Selfless Motives
There's a common theme in popular music that goes
on the lines of ‘I want you’, ‘I need you’, ‘I can’t live without you’. This is
supposed to represent a sublime form of love. It’s saying ‘See how strong this
love is’. This is symptomatic of a malaise I've mentioned before. That is, because
people are generally cut off from their real emotion they substitute actions in
order to hide their lack of real feeling. So saying ‘I need you’ is really a substitute
for real feeling. In fact, real feeling, because it is feeling, not action is
difficult to demonstrate in songs and on movies.
The sentiment of ‘I need you’ rather than being real love, is self-centred. It concentrates on the sentiments of the person who says it rather than the object of the love. Real love is selfless; you put the object of the love above your own interests. In this regard it is similar to the attitudes towards charity. What motivates people who give charity is often the desire to feel good rather than the interests of the object of the charity.
There's an attitude in the West that, as it were, if you have an itch you should
scratch it. So if you are hungry then you should eat; if you desire sex you should
have it; and if you feel a desire to give to charity then you should. The aim
is to satisfy the need, not to help the needy.
There was an article in a woman's magazine on a nurse who was working in Afghanistan.
There are few female nurses and she was able to help people who otherwise would
not have had medical assistance. She said she did this because she felt she had
a need. The desire was so strong that when she returned to Australia she simply
wanted to go back. Her son in Australia refused to speak to her. He felt he had
been abandoned and that she put the needs of women in an unknown country above
her responsibilities. Often, the children of parents who appear to be paragons
of selflessness resent their parents actions and feel abandoned. The motivation
behind the parent’s actions are either the desire to scratch the itch, so to speak,
or to simply impress others.
In some circles this thinking extends to children. They should, according to this
attitude, be given free range. What they want, however, is not necessarily what
is good for them. I've dealt with this previously.
