On genuine generosity and selfishness

By: Reyshimar Arguelles

The history of humankind is marked by countless instances of generosity. It is, after all, the most human of all traits, although the natural world manifests a different form of generosity in the mold of symbiosis. But isn’t symbiosis a process of reciprocation? Didn’t Dr. Jonas Salk make the polio vaccine available for everyone? Didn’t Oscar Schindler help hundreds of Jews escape the gas chambers without asking to be counted among the Righteous?

Generosity is deeply ingrained in our psyche. But also encoded in our soul is a predilection for selfishness. That said, the human mind and the human soul have always been a venue for a dialectical conflict that has influenced the way we perceive certain social realities and dictated how we act.

For every Scrooge who underscores the accumulation of wealth above all things, there will always be a selfless revolutionary who dreams of justice for all. Of course, everyone strives for what is good and shuns what is inherently evil. There is nothing much to say about that, except perhaps that it trivializes morality and allows people to take shortcuts.

Nothing can be so damning than to use generosity as a means to feel good. In this day and age where we live a double life in cyberspace, it has become so easy to pretend to make a difference. Whether you are eschewing plastic straws for metal ones or denigrating the Left for derailing the hopes for genuine change, generosity and other beautiful human traits mean nothing when you are too lazy to take meaningful action.

Take for instance the idea that charity is an investment in goodness. We are so desensitized into advocating the “pay it forward” schtick that we count the amount of donations we give as nothing more than a part of a time deposit in heaven. There is insanity in saying that past sins can be sanitized just as easily as stained egos.

But egotism is what matters most in this surreal world of mirrors and scarecrows that we live in. Francis Fukuyama, in his book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, we are living in a time when acts of goodness are seen to be therapeutic in so far as they help us cope with our quasi-moral need for recognition.

It is exactly this mindset that people have turned away from liberal politics and settled for suicidal power-mongers who say what they mean and act independently from what comes off as acceptable rhetoric. But what is more dangerous is how the very people who supposedly uphold the values of decency and uprightness are themselves propping up the reactionary forces they so eagerly want to crush.

The recent collapse of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom exactly demonstrates the utter toxicity of this line of thinking. The Conservative Party ruled by Donald Trump’s more articulate doppelganger Boris Johnson is threatening the very existence of the National Health Service which, for years, have been instrumental in providing quality and accessible healthcare to millions of British citizens. Instead of giving citizens what they actually need, however, the Conservative Party played upon people’s emotions and insisted on pursuing a complete divorce from the  European Union.

Instead of rallying behind the opposition Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, factions within the party itself refused to give Corbyn’s leadership any credence for policies that were deemed too radical for mainstream Labour. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, himself a Labourite, insisted that Corbyn has let the country down.

There is no generosity without selfishness. Labour’s defeat at the hands of another trash-talking outsider with eccentric hair will not be the only one. Many more will come, but we all have to be prepared by showing genuine kindness and maintaining a radical position against the forces of inequity and oppression. And for sure, we do not have to take shortcuts to achieve such an objective.