The Case for Selfishness
Against Empathy
Why should I care about people I don’t know? Why should I expend my limited energy on distant tragedies and the lives of those who will never impact mine? The modern world has manufactured a virus—one of misplaced empathy, a parasite feeding on attention, pulling individuals away from their own lives and into the endless churn of external noise.
People seem to crave grand conflicts, narratives that position them on some imagined moral battlefield, fighting wars with strangers thousands of miles away. They align themselves with causes not out of conviction but out of a need to belong, to signal virtue, to escape the emptiness of their own neglected existence. But life is too short to love it for others.
Instead, focus on what is directly in front of you—the six inches before your face. Aleister Crowley practiced this discipline by refusing to read the news, cutting himself off from the external hysteria that poisons the mind. He understood that power and presence lie in paying attention to what is here, now. Not in the endless abstractions of "justice," "duty," or "service" to some nebulous whole. These are chains designed to keep you distracted from your own becoming.
The Virtue of Selfishness
Selfishness is not a vice; it is the foundation of integrity. A man who governs his own domain with precision is worth more than a thousand who scatter themselves thin, dissipating their will in meaningless causes. To be in the world in the best possible way, one must cut away the cancers of shame, fear, guilt, and moral hesitation. So what? You will die, as will they. The difference is whether you have lived according to your own will or allowed yourself to be spent on the concerns of others.
The Discipline of Presence
What does this mean in practical terms? Learn to pay attention to the immediate. Cultivate absolute awareness of your surroundings, your actions, your inner world. Those who spread themselves across a thousand concerns dilute their own potential. The world does not need your sympathy; it needs your strength.
Stop telling people your plans. Stop seeking approval, validation, or external permission to live as you will. Be silent. Move deliberately. Focus on what you can control—what is within your reach, within the grasp of your mind and hands. If every individual mastered this, the world would not be a wasteland of passive, apologetic, self-sacrificing shadows, but a place of clarity and force.
The case for selfishness is the case for reality. Live for yourself, not for the ghosts of obligation others try to impose upon you.