Originally published in the journal Núvol: A historical and interdisciplinary reading of contemporary selfishness.
One weekend, while walking through the neighbouring village, I ran into a good acquaintance in the square, someone I had not seen for a long time. I had always found his way of seeing the world interesting: the gaze of a professional clown with an unconditional humanist vocation, different, at least in appearance, from what one usually hears.
We stopped for a few minutes and spoke without any specific purpose, almost by chance. The conversation unfolded calmly and openly, as dialogues often do when nobody is trying to convince anybody. Then he asked me a question that surprised me. It was not a provocative question, but a vulnerable one, almost spoken with a tone of despair:
“Leo, where does all this selfishness come from nowadays?”
The question remained suspended in the air. I could have answered immediately. I had several explanations at hand: social pressure, political polarisation, social media, economic insecurity. But the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that none of these answers was enough. They explained symptoms, but they did not reach the core of what resonated in that question. And so my inquiry began, with the aim of understanding whether that perception was justified, whether this selfishness really exists or whether we simply perceive it more clearly today. And, above all, since when this tendency has been taking shape.
Very soon I also understood something else: this question could not be answered solely from psychology, as often happens with this kind of issue. Psychology, or more precisely a psychoanalytic perspective, tends to look towards the past, towards individual causality, towards the wounds, experiences and mechanisms of each subject. But a society cannot be analysed in that way. It is not the sum of individual cases, nor only our history. We are also our dreams, our desires and fears, our relationships, our hope and our project for the future. If we want to understand contemporary selfishness, it is not enough to observe isolated individuals and their past. We have to look at the kind of society we are producing together and ask ourselves what we are becoming. Consequently, this inquiry starts from an incisive hypothesis: modern society has been shaped for more than eighty years by processes of individualisation and personalisation which, far from remaining merely a legitimate expansion of individual freedom, have also contributed to consolidating new forms of selfishness.
This process acquired particular force after the Second World War. Europe then underwent a profound social transformation aimed at strengthening democratic thinking and a humanism of universal scope. It was within this horizon that the United Nations was also born and the idea of human rights was reaffirmed with renewed strength, in one of the most important moments in contemporary democratic history. The conviction was consolidated that all human beings possess equal value, regardless of gender, skin colour, social status or origin. The aim was to guarantee equal rights, improve access to education and expand opportunities for personal development. Little by little, this impulse deepened. More and more people aspired to free themselves from old authorities and restrictive social norms. New rights were won, especially thanks to the feminist movement and the social, student and workers’ movements of 1968 in France, Italy and Germany. Names such as Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre and, from the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Habermas resonate here. Showing emotions, questioning authority, expressing criticism openly and seeking self-realisation ceased to be marginal and became socially valued.
Education also changed: children were to grow up with greater freedom, without violence and with more space for individuality. In that context, freedom was understood above all as emancipation from external limits and from the state. Nobody should impose how to live, how to feel or how to think. That conquest was essential for democratic development and remains today one of its fundamental and, in essence, humanistic pillars. But for the economy too, this represented a key turning point. The commercial potential of this evolution of individualism was recognised early on. Individuality became profitable. The more different people want to be, the more easily personalised products and services, lifestyles and even identities can be sold. Thus emerged a form of cultural capitalism in which freedom and consumption became closely intertwined. Self-realisation became a commodity. Each individual was expected to trace their own professional path, make their success visible, define themselves through status symbols and differentiate themselves from others. Today we call this personal branding. Traits that were once considered childish, such as a strong need for attention or validation, began to be normalised among adults.
And here appears a decisive paradox of our time: this promise of singularity often produces a new monotony. Everything is more individualised, but somehow everything is individualised in the same way. Everyone on Instagram, everyone wanting to appear authentic, interesting, successful, sensitive or cool. Everyone showing their breakfast, their body, their travels, their routine, their opinions, their emotions, their supposed spontaneity. Everyone looking for their own style, but often within repertoires already socially prefabricated. Even difference, rebellion or authenticity begin to resemble one another. As a result of this phenomenon, another even more unsettling paradox appears: individualism promised to strengthen the subject, but in this form it often ends up weakening precisely their subjectivity. In other words, individualism robs the subject of their subjectivity because it turns them into an object and, therefore, into something interchangeable. If the human being exposes themselves as a product, they become an object. In this way, paradoxically, individualism does not make us more human; at times it dehumanises us. Those who begin to see themselves as a product are forced to manage themselves, optimise themselves and constantly sustain their value. Professional life is thus transformed into a permanent race, marked by comparison and competition. This pressure consumes time, attention and energy. And when a large part of existence is organised around performance, self-presentation and the pursuit of one’s own goals, the inner availability to truly look at the other diminishes.Empathy weakens, while reactive sensitivity grows towards anything, or anyone, that damages one’s image, interrupts it, delays it or calls into question one’s own path to success. The shift from individualism to selfishness does not simply occur when someone thinks about themselves. It occurs when the other is no longer perceived as a fellow human being and begins to be experienced above all as an obstacle. This dynamic intensifies with social media, as we build increasingly personalised bubbles. We receive content suggestions that appear to be made for us, news aligned with our current interests and opinions that reinforce what we already think. AI too can become a sophisticated mirror: the quality of its answer depends largely on the quality of the question we ask, but that question is rarely neutral.
One of its most revealing consequences appears in the way we understand empathy today. A recent Stanford study, conducted with more than 5,000 students, shows a perception gap: many people tend to consider others less empathetic compared with how empathetic they consider themselves to be. The consequence is clear: if I already begin with distrust, if I start from the assumption that the other will not understand me sufficiently, in other words, that they do not empathise with me, I renounce deep communication, often without even having tried. As a result, not only does the frequency of meaningful communication decrease, but so does the willingness to cooperate. The other ceases to be an interlocutor and gradually becomes the opposite extreme: a distance that grows the less we speak. Right versus wokeism, man versus woman, majority society versus migrants, white versus Black. This phenomenon is especially visible in political debates, increasingly marked by confrontation, simplification and personal attack.
In this context, it is useful to recall Habermas’s distinction between strategic action and communicative action. We have refined “strategic action”, that is, acting in our own interest, to the point of turning it into a socially accepted form of selfishness. And in that process we have gradually lost the most valuable capacity of all: to act communicatively with one another in order to succeed together as human beings and, above all, as a society.
The clown I met that day in the square, the one who asked me this question, was called Claret. He did not get to read these pages. He died before I could answer him. But Claret did not need my answer; he already lived as an example for all of us, through his closeness, his dedication to others and his deep humanity. Perhaps the question he asked me that afternoon in the square was not only a question. It was also, in its own way, an invitation. An invitation to remember who we are.
