people who want to act fundementally selfishly have spent a lot of time and ink trying to convince other people that actually everyone wants to act like this, its human nature, because, Prisoners Dilemma-like, that view of humanity as selfish justifies their own impulses towards selfishness. European colonial powers are at the top of this list.
its a tautalogical solipsism:
- i want to do things that will benefit me and hurt other people
- morally this is pretty obviously bad
- everyone else obviously thinks the same way i do, though
- so they are morally bad
- so its justified and not morally bad for me to hurt them for my own benefit
a fucking oroboros of narcissism. ok im done now
ironically enough I was raised in an environment full of this kind of thought and by end of high school landed on "it is in my interest to genuinely help others as much as I can, because that creates an ongoing incentive for them to help me in return." literally reconciled altruism as necessarily emergent from selfishness, even had a little evopsych in there ("why would we even have unselfish urges if they weren't genetically advantageous?")
actually talked a few people around from the solipsistic version by recounting that theorem, so I guess it wasn't useless, but damn we sure can take whatever a priori axioms we find laying around and build roundabout justifications for whatever the fuck we want to huh