subject: Treating Yourself Better Than Anyone Else [print this page] Selfishness has a bad rap among the general public, because it denotes a situation in which one person has more by someone else having less. In reality, of course, that is only the case in abusive parent child situations, and even then the process is tempered by the child growing up and achieving strength and self determination on their own. Treating yourself better than you treat anyone else cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, even be termed as selfish, since it is self maintenance and is a part of daily living. Unfortunately, many people who live in or nearby alcoholism and drug abuse do not understand this as a basic fact of life. Somehow, the us-versus-them mentality takes hold on them, and they often believe that even satisfying basic human needs is selfish and not in the best interest of the group, commune, or family.
If you are hungry, do you consider it selfish to eat food? Humans are not living plants, which only need food, water and sunshine to survive. Humans need intellectual stimulation and knowledge and growth and recreation and personal bonding and love and commitment to one another and to our individual interests and desires. Humans are not just made out of plant material, and it would literally be an advanced form of self deprivation to only give ourselves the requirements of such. We need books, and travel, and sex, and love, and nurturing, and beauty both in ourselves and in other things. We need comfort and safety and luxury, as well as wildness and freedom and new things.
Treating your business better than any other business applies the same way. Henry Ford gave his employees the highest wages that he could afford and that they could earn, so that in time they would be able to buy the products which their company produced, advertise the business, stimulate the economy and demonstrate the growing demand for the product. If he only ever paid them a small salary, they would not have even been able to afford a car, not to mention how demoralizing that would have been to work for Henry Ford. By the same token, part of taking care of your business is to use high quality drug testing equipment, drug tests, and alcohol breathalyser devices
