Urbi et Orbi

Selfishness should be made an eighth Deadly Sin. It was Pope Gregory the Great who proclaimed lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride as the Seven Deadly Sins in the sixth century. Perhaps the sixth-century pontiff did not know selfishness would be just as deadly as or even more deadly than the septet.

Or selfishness may be the common denominator of all Seven Deadly Sins. Few moralists stress selfishness as the source of all evils. Lust is a deadly sin, as so stipulated in one of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his maidservant.” Lush is selfish, of course. So are gluttony (you want everything for yourself), greed (you want to have more for your self), sloth (you don't want to work yourself), wrath (you are angry because you believe you yourself are wrong), envy (well, the Bible says so), and pride (you think you are better than everybody else).

Selflessness, however, has never been seriously taught as a virtue throughout history. Altruism is a rather newly coined word by academics. Well, it means unselfishness. It doesn't matter whichever you want to call it — altruism, selflessness or unselfishness — it is the virtue the people the world over have to be taught to learn and practice the best they can.

Particularly in Taiwan, where the rich and the powerful are posing as role models for the young and the not so young who have learned selfishness pays. Our schools have never tried to inculcate students in the importance of unselfishness. Ask a delinquent college student what he has wronged others. He will tell you, “So long as I like or zhi yao e xi huan.” The Ministry of Education should, instead of trying in vain to improve higher education (there already are more than 160 universities in a small island with a population of 23 million people), require schoolchildren to learn how to be less selfish.

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