selfishness

Selfishness is being concerned excessively or exclusively for oneself or one's own advantage, pleasure, or welfare, regardless of others. Selfishness is the opposite of altruism or selflessness, and has also been contrasted (as by C. S. Lewis) with self-centeredness.

==Divergent views== The implications of selfishness have inspired divergent views within religious, philosophical, psychological, economic, and evolutionary contexts. Some early examples of "selfist" thinking are the egoistic philosophies of Yangism in ancient China and of Cyrenaic hedonism in ancient Greece. Yangists followed the teachings of Yang Zhu and might have been influenced by Taoism. Cyrenaics, founded by Aristippus of Cyrene, were skeptics and materialists (but perhaps nominally Greek pagans). Thomas Hobbes, who could also be viewed as selfist, was a materialist but also advocated loyalty to a strong government and state church. The views of Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner provide a more proximate link to the modern selfists.