The Effects of Selfishness

This was a college essay I had to do. So, it's got Biblical principles, but it not inherently a Bible lesson.

Greedy politicians eager for power, obsessed corporations always striving towards gathering and collecting more precious, cold, hard cash, and the five year old who refuses at all costs to share his box of one-hundred crayons with the child who forgot to bring his that day are all perfectly accurate results of the terrible act of selfishness. Through this awful mindset of selfishness, bloody and relentless wars have started, men and women have lost their jobs by their coworkers through dishonest gain, and countless friendships have broken or never even began. Any person can fall prey to its subtle hands of malice, so a being must constantly be vigilant to try and make this world better through selflessness. Selfishness causes a large plethora of problems and issues and can produce many varying actions such as greed, violence, and unhappiness.
    The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines greed as; “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed” and greed most certainly cannot exist without a strong presence of selfishness abounding. Although the excess of whatever they desire, whether the object be money, drugs, or possessions, the over abundance can ultimately cause problems with the person mentally, physically, and emotionally. Greed often leads down the path of inhumanely taking from those who need whatever the object is. For example, during the Industrial Revolution, business giants like Carnegie and Rockefeller did not support their company’s workers with the money a family needed for living. Through business leader’s greed, they selfishly deprived the average man of good living standards and caused many horrible deaths through malnutrition, disease, and produced more selfish people who would murder others to sustain their own life. These facts, without a doubt, stemmed through the businessmen’s inconsideration of the common man – in other words, their selfishness.
    Within the Bible, the book of James states in chapter four, verse one “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you?” How true of a statement that is, selfish desires can also produce hefty amounts of bloodshed and violence. When your own desires begin to command your thoughts and actions, we think of nothing but fulfilling those desires. This self-centeredness can cause a person to adapt a very dangerous, “by any means necessary” attitude. The selfish desire could include a good cause (such as a dying relative who needs money for treatment), but when emotion takes grip and someone stands in the way, fighting or even bloodshed is the inevitable outcome. Therefore, through selfishness, a well-meaning country who’s only goal is to restore itself to stability and former glory can ignore the lives and opinions of other countries neighboring it; I am, of course, talking of Nazi Germany. World War Two began due to the selfish ambition of the people of restoring itself, all the while subtly sowing the seeds for conquest and a war that would involve most of the modern world.
    Finally we come to unhappiness and how selfishness permeates even our happiness, joy, and contentment with life. An obvious reason why selfishness can effect happiness is the unavoidable factor of not being liked. By demonstrating selfish actions, people begin to realize that, the one only satisfying their own needs cannot possibly care for others. Just as important and most certainly more probable, selfishness inevitably harms happiness through the fact that everything done becomes a rigorous and lonely battle. For example, a worker looking for a promotion can focus singularly on work to gain that promotion; however, the work environment most often requires a willingness of varying degree to perform with other coworkers and superiors. By demonstrating a lack of care about another worker, one might be deemed unworthy for the promotion due to the lack of “people skills.” Want happiness certainly is not inherently selfish, but it most certainly can become selfish through the paths chosen to pursue it. Often times, those pursuing happiness through selfish ways lose sight of other’s happiness and, therefore, lose a set goal for their own happiness.
    Selfishness, as demonstrated in the above paragraphs, can influence one’s very way of thinking and drastically alter their lives in severely negative manners. This behavior can destroy anything from another person’s ways of existence through greed, to other nations through violence, and even an individual’s happiness though lack of concern of fellow mankind. The only way to ever combat the atrocities committed on all forms of scales, large as well as small, is to counteract them through simple random acts of selflessness. Selflessness can bring a simple smile to brighten someone else’s day, which can produce more selfless deeds by them, creating a web of good actions stemming from a simple, genuine smile. In the end, selfishness causes more harm to a person than good, so why do we do it? I would like to conclude that human desires will always attempt to take the best of a man, woman, or child; however, it is actually thinking of ourselves that hurt us most.

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