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« on: November 04, 2007, 05:15:40 pm »
Why are humans not 100% selfish? Because there are obviously other components to humans than selfishness. Human ethics, possibly, could be considered 100% selfish, but not simply humans.
In any case, I think you are confusing selfishness with human experience. Obviously all experience is only from oneself, nobody experiences being another person (except in some transcendent/chemically altered/etc. states), and so all our ideas are relative to ourselves. When we do something nice, it makes us happy when we see that the other person is happy. So is it selfish to do nice things, because we are really only doing them for ourselves? No, of course not, it's just altruism, and it's a very good thing. True selfishness would be a disability to feel happy because of other people.
And I don't think people always wear masks, either. Obviously, all thought has to be expressed in ways other people can understand, but many people do try their hardest to make those expressions as close to their actual thoughts as possible, and striving to be true is the complete opposite of wearing a mask.