if you take the division between self and other as absolute. I have
never experienced it as such. With most people, especially the ones I
care about, it feels more like a continuum, and it actually makes me
happy to do things for them, with them, etc... It doesn't feel like
their gain and my loss; it feels like an overall gain."
Excellent feeling--the feeling of good health and wellbeing!
There are higher aspects and higher realizations of life that differentiate human beings from beasts--though motherhood in beasts--that don't demand or think of getting economic rewards for rearing their young--is surely higher than the motherhood in Feminine Genderists, that demand price for their milk and other things in capitalist economy--while dead bent upon preserving the capitalist system of production, counter-production, appropriation, misappropriation,... and reproduction of life.
The fact is, human species has attained supremacy over beasts only because of their social mode of living and working together. There is an individual because there is the society--and vice versa.
As such, as long as any individual has life and working potential in him, he can either live/work merely for himself or he can live/work for the society as well.
When somebody chooses to live merely for himself, his mental health deteriorates very fast, for:
Life follows its own course; be that the life any individual, or the collective culture/march of the whole humankind. "History is made in such a way" reports Frederick Engels, "that the final result always arises from the conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant-the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something no one willed."
These conflicts produce an unprecedented misery in the mind of the selfish man-however rich he may be. An as is an ass however laden with gold he may be!
Add to this phenomenon the realization that the Sun is an insignificant star in the galaxy, and earth a negligible spec in the solar system-and each one of us is one amongst 6 billion individuals, and our life-span limited to just 70 or 80 or 100 years-if we happen to survive normally; and humans have lived for millions of years so far on earth; and, if the species doesn't get extinct due to their love for capitalism and masters or inability to overthrow the capitalist system of international brothel-business and robbery-humanity may survive for thousands to millions of years more.
Thus in this beastly, ruthless, rotten, irrational and cursed inhuman world ( disregarding the natural precariousness and insecurity of life), as long as a person is alive, as long as a person has life and thinking and working potential in him: HE HAS TO DO SOMETHING. And this doing something can be either working for the continuance and enhancement of international human wretchedness or working against that.
Zihannasheen