would create a more utopian reality. In practice when people do this the worse actors in society can lord over the masses with seductive ease creating a dance of misery between all parties involved. In the best of circumstances, one end of this dynamic resents the power people take over them and the confinement it creates. While on the other end people become frustrated that those they are “helping” don’t behave more in accord with their values, without ever questioning if their values would help them. In worse circumstances, this dance becomes naked tyranny.
So then am I advocating for everyone to have a take-what-you-can-get attitude during, of all times this holiday season? No, as that would not be the endpoint of our behavior if we were liberated enough to act unapologetically in our self-interest. To illustrate this I'll ask a simple question.
What's the thing that everyone wants to be?
Before you answer, I will apologize for employing a rhetorical technique I deplore. Asking an open-ended question that can have a multitude of equally right answers while I secretly know which valid answer is the right one is a slippery logical trick. Whatever answer you came up with is not wrong because it is not the answer I predetermined without telling you. But enough with the caveats. What is the one thing that everyone wants to be?
A Hero.
Everyone wants to be a hero. Just about all the movies we watch are about people overcoming some adversity for the sake of others. Sometimes this is done physically in action movies. Sometimes people wrestle with their inner demons in dramas or romantic comedies. Even when a protagonist is an anti-hero Movies use this troupe as an archetype that's embedded in our psyches. People fantasize about running into burning buildings to save old ladies and orphans. About wrestling a gun away from a mass shooter. Even when we remove the choreographed action sequences from our fantasies we often imagine ourselves doing something admirable in some way. And here's the secret. These fantasies are rooted in our selfishness. We don't desire to be the hero because it makes the overall world that much better. We do it because it's the pinnacle of human potential. A pinnacle we wish to experience.
In real life, this probably looks much less flashy than its Hollywood rendition. It could look like us having a difficult heart-to-heart conversation with someone that helps us in some way. Maybe it looks like us helping someone change their tire on an isolated patch of a snowy road. However, it manifests that being heroic simply means being of service to others. And it's completely selfish. So instead of trying in vain to will away our selfish desires why don’t we work on fulfilling them in the highest possible way?