Give or Take

Are humans innately altruistic or egoistic? It’s a matter of both: the givers and the takers. At different points in a person’s life they adapt and change from both, altruistic and egoistic, sometimes even both in tandem. People rely on others in a dangerous way. Humans innately co-depend on others and use each other as a way of support for themselves, when that support is gone all that’s left is the pain of what’s left. But isolation is not seen as an option for the human brain, so what is left is to live in an ignorant society who refuses to listen to its own problems. Generally, altruistic people live among egoistic communities, because humans have a way of looking for a reason to live while destroying other people’s purposes. Both concepts exist within the other, without bad there’s no good and without good there’s no bad. It’s the same for altruism and egoism, they’re two sides of the same coin and they influence each other effortlessly. 

One perfect example of this situation is in The Road by Cormac McCarthy. In this post-apocalyptic novel the boy prevents his father from crossing lines, moral lines only these two still have. After a catastrophe that wiped out and changed the world the main purpose of the ones that are left is to survive. It’s an idea that is dug deep in the human brain, but how far can someone go without a motive for life? To satiate their needs, majority of the groups in this book turned to cannibalism and slavery, a horrifying scene the boy has to relive many times: 

He was standing checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him. He looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? The boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned around and looked again. What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on their spit. (McCarthy 198). 

This was not the first, certainly would not be the last, time that the pair had witnessed such a thing. They live in a corrupted world where the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ surfaces to another meaning. The ones who lived were the people who would do anything to do so, murdering and eating a defenseless infants organs is part of the list. Still the protagonists’ morals wouldn’t quaver, the only sense of morality the man still had was because of the boy’s demands. The need to be good overpowered him when he was surrounded by such cruelty, this forced his father to do the same: “He kept his eyes on the thief. Goddamn you, he said. 

Papa please dont kill the man. 

The thief’s eyes swung wildly. The boy was crying

Come on, man. I done what you said. Listen to the boy” (McCarthy 258). The boy has a necessity for staying moral and not hurting anyone, his empathy for others does nothing but harm him. The boy and the man are a representation of how altruism and egoism influence the other, because, as altruistic as the man may seem, he only kept his morals for the sake of his son. This part of the book shows one of the many times this has happened. An old man had stolen all of their things, took their blankets and food and left them with nothing, and the man’s plan was to leave him with nothing but his shame. But the boy’s golden empathy always won, after the confrontation he managed to convince his father to give the poor man some things so that he could survive. The man was hesitant but obliged at the end. The boy manages to keep his father in check and makes sure he doesn’t cross the line from his morals, he makes sure they are the good guys. This highly altruistic character living in an egotistical world is an example of how there cannot be egalitarianism in society, selfish and selfless. Because eventually he has to make selfish choices and he can’t balance his morality with the rest of the people who are still alive, there’s no equilibrium in his world of good and bad. 

The world consists of people who give and people who take. It is not balanced and it is not fair, but that’s how it works and there’s nothing we can change. 

Another example of altruism living among egoism is in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane. The case here is an innocent girl who’s being taken advantage of because of her love. Maggie’s way of looking at life is through rose-colored lenses, she uses this as a coping mechanism for her harsh reality, and the main focus of those glasses is Pete, who she believes to be so good but ends up stripping her of herself by the end of the story. Maggie’s lover takes advantage of her and when he obtains what he wants from her he leaves her, abandoning her in a misery without her name: “At the feet of the tall buildings appeared the deathly black hue of the river (…) The varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to a silence” (Crane 69). What was left of this girl was her suicide, frowned upon by her community and family, left alone by her lover, she had no other option but to die. Because Pete ruined her life, he took her virginity and left her with the shame of the act. Nobody around her tried to understand what had happened, nobody tried to listen to her, nobody helped her in any way, she was left to feed by herself. The girl of the streets was corrupted by, what she thought was, love, and there was no savior coming to help. She had to realize that fairytales are nothing but fake, that others wouldn’t help her even when she helped others, that life is not fair. 

Unfairness can be found everywhere, and there’s as many selfish people as there are altruistic. In a society where all that matters is power, people don’t care for truth or lie, right or wrong. And if there are so many people who are taking advantage of others, where are the ones that are tactless? In The Great Gatsby readers can appreciate the people who take and receive but never give. The high class society that the main characters live in consists in taking from others and selfish desire. They care about their status, money, and power, they don’t care if they hurt others if it’s beneficial to them, and they don’t have a consequence for it: “It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy– they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (Fitzgerald 109). In this situation it is because of their high class lives that the characters are this way, but a lot of the time it doesn’t take money to hurt others, most of the time it just takes the self-centered interest that humans have. At some point or another, there’s damage done to the ones around us caused by us, whether we want that or not. A person can be selfish and then turn selfless, or vice versa. 

It’s a matter of both egoism and altruism. There is no best option to take because it’s the way that we live our lives, it’s how we survive. A person can’t lead their lives without being hurt or hurting others, humans learn from pain and guilt, and even if it’s for personal gain, being selfish is not wrong and being selfless is not right. Because right and wrong are just concepts humans use to create a sense of morality, it’s all just a social construct that people learn through their lives, it’s not a real thing. The world consists of people who give and people who take. It is not balanced and it is not fair, but that’s how it works and there’s nothing we can change.