Selfishness is a word that has unjustly received a negative connotation. Without selfishness (our personal quest to satisfy ourselves) life would hold no real purpose. There would be no purpose to find love, better ourselves, seek knowledge or really do anything. Matter of fact, even eating wouldn't be worth it. However, selfishness also has it to where it's in our best interest to look out for our fellow sisters and brothers.
Firstly, let's look at the human drive to survive and our abundance of personal needs. Greater things can be achieved through cooperation rather than individual and isolated labor. If everyone just decided to make their own things and grow their own food (not hating on the concept of DIY) but never agreed to work with others, then we would have no divided labor and probably no advanced technology. This of course is obvious, but the lesser talked about subject matter is how we divide labor versus the powers that be. Our selfishness is obstructed by coercion and its inefficiency. In other words, workers who don't run their work place collectively end up serving their managers' selfish needs rather than their own selfish needs which is a problem with hierarchical structures.
Are we driven by a motive to make money? Technically speaking, yes, but it's only the value of it which drives us, not the paper material itself. Besides for a new TV screen, car payments, mortgages and a trip to the doctor's office (if we can afford it), what else does money give us? It gives us inequality which gives us many-a-bad thing. It's surely not selfish to put each other in separate social classes and grant certain people privilege over another nor is it selfish to set up a society which breeds theft and degradation. If people reached a level of collective consciousness, they could end up selfishly reaping the benefits of economic equality and its societal safety net.
Lastly, the struggle to meet our own sexual satisfaction and conquer our own lonely hearts is yet another selfish goal we all mostly strive for. Very often (depending on one's own sex drive) we get horny. We don't get horny once in our life and think, "Ok! Time to reproduce!" It's something we constantly crave. Unfortunately, the selfish act of sexual conduct has been demonized to the point of deprivation and frustration. Eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired (and your 10 hour work shift is over) and play games when you're bored. Just don't have protected sex in an orgy because that would make you a whore/ slut. Oh... and gay sex... NEVER! If you're gay... just NEVER have sex... EVER! Things like monogamy, homophobia and the idea that someone can be a "whore" are all cultural values which condemn our perfectly reasonable (yet selfishly proclaimed) desires. Free love anyone?
So the entire point of this post was to make two claims. One is that hierarchical power stifles efficiency and productivity and the other is that cultural traditions may sometimes leave negative connotations about perfectly natural desires in our heads to the point where we would see our own sexuality as a shameful behavior. This is the core of how our evolutionary nature works. Animals survive through their own selfish wit. People, with their more complex brains, should overcome their anti-selfish tendencies by breaking down hierarchies and cooperating with one another so that they too can be a surviving species.
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