I actually agree with you, everything is driven by individual desire i.e. selfishness - even helping others, but it's a bit of a grim way of looking at things. The point I was making is that if we reduce everything to the simplest underlying principal we miss what makes life interesting and we may as well not even be having a discussion.
You could, quite correctly, classify my responses as selfish acts of showing off to gain meaningless kudos in an online forum...or more charitably classify them as thoughtful discourse between people interested in esoteric topics.
> I actually agree with you, everything is driven by individual desire i.e. selfishness - even helping others, but it's a bit of a grim way of looking at things.
Like you're saying, it's a grim way to look at things and it's even a quite simplified view.
Sure, people sometimes help because of more selfish reasons, that they want to be praised, but I'm pretty sure that pure empathy for people can also be a quite big motivation to help.
