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The Self-Centered Altruist


In all my experience, I believe the academic relationship between a mentor, a teacher, is one of the most genuine forms of human transaction. It overrides the human tendency of jealousy in most simple cases because there is no direct line of comparison. A teacher sees their knowledge culminate in another and see it bear fruit. If anything, their greatest accomplishment would be seeing someone they taught benefiting off their effort. Although the intent or subconscious reasoning may be humanly flawed the authenticity behind the want for someone to succeed cannot be questioned.


I say this with my own experience getting the opportunity to formally tutor students. I always believed that some lingering amounts of jealousy may exist when someone succeeds in our arena but I found that when someone succeeds due to me it doesn't feel like competition at all, but instead a continuation of knowledge held in another person.


But of course, a relationship stronger than this is evidently one between family or more specifically one between parents and their children, I suppose for a similar reason too. Because someone's child is a direct link to you, a part of your blood and flesh realised in another person that you get to call your own.In this sense, every accomplishment, every step toward something better, is not only encouraged but deeply desired, often irrespective of what it offers in return. 


In both roles—the educator and the progenitor—the boundaries of the 'self' become porous. We stop viewing the student or the child as a competitor because we have psychologically claimed their victories as a subset of our own history. It is perhaps the most beautiful form of narcissism: loving someone else because they are the living repository of your best efforts. 


Yet, there is a nuance between the two. The teacher’s joy is a rational one—a satisfaction in seeing a specific theory or skill survive the passage of time. The parent’s joy is visceral. If the teacher provides the architecture for the house, the parent provides the very foundation upon which the house stands. 


Concisely, it becomes most logical to conclude that “every man for himself” becomes deeply inherent in one's actions even if it doesn't appear to be on the surface. But there is a good reason we have come to accept this as the norm and not question it, because doing so collapses the very idea of humanity being anything but self centered.

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