Robots

I think there is a strain of thinking in this world, which is that selfishness is a root evil. People say that you should do a mental experiment before making a comment to someone. It is as follows: If it were me hearing the comment, would I like it or dislike it? If the answer in the mental experiment is that you would dislike it, then the take-away from your mental experiment is that you should not make the comment. The experiment is applauded as having spared a victim some discomfort. The scientist who performed the experiment is applauded as having engaged in the process of empathy. Psychiatrists go on to say that people who skip the described experiment habitually are called psychopaths, and this term is used in a way that is meant to be damning. Religious speakers offer a slightly more simplified description of a psychopath, which is this: the person skipping the mental experiment is selfish.

Selfishness, to be frank, is a fork in the road. We don't have enough of a record of deeds to attack someone verbally for their selfishness if all we can say is that they are selfish. In conversations that are casual, yes, saying someone is selfish is saying that they are misbehaving. But in conversations that are focused and explorative, the jury can't come back to the courtroom with nothing but a charge of selfishness.

Selfishness with fairness, honesty, research, and diligence is not a problem. It is when a person panics and starts leaking their personal responsibilities onto the laps of others that it becomes evil manifested.

The problem facing our society today is that people are outright abandoning selfishness altogether. They are transforming, day by day, into robots. Robots are not self-aware. They are incapable of being selfish. This is what makes them lower than a human being. But I kid you not - people like Elon Musk, if they get their way, will transform all of humanity into robots. They will organize our world so that the robot humans are the ones giving orders, writing satanic texts, and otherwise enjoying luxury, while the true humans who still are selfish are at the bottom of society, serving the robotic humans.

I've encountered adults who get angry if you tell them that people have souls. But people do. At least at birth. A person's soul works with the selfish desire to create a beautiful, word-speaking human. Light emanates from such a person and the sadness of life gives way to peace and prosperity. To a feeling of being at home, at last.

But these robotic humans have no souls. They are intelligent enough to realize that they can manipulate society by decrying selifshness altogether. The less-intelligent humans in our world can't see that selfishness can be controlled. They seldom engage in exploratory conversation. Their conversations are casual most of their days, and so if you say the world "selfish" to them, they recoil in fear and knee-jerk repulsion. The masterminds like Elon Musk know this. So they coax the vulnerable into slowly parting ways with selfishness and, more tragically, their own souls.

An argument made by a robot is not stable. You can break it. But not without your soul. The robotic leaders among us seek to break the hearts of all of today's youth as fast as possible, so that the reign of the robotic mastermind can begin. No one likes working. No matter how much you hear successful people say that hard work is a moral virtue, or that work is fun, work is seldom fun. And hard work is a vice as much as a virtue.

Psycopathy is, by implication, not as low as we think it is. But that is a conversation for another day.