The Selfishness in Beauty

I was getting on an airplane when I noticed an old man sitting alone in a wheelchair waiting to be assisted to board the flight. I said to myself, “there’s a man who sees people for who they truly are.” He was old, frail, not terribly good-looking, and paralyzed. No one attended him. When he was finally wheeled onboard the plane a few minutes later, the agent treated him with indifference.

Why the indifference I wondered? The best conclusion I could reach was: “because the old man had nothing to offer people.”

And it was at that moment I realized what ‘beauty’ is.

‘Beauty’ is a quality that people want to possess. If they see it in other people, there is a selfish desire to possess the beauty the individual has. For a man, a wife’s beauty is a quality for him, not for her. If she is beautiful — has facial symmetry — she is probably healthy. If she has wide beautiful hips, she can bear him many children. If she has large round breasts, his children will be well nourished. And these children will in turn inherit her beauty and make it more likely that they should find mates and yield for the husband many offspring. This is the truth of our selfish genes.

Those of us blessed with some measure of attractiveness will be treated more gently by our fellow human beings—and thus a veil will be held over our eyes and we will see people as inherently good. We won’t let ourselves acknowledge the awful truth—that people are acting selfishly. We all want to believe we are loved for some inherent ‘goodness’, some inherent ‘lovableness’ in ourselves. But the terrible reality is, the kindness of others will always be motivated by their own selfishness. At bottom, this is pure gene selfish—a desire to mate with a ‘beautiful’ individual to ultimately confer benefits onto one’s own offspring. Or in a more general fashion, the desire to associate with people who are younger, attractive, and have more social status in order to confer more social status upon ourselves.

An old man in a wheelchair offers nobody anything. Therefore people respond to him socially with far less attention than they would bestow upon a younger, healthier person. So it is that the old man’s eyes are never clouded by illusions of goodness and charity.

Old, ugly and disabled— that is the vantage point from which to see the true nature of people.