Book Review: The Art of Selfishness
Under pressure, the real you longs for expression and fulfillment.
This is the first book I’ve read in probably a year. As a teenager in the late eighties and early nineties, I sought out books. I loved going to bookstores and libraries. I remember those quiet periods of discovery and contemplation that entranced me and captured my attention to the exclusion of all else.
Now, my ability to concentrate on one thing, let alone read an entire book, is noticeably compromised. I can barely keep a thought in my head before another one overtakes it. Every word of a page I’ve just read will completely evaporate behind my preoccupation with whatever so-and-so said or did to so-and-so earlier in the week.
The thief in my pocket has stolen my capacity for paying attention. I’m trying to reclaim that attention by committing to reading books. The Art of Selfishness, written by David Seabury, is the first one I picked up. How fitting.
Twelve years ago I literally found this book on the ground next to my car. The title intrigued me: The Art of Selfishness. What was this author up to? Like everyone, I was taught that selfishness is bad. I’ve kept the book all this time and only this past weekend finally read it.
The book mirrors some valuable advice I got from a friend during a difficult period in my life. He and I were old running buddies who got into a lot of trouble when we were younger, and the both of us had eventually taken decisive turns for the better.
But the old attitude was still our way of relating. He met my despair bluntly, telling me:
Quit kissing ass or trying to be “in good graces.” You don’t need validation from others. Don’t beg for anything. People can either accept you for who you are or move on. Very few people really care anyway. No matter. Life is short, and everyone dies alone. Put your happiness first. Let their problems be theirs.
I know, right! Not exactly what you want to hear when you’re at an emotional low. But I can tell you, it was an act of mercy and love. And some of the simplest and most treasured guidance I’ve received. As it began to settle, I felt empowered by it. If I could inject it into my veins every morning I would.
The Art of Selfishness reminded me of that advice. It’s not about how to be uncaring or to disregard the needs of others, although it is a book about putting oneself first. Obviously. This may seem contradictory but I found the idea mostly very sensible as put forth by its author.
The book was originally written in 1937, and I would assume it to have been rather progressive for that time, considering its many forthright challenges to convention. The edition I read was a reprint from 1974, but revisions were few, according to the foreword. Its message is timeless.
Many of us believe we are bound by duties and obligations. Whether by family expectations, marriage patterns, or the demands of work; by a desire for social status or keeping up appearances; ego fulfillment, insecurity, fear, passivity and politeness - the list of responsibilities, mistaken or otherwise, never ends. These are the same problems people grappled with when the book was written.
Essentially a prolonged riff on navigating personal boundaries, the book’s foreword states its aims:
The word “no,” or the phrase “I won’t do it,” is a wonderful weapon in the arsenal of life. Here, then, is a manual for dealing with the problems of selfishness… the selfishness of others. What they term selfishness is really their own, not yours.
A further summation appears on page 28:
If I had only a few central points to offer for overcoming our daily quandaries, the first would be: "Don't follow any advice, no matter how good, until you feel as deeply in your spirit as you think in your mind that the counsel is wise."
And the second caution would be like the first: "Don't assume that the established ways of thinking about human conduct are true and perfect just because they are established. They are quite as likely to be as insane as the customs you repudiate."
If these quotes resonate with you, it’s worth the read. Some of it is indeed what you might expect from an early personal development book in the wake of post-Great Depression recovery: strong assertions about proper perspectives in salesman pitch, littered with platitudes and marketable phrases designed to neatly identify and categorize all human action.
Still, I found gems. But I’ll get to those in a minute. First a few criticisms:
I take issue with some of the author’s conceptual framings. For example, his thoughts on suicide:
Suicide is melancholia in an extreme, and as depression is built on rage that life is not more satisfactory, so we find in suicide a mechanism of revenge. The individual wishes to punish the world and those in it with whom he has come into intimate contact, because they seem to make him unhappy.
Suicide, then, is an act of ego satisfaction. Self-killers are venting their displeasure in exactly the spirit of a child in a tantrum, destroying themselves from the mad belief they must otherwise compromise, taking their lives instead of their liberties.
