Sociopath Community

I regularly boost peoples confidence in themselves if they are obviously champions in a down spot they cannot crawl out of themselves.

the nicest most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone

I showed no mercy on a co-worker who used her breast cancer as an excuse for everything. She couldn't lift anything 'cos her lymph nodes had been removed and was always clutching her arm.; couldn't retain anything she was taught 'cos the chemo impaired her memory. I hated the ''I am a victim of cancer' approach and her incompetence made my job harder.

I guess I was mean to her, but I couldn't control my contempt. 

She left the job and I feel sure her experience with me may have toughened her up a bit.

She must have wished ill on me however, because I later developed a spur on my elbow which means I often clutch my arm in pain. And every time it aches I think of her

by Obsidian

Indeed, our drives are selfish, we couldn't be unselfish even if we tried.

by Smiffy

I wish more people would just admit to that. Instead of their delusions of being good.

 I've heard the "everyone's selfish" philosophical mumbo-jumbo before. I get your point, but you miss the obvious. At the end of the day, there are people who are happy helping others out, sometimes even risking their own life and well being, maybe even sacrificing themselves for others... and people who don't get anything from that and don't give a shit about others. Even if you can say the first group acts generous because it makes them feel good, there's still a separation between that kind of people and the others. That's why we have words like selfish and generous in the first place, to differentiate between people, because there IS a difference.

You aren't fooling anyone, cocksucker.

Some feel good for doing generous acts while others don't, this is true, but it doesn't change the fact that they are being generous for their own reasons, not for the reasons of another. The other being helped is more of a byproduct of the "generous" person pleasing themselves. I'd be more inclined to call it Charitable Selfishness than try to argue it's because of the person being selfless, or even "good".

It could be for the attention it brings, it could be to pad their own egos, it could be just so they don't feel guilty at the end of the day, it could be from acting out the "how they were raised" script to support their own status quo, it could be so they can brag about it to others, it could be for self-compensation, so that they can accept parts of themselves they dislike. There's all sorts of selfish reasons to help people where the obvious forms of self gain (like manipulation) are absent from the situation entirely. For many, it's for the sake of comfort.

In the end, it's still selfish self fulfillment that has little to do with who they are actually helping. They feel good about themselves, so they keep doing it, similarly to how a person who enjoys candy will likely continue to eat candy. If the money spent on said candy was going toward charity, it's still primarily for the candy itself.

by Turncoat

It could be for the attention it brings, it could be to pad their own egos, it could be just so they don't feel guilty at the end of the day, it could be from acting out the "how they were raised" script to support their own status quo, it could be so they can brag about it to others, it could be for self-compensation, so that they can accept parts of themselves they dislike. There's all sorts of selfish reasons to help people where the obvious forms of self gain (like manipulation) are absent from the situation entirely. For many, it's for the sake of comfort.

In the end, it's still selfish self fulfillment that has little to do with who they are actually helping. They feel good about themselves, so they keep doing it, similarly to how a person who enjoys candy will likely continue to eat candy. If the money spent on said candy was going toward charity, it's still primarily for the candy itself.

That's a pretty limited world view. Perhaps you see it this way since you personally are not able to relate? Watching a stranger struggle, with say lifting a heavy item and potentially getting hurt could compel another to help.  Why? Perhaps it's empathy, a feeling that if that was me, I could use a hand so I will extend one.

There is something called kindness after all. To say it's for purely selfish reasons is a stretch and weak argument, imo, but then again if one can't relate I guess one can't relate. How empty that must be.  
   

They help them because if they don't they'd feel worse about themselves. It's still self-gratification, it's just done through using another as a sort of proxy for it.

Somewhat of a tangent, but have you ever read up on Survivor's Guilt?

by Jones

You aren't fooling anyone, cocksucker.

Cocksucker? Sorry, wrong guy pal. You meant to reply to Edvard 0, I'm just Edvard. Understandable mistake.

by Turncoat

They help them because if they don't they'd feel worse about themselves. It's still self-gratification, it's just done through using another as a sort of proxy for it.

Somewhat of a tangent, but have you ever read up on Survivor's Guilt?

 Yeah, I think I made it clear I understood your point in that post. You say people help others to feel good or not feel bad about it, but you can't prove 100% that's why. That's your opinion. True, those feelings are a consequence of the nice acts, but I don't think they are the REASON all the time. At least I don't feel it that way. I agree with MissCommunication. I think you're missing a puzzle piece in all that.

And again, even asuming you were right and brain chemistry tricks us somehow... Some people are tricked to act nice, some are tricked to be assholes...Let's call the nice people nice and the assholes assholes.

Yeah it's opinion, but pretty much everything arguably is, isn't it?

I prefer to find the things everyone (generally) has in common to help establish the template "self" before throwing qualifiers and labels at it to show how they might be different from one-another.

The selfish and the charitable both do what they bother to to to serve their own needs, needs that could easily change from discovering a new concept that warps their way of thinking. The nurture of it is what judges what they do about their selfishness, while their nature shows how prone they are to it. Reason doesn't have to always be on someone's mind to be followed, reason is simply why it happened.

Yeah, someone who helps someone across the street or helps their car out of a pothole in a Blizzard is "nice", while the other person who walks by (or even laughs at their misfortune) is an asshole, but both are making the decisions based on self-fulfillment. The rush of "doing something nice" I've seen manifest all sorts of things that give away far more negative aspects of their character than the nice act itself could ever hope to invalidate.

Someone who brags about the good deeds they do pretty much invalidate the deeds themselves, in my opinion. If something could truly be selfless, they'd factor their "self" out of the equation. That takes either dissociation or maybe groupthink to accomplish.