Selfishness, Self-Interest, Self-Regard
Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.
—Philippians 2:3–4
One symptom of excessive focus on the self is a victim mentality, which, Barry Brownstein suggests, poses a serious threat: “A ‘decent society’ cannot survive when a critical mass of people is focused on grievances.”
Julian Adorney identifies one factor helping to generate a grievance culture: “safetyism.” “When we as a society try to protect children from every bump and owie, we accidentally teach them to approach new ideas and perspectives from a place of fear, because they’ve never been given the opportunity to learn that they can handle a little bit of distress.”
L. Joseph Hebert helps sort out the difference between self-regard and selfishness. “While it is fair to say that self-love is essential to the habits of personal development and mutual exchange that make the world turn, it is mistaken to present self-regard as standing in a binary relationship with benevolence.”
Peter Leithart explores a similar theme, insisting that self-interest is an inadequate basis for understanding the economy. “Every economic action, every human action, is concerned with the relative values of both means and ends, with use of scarce resources and the persons who ultimately receive them.”
Against an inordinate focus on the individual self, Caleb Stegall reminds us, is a venerable though beleaguered American tradition of community. He sees as unstable the “conservative synthesis between the primacy of individual freedom and the need for social belonging” and perceives more promise in “tradition, faith, and a deep respect for the particularity of place.”
The obverse error of individualism is the dissolution of the self in groupthink and collectivism. Fr. Jerry Pokorsky explains how Christian faith undermines this tendency. “Honesty and truth challenge the patterns of every form of groupthink. Incisive questions of fact and the honest examination of raw evidence break the tightly packed solidarity of sinful (or erroneous) groupthink.”