I’ve put together a booklet of essays on the self-serving bias. If you haven’t familiarized yourself with the concept and are planning to run a large corporation after the Reval, this is one you may want to have a look at.
Download a copy of On the Self-Serving Bias here: https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/On-the-Self-Serving-Bias-2.pdf
Introduction
It seems to me that … the self-serving bias was one of the first notions I imbibed in my search to feel better than the angry, irritable, clever man I was. Surely life was not meant to be lived in such daily pain and suffering.
So I picked up Eric Berne’s Games People Play and the long journey to wellness began. If Berne did not explicitly discuss the self-serving bias (I can’t remember if he did), all the games he described were founded upon it.
There’s actually a broader perspective into which the self-serving bias fits as a strategy. I described that broader view as “Separate Selves Struggling for Survival amid Seeming Scarcity” in an article in this book. (1)
The broader view sounds convincing but it’s wholly untrue. We’re not separate selves; there’s no need for struggle or scarcity; and we’ll always survive no matter what.
There’s no room for God or galactics in this perspective.
But even worse, given that the view ties us to conflict, we seem always to end up looking out for # 1 and struggling with everyone else to survive. This is not a life.
I hear Kathleen saying, “How’s it working for ya?” Well, social Darwinism only works for the elite of the elite when it does at all. They too are struggling to remain in position – and survive.
It doesn’t work at all for the so-called weak who, forgotten by a society led by a controlled media, languish, as people in many countries around the world are doing at this time. Sri Lanka is a stark example.
If we’re going to reverse this global situation, we have to become aware of how the paradigm and its strategy are being sold to us. We have to watch our own thoughts and acts to see it, to raise it to awareness, which usually is enough to handle any problem.
Have fun with this one. Just get that at times you and the rest of us are self-serving. Notice when you’re being that way and just stop. Just the facts, ma’am, without the spin.
As a matter of fact, you don’t actually need to have something to put in its place. It’d be enough to just stop.
When I look at my own self-servingness, I feel almost as if I’m steeped in it. So much so that it’s almost invisible to me. And certainly almost irresistible (a siren song).
And yet seeing it and sharing what we see can be one of the most intimate acts between two partners. It injects a note of reality into many a conversation.
Pushing our edge by revealing our self-servingness can result in a return of sharing in a stuck relationship; it can be evidence of sincerity; it can be an icebreaker.
I haven’t emerged from the self-serving bias so I can’t tell you how it feels to be free of it. But after years and years of playing the awareness game, I regard the journey as being as much fun as arriving at the destination.
Download a copy of On the Self-Serving Bias here: https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/On-the-Self-Serving-Bias-2.pdf
On the Self Serving Bias 2