That’s harsh, and a hard sell to someone in debilitating physical pain that medicine can’t overcome, or to someone trapped in clinical depression from which they see no other exit.
He is also staunch on the principle of never compromising. This too begs the question. Never? Without digging in here, there’s a pick-your-battles card to be played that would seem quite effective in dislodging the rigor of his conviction.
Moreover, the very worldview he proposes contradicts itself at times. In a chapter called How to Face a Crisis, he says (and read critically, with the book’s thesis in mind here):
There is only one effective way to deal with a crisis: meet it squarely, head-on. Any other way involves compromise - and compromise, like evasion or expediency, is the essence of defeat. A cataclysm cannot be averted by turning your back on it.
Sounds rather… dutiful, no? Now contrast that with another set of directions he provides in a section entitled How to Refuse a Request:
Keep the world off your back. You don’t have to carry it; you only think you do. If you start to pay toll for the privilege of living and accept the pressure of everyone who creates it, you will be broken indeed.
Or this, from another chapter, called New Skills for Quarreling:
Teach yourself to treat any debate as play. Keep it light, full of humor and tolerance. The moment anyone you are talking with becomes personal or impatient, leave the room.
I’m being nitpicky, to be sure, and it doesn’t necessarily follow that these are logically inconsistent positions. The latter advice on arguments gone awry is indispensable. But for a book whose premise is essentially the shunning of duty, or at least giving consideration to whether something is or is not duty-worthy before committing to it, his insistence that only one effective way exists to face a crisis, or to face anything, frankly, challenges his own program.
Ok, not flattering I know, but stick with me. Those gems I mentioned? There are a lot of them. I’ll close with those, and you can weigh them against the rest. I’ve tried to break them into themes. Seabury shares some truly brilliant insights. Enjoy!
ON AUTHENTICITY
Most people won’t believe it, but it isn’t so much what you do as how you feel that puts other people at ease. We convey our true spirits in a million indirect ways: a look of eye, inflection of voice, touch of the hand. A dominant motive even affects what we don’t say, or do, quite as much as it shapes our conduct.
You can’t put people at ease if you don’t want them to be at ease. If you are envious and full of hate, the best book on etiquette will not make you a companionable person.
ON COMMUNICATING
Most conversations are ruined before they begin. Too many people have the idea that a successful discussion is developed by objecting to what your companion is saying before you understand what he is talking about.
Don’t shame them by your skill in voicing their intentions. There is nothing more unpleasant than one who can flow like an open spigot with what he’s sure is everyone else’s inarticulate broodings.
ON CONFLICT
Don’t fight for the sake of fighting. Don’t fight to inflate your ego. Don’t fight to exalt your pride. Don’t fight to overcome your adversary or to punish him. Fight only to win a larger end, and fight without fighting - incongruous as that seems. Strive for the positive force, the impelling power that will be invincible in overcoming your trouble. You seldom need to attack if you use your wits.
ON NEEDY RELATIVES
Those who trade on the blood relation always drive sharp bargains. The cheat is not more prevalent in the marketplace than in the home. Beware of the tricks of those who put “family“ above fair play. Their affection is counterfeit.
The tyranny of the weakest member of the household is worse than its strongest egotist. A sinkhole isn’t as vigorous, but it’s more dangerous than a cliff. Don’t let dolorous despots ruin your life.
ON DOING FAVORS
There is nothing more disappointing than to anticipate a reward for kindness. Somehow it leaks out when you expect gratitude, and changes a blessing into a barter.
ON FIXING OTHERS
You can’t take away any man’s pain, except as he is ready to outgrow it. He is injured by your unctuous solicitude. Someday we shall know that self sacrifice is the first step in predatory living.
Never steal another person‘s trouble and call this thieving a virtue. You are just as dishonest to take the discipline he needs as to rob him of bread. Pain belongs to the man it purifies. Sorrow is a solvent of the soul. To get a difficulty away from its owner is psychic burglary.
