| | I think one crucial thing is missing here. Alot of these posts specualting on the reasons people go into these lines of work talk as if the people in them are like "Gentleman firemen" or something. Has anyone ever heard terms like these, like "Gentleman rancher", someone who is not into a profession primarily for a livlihood, but primarily for pleasure, because they have enough money to do it without any worry over needing it to be profitable?
I know someone who is fireman and I know why he is and I know, without a doubt he hates it, and has said as much. He hates the blood and the carnage and the people he sees dying horribly right in front of him at times, whom he is powerless to save.
He's saved people before and is happy to have done so, but the bottom line is he'd quit in a heartbeat if he could afford to. It's a job. It's a job, and it was simply the best job available to him when he needed one most. He puts his life on the line, clearly, for the same reasons why I'd think so many join the military out of high school. For economic reasons. If you aren't putting your life on the line, then you do not have the chance at the economic future it provides.
People do their "duty" because they don't have a choice. Their not "gentleman workers" in it primarily for the thrill, satisfaction, love of it all, or sense of altruism. They do it because there is simply no better offers, and to quit means loss with nothing equal or greater to replace it.
For alot of people, like the man I know, joining the fire department was one of the very few ways of joining the ranks of the middle class. It was the only thing he was eligible for and he didn't have to wait for an opening, a wait that was economically impossible to him, which is not at all rare for many.
I think that the altruism for many comes in later as a justification - to themselves - for why they do something, which the truth be known, they really can't or don't know how to escape. So rationalizing the heroism of it all gives it a meaning and reward for them, without wich it just may prove to be utterly intolerable and if it is, then what? Throw in the towel, start shopping at goodwill for your childrens clothes, maybe have your wife leave you, check into the nearest homeless shelter?
I think the reasoning goes, that it's best to just hang on until retirment. People stay for the security, not because work is a priviledge to them, and they can just as well be an actor or a doctor or lawer, or something, and everyone gets to pick their hearts desire in this world. That's not how it is.
Alot of people get into lifthreatening public service occupations because the world is set up where those opportuities exits for one, and they exist as the best bet, economically, on top of that for many. I don't think people do them at all FOR the risk, except perhaps a minority of fools. They do it for a livlihood, not for risk, but for security, and for them, it was the best thing available they were capable of, from where they were at.
You know, not everyone gets to go to college. Not everyone gets to pick a major in life, which is a priviledge for alot of people. The posts I read read like everyone is like a college student in life who gets to pick, out of an array of fairly equal roads, which one they would like to go down. Well, I'm here to say there are very many people that do not get to choose whatever they like at some carreer smorgasborg. Alot of people, at least most of the people I know, do what they do because it was simply the only winning alternative that confronted them at the time. There doesn't seen to be an understanding here that people can "pick" their particular occupation the same way others "pick" to go to college itself.
For alot of people, their very occupational choice is as equal of a choice to them, as for others the choice to enter college is. Entering college is a platform for getting to decide what you'd LIKE. Well, there is also world that doesn't have that privilege, cultural myths about the land of opportunity notwithstanding.
Having said that, let me answer the question: is selflessness ever a virtue? No. What reason could a "self" have for acting in it's own disregard? What could motivate a self to do so? Saying that this is ever possible is the same as saying a self's actions can exist without the same selfs volition, and that volition for a self can be independent of it. In other words, selfless action is acting on the notion that the self is a puppet of something beyond it. We know that for a self, there is no self beyond it. It is itself. It is not what it is AND what it is not, that itself cannot be outside of itself, that's a contradiction, and so it's volition cannot be, and a compromise isn't possible. A self can only act on it's own volition and so only for it's own benefit. There is no escape from that fact, and so acting as if in any way there is, or can be, is wrong.
It's tantamount to acting as if YOU exist apart from YOU. If you act FOR another, then you act as if you ARE that other, which is unfair to both of you ,really. Disrespectful. The whole thing about selflessness is that it contradicts the law of identity as applied to the identity of the self, that it is what it is. You act in your own interest, always, because it's logically inconcievable to act without simply, a reason to. There has to be some REASON for you to. Selflessness always implies the opposite, that somehow it's possible for you to act free of any personal value, that an action doesn't always necessarily imply one.
You can act AS IF that's not true, which is selflessness, but such "acting" will only lead to personal dead ends because it's unrealistic. You can only go so far until you have to do something actually supportive of yourself.
|
|
