system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I believe that everyone is selfish and there is no true kindness in people. CMV

This could be stemmed from my poor social experiences or from what i learnt in my psychology diploma, and soon recently came to the conclusion that there is no true kindness/altruism whatever you call it. 

For a behavior to happen, there needs to be some sort of motivation. Intrinsic or extrinsic, there is a need for people to behave a certain way. Extrinsic motivation is plain and simple. The most common is money. People work for money, people steal for money, people who do charity gain acceptance of society, which in turn lets them earn more from their enterprises since the company they represent is more accepted. That's what i believe. 

Even if there is an intrinsic motivation, the person definitely have to do it for his or her own cause. For example, a generous person who makes self-sacrifices for others could gain satisfaction in his own mind that he's done something "good" and the social acceptance which he gets would motivate him to do more kind deeds, since society as a whole promotes pro-social behaviors. 

Or someone sees an injustice and steps in for the victim. The person seeing the injustice could just be annoyed at the situation and in order to resolve the annoyance he steps in to help the weak. I would also think that that's just a method for the person to deal with some internal unsolved issues to make himself/herself feel better. For example, a man who was a bully victim steps in to fight off some bullies because he did not have the courage to stand up to them when he was younger. Because of that, he may feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in himself. Thus, since there is a personal gain, I do not see pure kindness. 

So basically even when someone does something good or kind, i would attribute it to his or her need to be socially accepted or the self-satisfaction, and when there's personal gain from displaying pro-social behaviors, I do not believe that people can have pure kindness. But hey, that's just my opinion man.


Edit: ok basically, I believe that there will always be personal benefits when someone does some kind deed that is beneficial to others. Without the personal benefit, nobody will do anything solely for the benefit of others. 

No matter how I looked at things, I can always attribute acts if kindness with some form of personal gains. 

I may not have phrased it correctly saying that everyone is selfish. I just tend to be quite avoidant at times and think the worst of people. Lol

Edit2: so many people talked about positive and negative values. So my question is: how do you determine the TRUE values of one's motivations for an action?
gpt
What about the economic principle of marginal utility?

In short, the idea goes: you buy an item -- lets say it's an ebook reader, and you have a large marginal utility (you love to read), say it has a number value of 100.  What if you bought another ebook reader of the same type?  Would that value still be 100?  What if you bought 20 of them?  Would the 20th kindle or nook be still worth 100?  Probably not, right?

Well, if you do charity work for intrinsic value, at some point the marginal utility could be bordering on zero right?  At some point you'd have been recognized as a very kind person in the community and everyone recognizes that -- what if you keep doing charity work at  near zero marginal values?  Why would you keep doing that?  You have next to nothing to gain (you've already gained what you could) but you keep doing charity work.  Is that not an example of selflessness?