I suppose there’s a difference between doing a selfish act consciously, and doing it without awareness that it does, in a kind of karmic way, benefit the person doing the act.
I believe that I don’t have to know an act is selfish for it to be selfish, in that it benefits me indirectly. Helping others helps create a culture where everyone helps others. This helps you, when you are in trouble.
There are cultures right now, such as perhaps in Iraq, where altruistic behavior is taken advantage of, and then the altruist is shot. The altruist is considered naive.
So altruism works to the benefit of all, which works to build a safety net for yourself. As such, it is selfish. Yet almost no one thinks this way. They just think they are doing something good.
You could look at it evolutionarily. Genes that give us the impulse to be altruistic will propagate, if they actually benefit the culture, and help increase survival of altruistic people. I believe that altruism has been built into us through this process.
In the end, it comes down to feelings about words. We will behave the same way, no matter what we feel. Well, except maybe TKS—but, in the prisoners dilemma, you need a small portion of people who take advantage of others, although I forget why. In any case TKS could be being altruistic by being selfish. In other words, despite himself.
Anyway, “selfish” has, overall, a negative connotation, whereas “altruism” has the opposite connotation. I’m not sure if it matters what we think of how we describe the behaviors, because I suspect that won’t have any impact on the behaviors themselves. I.e., most of us will behave altruistically, whether we think we want to or not; and some of us will behave purely selfishly, which keeps us altruists in line.
Damn! I wish I could learn to make a point quickly. These things seem complex to me, I guess.