Rational is Self Centered?

All beings looks after itself, well. We demean looking after ourselves well, calling it selfishness. Is it a wonder that human race is constantly under some threat?

In a larger sense, selfishness is nothing but the acute fear one has of losing whatever one has. Naturally, this fear can occur in one, only when one has something to lose. And such people knows very well, what they are going to miss, if they lose what they have. Hence they are very careful, which, other people who can afford to be less careful, find difficult to understand. But when it comes to other people, they naturally look at the well off with certain jealousy, as, compared to the common people, the well off are noticeably better off. And the common people tend to read the behavioral facets specific to all others differently, mostly with negative connotations. For example, the 'careful nature' we saw above may get christened as an undesirable trait, selfish behavior. Of course there may be a few cases that richly deserve a dressing down, from both the well off and the others. 

However, in the majority of instances, those termed as selfish may only be acting (perhaps offensively) careful.

Making, 'being rather offensively careful' into a social stigma, and an accepted excuse to unleash one's misgivings with impunity, as far as rest of the people go, can lead to something more.

This also results in certain philosophical differences, between those who are well off and the others, leading to a state of natural mistrust between them. Anything that the rich does, becomes a suspect in the eyes of common people, and vice versa. Human society, rather than directing all its energy in meeting whatever problems are there to be solved, gets busy with such internal, unproductive scuffles. And we fail to notice the tell tale signs of social strife, harbingers of impending disasters. Consequently, a problem is attended to, only when it becomes impossible to neglect it. 

Perhaps all the challenges we face today, like global warming, AIDS, or other disasters, owe their frightening look to such a cavalier attittude. That is, these issues wouldn't have been there, had we been able to use the full might of the human race to address each and every difficulty, as and when the initial signs could be seen. And it would have been thus, hadn't we been busy with personal sqabbles on such issues like selfishness.