The Greater Good
When you perform actions that might not benefit you in any way and can sometimes not be in the best interest of your own-self, however, if the impact on the community is profound. Congratulations, you are a part of the "greater good" club.
Try answering the following questions
- Why is the tax collection in many countries still so low?
- Why is corruption so rampant in the developing world?
- Why did some countries had and continue to have dictators?
- Why is healthcare so unaffordable?
- Why do politicians sometimes find ways to stay in power forever?
- Why are some discoveries important to human existence patented?
- Why does society have so much wealth inequality?
- Why did the slave trade exist?
- Why do politicians in some countries amass a fortune in their lifetime?
The answer to many of the questions above can be attributed to self-first philosophy. Keeping oneself above anything else. We have more people who act in their self-interest, instead of thinking of their community, locality, city, state, country, and planet.
Statistically, if extreme human kindness is Gaussian distributed, we should still have about 2% of the world population above Mean + 2SD (standard deviation). 2% of 8B humans is 160M people, but we aren't reading about examples of extreme human compassion that often. What if the mean itself is heavily tilted towards self-interest philosophy, this could probably be due to human evolution wherein genetically we are programmed to survive first. Survival of the fittest is the game we are playing still now.
But there exist individuals who have made significant contributions to humanity, whilst not enriching oneself[1]. Imagine a world where we have more people in the "Greater Good" Club when compared to the "Self Interest" Group. Wouldn't the world be such a lovely place to live?
[1] - How one company gave up a patent—and saved 1 million lives