ON TAKING HINTS
When others ignore you, they are telling you how to treat them. Every situation is full of good advice. Take counsel from the occasion and you’ll know what to do.
ON LOVE
Love is not so simple and malleable as many suppose. Put it in prison and it dies. Restrict it and it turns into hate. Force it and it disappears. You cannot will love, nor even control it. You can only guide its expression. It comes or it goes according to those qualities in life that invite it or deny its presence.
We know nowadays that the laws of attraction and repulsion are as absolute as those of gravitation. Some things and people cause a harmonious response, others arouse antagonism. It is not a matter of good or bad, right or wrong, but of sympathy or revulsion. You do or do not continue to respond as your affection or your hate grows. And this is because you and the other person are as you are.
ON LOVELESSNESS
Better to lose love now than to wake up in a few years to find you never had it.
ON MARTYRDOM AND RESENTMENT
If you accept the doctrine of standing on your own feet, insist on giving others the same privilege. Every time you carry a healthy person, you weaken him.
One day we will hate those we claim to love if we let them pray upon our lives. It’s kinder to be honest in the first place. Hating someone and feeling guilty is about as foolish as loving someone and feeling virtuous.
Seldom is there a virtue in the masochistic martyrdom people miscall goodness. Most of the pressure in our lives would’ve disappeared had we let our friends and families do their own living, the living they could do within their knowledge and capacity. We do not need to carry each other and children, mothers, brothers, upon our backs.
Everything and everybody has a saturation point. This means you. The time will come when you can stand no more from the people and things who fill you with fury. Whoever and whatever they are: wives, sisters, mothers, fathers, husbands, partners, bosses, hours, neighborhoods, jobs, jostling crowds or jazzy visitors, it makes no difference. If the irritation they create grows faster than you can give it outlet, you will someday slop over and make a mighty splash. If such a saturation is inevitable, isn’t it better to change now, move in, move out, give up, invite some relative to leave, or leave yourself before the explosion?
Self-neglect is a form of suicide, a first step in the destruction of one’s nature. This usually precedes the actual taking of one’s life. Somewhere the evil doctrine of patient endurance has been at work. The final killing of one’s body is but a completion of the sacrifice.
ON MICRO-MANAGING
Never try to manage anyone else. Manage your self and what you say and do. Maneuvering others fails. Make your mind the campaign ground of your effort.
ON NARCISSISTS
Neurotic selfishness tries to swamp you by the way it twists everything you say into unkindness and accuses you of the very sadism it feels. Your words are elaborated, your meanings changed, evil intent is put upon you until your relationship with an egocentric has become an involved turmoil.
Drop the discussions. Give them up. The delirium of a fever is not cured by argument. Neither is the sick mind of a neurotic helped by verbal pressure. You get nowhere by blaming such an unfortunate person for the abnormalities his early setting created.
ON RUMINATION
Keep your difficulties out of your brain. Put them on paper. Make them as objective as the latest crossword puzzle. Seldom ponder about them if you haven't them before you on the table.
The most important strategy of all is quiet. Limit your talking to one-tenth of your doing. More effort is wasted in words than in any other folly.
The quieter you are, the more powerful will you be. Some things to disregard as not worth bothering about:
Most criticisms and blames.
People’s accidental mistakes.
All slights, whether intended or not.
All behavior that comes from ignorance.
All conduct from inefficiency.
All the ways neurotic people act.
All advice when impatiently offered.
All unsolicited obligations.
All mistakes no one can correct.
Most consequences of temperamental differences.
The unavoidable losses in life.
The imperfections of everyone.
The fact that life is full of troubles, and so is the situation you are arguing about.
Mosquitoes and bill collectors are part of life. Arrogant neighbors and stupid relatives are not unusual. Accept them as you do the dirt that collects on your hands. Almost any situation can be washed up, once you become calm about it.
Make this a rule: never attempt to clear up a bothersome situation while you are upset about it. Let it alone until the funny side of it all appears.
Thanks for your time and attention. If it’s as elusive as mine is, it is most appreciated. Here’s a link to The Art of Selfishness on Amazon.