Reply #96: Obviously, I am NOT using the current materialistic values [View All]

[Raksha]

of wealth and financial gain to measure "living well." Not entirely anyway. Now I like material things just as much as anyone else, and obviously I also have certain minimal survival needs that have to be met, again just like anyone else. I don't think it "pays" to be moral at all, not in the immediate, egocentric way that most people think of something as paying or not paying.

But when you look at the big picture, it's the only attitude that makes any sense. We are all in this together, and what goes around, comes around. It seems perfectly self-evident to me that ultimately you're a lot safer if you don't go charging around the world seeking to impose your will by force and giving other people a lot of perfectly valid reasons to hate your guts. Because if enough people hate your guts for long enough, eventually they WILL do something about it. Likewise I've never been able to understand the neocons' total disregard for the environment--don't THEY have to breathe the same air we do? All the money in the world won't protect them if the Earth becomes uninhabitable--and yet they think it's a "good" thing that the attacks in London took climate change off the front burner???

So I guess what it really boils down to is having a wider and deeper concept of what constitutes "self-interest."