All the Selfish People

With apologies to the brilliant Beatles

for tampering with their classic song

for purely selfish reasons.

mea culpa

Ah, look at all the selfish people
Ah, look at all the selfish people

Richard Dawkins picks up his book in the church with no God
The Selfish Gene
 Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion.
Then who is it for?

All the selfish people
Where do they all come from?
All the selfish people
Where do they all belong?

Aristotle joined a perceived majority of his countrymen in condemning those who sought only to profit themselves.
Lack of empathy has been seen as one of the roots of selfishness, extending as far as the cold manipulation of the psychopath.

All the selfish people
Where do they all come from?
All the selfish people
Where do they all belong?

Ah, look at all the selfish people
Ah, look at all the selfish people

With the emergence of a commercial society, Bernard Mandeville proposed the paradox that social and economic advance depended on private vices – 

on what he called the sordidness of selfishness.
Francis Bacon carried forward this tradition when he characterised 

“Wisdom for a man's self as the wisdom of rats”.

All the selfish people
(Ah, look at all the selfish people)
Where do they all come from?
All the selfish people
(Ah, look at all the selfish people)
Where do they all belong?