Inherently, all of us are doing whatever we are, for our security (because our physiological needs are satisfied), for steady flow of income in our later years. It is selfish indeed. It is a very esoteric concept that "selfishness is a virtue". Let me elaborate on this for clarification.
Selfishness by definition can be treated as thinking about selfish motives and gains. This is driven by the fact that we want to secure ourselves from possible impending or future risks. If this is applied a level further, upliftment of general public can also be purely driven by selfish motives. How?
The main reason for existence of anti-social element in the society is presence of poverty and absence of income. What is the need for income? Obvious answer to this is: for subsistence. Ability to provide oneself with basic necessities for living can be achieved through this income. The root cause is "unsatisfied basic necessities".
If the root cause is atacked by providing everyone with the basic necessities, then there will be no need for anyone to turn against society.
So, providing the basic necessities of food, shelter, water, health, social security will solve the problem.
Arriving at this conclusion was easy. Now comes the difficult job of convincing people to get into action. By action, I mean providing everyone with basic necessities.
Let me come back to the arguement of virtuous selfishness. If I am selfish, it should motivate me to eliminate to the extent possible the risks of future. As is seen recently, the risk from anti-social elements is on the rise. To avoid this, attacking the root cause and providing everyone with the basic necessities will solve the problem to a greater extent.
According to Abraham Maslow's Need Hierarchy, if a persons physiological needs are satisfied, he would want his security need, then social needs and further up to self-actualization to be satisfied.
If the human society as a whole raised to the third level with everyone's safety needs and physiological needs satisfied, earth will by itself become a heaven to live in. As the focus of society and of every individual will change from food, shelter, security of body to a higher level of friendship, family and intimacy. So, it is the selfish interest of any person to bring the society to this level, more so, for the people with intellectual, physical, monetary powers or any combination of these powers.
Is this achieving social upliftment in true sense? I believe, this is and not by any means a higher average per-capita income with growing inherent disparities. In true sense even the higher-percapita-income countries have not achieved these. For example, in the US, there is higher disparity where top 1% of the population accounting for 16% of the income.
Comments invited.
