Breeders, Non-Breeders And The Reciprocal Accusation Of Selfishness
Breeders and non-breeders often accuse each other of being selfish. This is remarkable, as being selfish means attempting to get benefits for oneself disregarding conflicting interests. Accusing someone else of being selfish implies the agreement, that the allegedly selfish behavior is indeed beneficial for the accused. Evaluating another person's behavior as self-damaging would lead to call him a fool, insane, irrational, pathetic, anything except selfish.
Therefore a breeder accusing a non-breeder as selfish implies the admission, that not breeding is more beneficial than breeding, and vice versa. This paradox needs to be explained.
So far, I had attributed the decision to breed or not to breed only to the need for homeostasis due to differences in the strength of the procreation instinct serving directly the survival of the genes. I consider this as distributed along a bell curve, where at one extreme end people feel a strong procreation instinct, while at the other end, this instinct is absent.
But there is a second scale, which I have up to now omitted, the innate nurturing instinct. It is also distributed as a bell curve. The innate difference is between being attracted to spend time with and to care for helpless beings or not. At one end are those people, who feel very emotionally attracted to babies, children, pets, not only their own but in general. At the other extreme are those people, who are just not attracted to any beings, who are lacking the cognitive abilities of a sane adult.
These two scales are not or at least not fully correlated. To illustrate the problem, I compare the four combinations of the extremes, but the same problem will also be to a lesser degree the case with the majority of people anywhere in the middle of the bell curves. And of course, people are often influenced and brainwashed, so they are not aware of their true inclinations.
1. High procreation and high nurturing instincts:
Such people experience raising children predominantly as restoring homeostasis and therefore subjectively as their self-interest. They are those, who rather feel indiscriminate pity for the childless and the childfree and rarely call them selfish.
Breeders and non-breeders often accuse each other of being selfish. This is remarkable, as being selfish means attempting to get benefits for oneself disregarding conflicting interests. Accusing someone else of being selfish implies the agreement, that the allegedly selfish behavior is indeed beneficial for the accused. Evaluating another person's behavior as self-damaging would lead to call him a fool, insane, irrational, pathetic, anything except selfish.
Therefore a breeder accusing a non-breeder as selfish implies the admission, that not breeding is more beneficial than breeding, and vice versa. This paradox needs to be explained.
So far, I had attributed the decision to breed or not to breed only to the need for homeostasis due to differences in the strength of the procreation instinct serving directly the survival of the genes. I consider this as distributed along a bell curve, where at one extreme end people feel a strong procreation instinct, while at the other end, this instinct is absent.
But there is a second scale, which I have up to now omitted, the innate nurturing instinct. It is also distributed as a bell curve. The innate difference is between being attracted to spend time with and to care for helpless beings or not. At one end are those people, who feel very emotionally attracted to babies, children, pets, not only their own but in general. At the other extreme are those people, who are just not attracted to any beings, who are lacking the cognitive abilities of a sane adult.
These two scales are not or at least not fully correlated. To illustrate the problem, I compare the four combinations of the extremes, but the same problem will also be to a lesser degree the case with the majority of people anywhere in the middle of the bell curves. And of course, people are often influenced and brainwashed, so they are not aware of their true inclinations.
1. High procreation and high nurturing instincts:
Such people experience raising children predominantly as restoring homeostasis and therefore subjectively as their self-interest. They are those, who rather feel indiscriminate pity for the childless and the childfree and rarely call them selfish.
2. High procreation and low nurturing instincts.
Such people discover, that they experience raising children as a burden and a sacrifice only after they have them, when they are unable to undo the irreversible mistake. They experience cognitive dissonance, they are envious of the childfree and they call them selfish.
3. Low procreation and high nurturing instincts.
Such people are attracted to children, they choose to be dedicated uncles and aunts, to adopt, to be school teachers. They perceive pets as children. While they are rationally aware of the overpopulation and other external good reasons for not breeding, they are secretly dissatisfied of not being able to spend as much time with children as would give them homeostasis for their nurturing instinct. As a result, they secretly envy the people, who have own children in defiance of any rational considerations, and they accuse them of being selfish.
4. Low procreation and low nurturing instincts.
Such people are attracted only to beings, with whom intellectual communication is possible. They are emotionally attracted to those people, with whom they can share the joy of consent by having something in common, by the intellectual intimacy with a mindmate.
They can find it interesting to watch other people's kids for a few hours and to enjoy a visit to the zoo, but such beings just bore them after a while and caring for them is not an attraction, but an unpleasant burden to be avoided. This lack of the instinct to asymmetrically care for the young has of course nothing to do with the symmetrical willingness to care for a sick partner in a committed relationship. Such people are not driven to find someone as a target for an asymmetrical nurturing instinct, they choose someone to get attracted to by a wise intellectual choice, and caring is a symmetrical part of commitment.
Such people are aware, that society as a whole needs some procreation to survive. For them, being free from raising children is a privilege, they are content, that others do the unpleasant chore. They are grateful to have been spared. They have no reason to call breeders selfish.
