This blog post examines the dangers of making selfish choices and the positive impact of the right life on individuals and society.
Everyone has probably done a group assignment at least once in their life. Unlike individual assignments, group assignments are carried out jointly by several people, so you can learn things that you cannot learn from individual assignments. While carrying out group assignments, you can also learn leadership and followership and learn a sense of responsibility for the work you are assigned. In addition, the process of cooperating with others improves your communication skills and conflict resolution skills. However, as the prisoner’s dilemma game shows, you can gain more when you don’t cooperate with group activities. When group activities are carried out, there are people who want to ride the train without doing anything and expect others to do it for them. Therefore, let’s learn about the strategies needed to prevent these people and the reasons why we should live a proper life.
To prevent free-riding, some rules are needed. First, students should work in the same group for a semester or a year. In addition, group members should evaluate each other and those who engage in free-riding more than a few times should be removed from the group. The rationale for these rules is the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis. The reciprocity hypothesis states that when the interaction between two parties is assumed to continue, the other party will perform an altruistic act out of fear of retaliation the next time. If it is only a one-time deal, people will take the betrayal strategy that benefits them the most. Therefore, if you work in a group for a semester or a year, you have to maintain a constant relationship with your group members, so it is difficult to want to ride for free for the sake of immediate gain. And mutual evaluation is a form of retaliation. You can identify those who want to ride for free through mutual evaluation every hour. You can also reward those who are highly engaged to further increase the participation of group members.
What would happen if we all decided to take a free ride when doing group assignments? If we do not fulfill our responsibilities for our own convenience as members of society and leave it to others, our society could eventually lead to its destruction. Therefore, we must live a righteous life by fulfilling our responsibilities without causing harm to others.
Living a righteous life ultimately helps an individual survive. There are many meanings to the phrase “living correctly,” but here, let’s think of living without causing harm to others. As explained in the previous section on the reciprocity hypothesis, if you do not cause harm to others, you will not cause harm to yourself in the end. In 1984, Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan proposed a strategy that would allow you to earn the highest payoff in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. A variety of strategies were submitted, ranging from very sophisticated strategies designed to continually modify their predictions in a Bayesian manner to random strategies in which each player chooses their own behavior at random each round. However, the winning strategy in the competition was the simplest one: the strategy of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” In other words, the strategy of starting the game in a cooperative manner and then simply copying the opponent’s previous behavior. If the other party cooperated in the previous round, he or she will cooperate in this round, and if the other party betrayed in the previous round, he or she will betray in this round. In addition to these game strategies, reciprocity can also be observed in the world of vampire bats and chimpanzees. The vampire bats share the blood they have sucked with other bats and the chimpanzees groom each other under the principle of “I am willing to help others only if they have helped me.” Therefore, in order to live without being harmed by others, we should at least not harm others.
Let’s look at the meaning of living correctly from the perspective of family and kinship. What does it mean to live correctly in this context? It means fulfilling one’s role. The family community is maintained when parents play their role as parents and children play their role as children. Parents should take good care of and look after their children, and children should be filial to their parents and build a harmonious family. If one does not fulfill one’s role, the family may collapse. The kin selection hypothesis explains that altruistic behavior occurs within families to increase the survival rate of genes. Therefore, if each member does not play their role, both parents and children cannot live a smooth life, which ultimately poses a threat to the survival of genes. As such, if one fails to fulfill their responsibilities within the family, it can threaten the survival of the individual, and even the survival of genes.
Let’s expand the concept of living right from the individual to society. Living right helps maintain the stability of society. What would happen if everyone was selfish and only cared about their own interests? Suppose there is a world where no one can bend their arms. In a village where people know how to help others, instead of struggling to eat alone with unbending arms, everyone can fill their hungry stomachs by putting food into each other’s mouths. But in a village where people only look out for themselves, each person puts food in front of them and struggles to eat it with unbending arms, but in the end, they are unable to eat and are forced to starve. When everyone only cares about their own interests, the society will eventually collapse as it will be on the path of regression. The complacent thought that “I can live selfishly for myself” can eventually affect the entire society. Therefore, we should live a proper life of helping and caring for others rather than a selfish life of only caring for ourselves.
Some may question whether we should live a proper life even at the expense of our own interests. When you cut in line to get on the subway, you can sit down comfortably, and when you don’t want to go all the way to the trash can, you can throw away the paper on the street, which is a short-term benefit for yourself. But if you think about it, what would happen to our society if everyone did this for their own convenience? Our society can be compared to a donut. In other words, society is connected as one, and one person’s selfish behavior can have a huge impact on society as a whole. When a person with a social status abuses his power or commits a corruption, the repercussions are enormous. Many people are harmed by one person’s wrongful behavior. Since society is so closely connected, one’s wrongful behavior can harm others, so one must live correctly.
Finally, living correctly ultimately helps an individual to achieve self-realization. In movies and dramas, we can see people sacrificing themselves to save their teammates. In fact, when a gas explosion occurred in Busan in 2006, firefighter Seo Byeong-gil saved two residents and lost his life after being buried under a pile of rubble. Why do people like this sacrifice themselves to save others? They made decisions and took actions based on their own thoughts in urgent situations. They considered the pursuit of rightness to be their highest value. They achieved self-realization while upholding the belief of living right. Maslow expressed human needs in five levels: physiological needs, safety needs, affection and empathy needs, respect needs, and finally, self-actualization needs. In this way, it can be said that humans ultimately live for self-realization. Ultimately, happiness can be achieved through self-realization. Deceiving one’s conscience for the sake of momentary convenience only leads to guilt and suffering. On the other hand, people who live their lives correctly, even if it is difficult and challenging at the moment, will ultimately be able to live a happy and meaningful life.
If someone tries to take a free ride, they will be pointed out by the members of the group and will not have a positive impact on their life. A selfish life is sweet in the short term, but can lead to great disaster in the long term. On the other hand, a righteous life may be difficult in the moment, but it will bear sweet fruit in the end. Therefore, instead of just chasing immediate gains, we should look ahead and live righteously.
