Delphic Maxim 96: Benefit yourself
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
96. Benefit yourself
One of the problems that arises as I’ve read through these maxims stems from the heavy orientation towards community. It conflicts a bit with our contemporary reading of the world: that we are individuals responsible for ourselves. The ancients understood that we are part of communities, and that our engagement with and support of the people around us was a way to strengthen ourselves. Today’s maxim is a reminder that we should also be looking out for ourselves — not necessarily to the exclusion of others (since community strength is our own strength), but self care is important.
I temper that observation, though, with the fact that we do live in individualistic times. Recently I wrote about the impact that Instagram has been having on our understanding of self, and traced an outline of Baudrillard’s argument about simulacra and simulation. Instagram is a way of representing the self, and the self that it most often seeks to represent is one that seems to be in perfect health, living your best life, relaxing and enjoying leisure. Instagram calls attention to the benefit and care of self, of the things we enjoy, it is a snapshot of a life that we might want to lead — or the aesthetic celebration of things that we would like to be representative of our lives.
It’s a symptom of a society that is structured around benefit of the self — contemporary, liberal, capitalist and democratic.
At the last Australian federal election, people were shocked that voters in the mining regions of the mining states (Queensland and Western Australia) voted for a party that unambiguously supported mining. I saw posts on social media asking how people could be so selfish, how they could only think of themselves. But really, this should be no surprise. We have had a cultural and economic system that has spent the last 200 years pushing people towards looking out for themselves — and this has fortified since the 1980’s into a culture that positions each of us as atomised individuals who participate in discrete social activities (these days via social media).
The idea that we are a part of a class, a social group, and that our identities are not some internal miracle but instead are grounded in our social world, has become alien to us. So we have a culture of benefiting the self. This maxim doesn’t really need to exist to remind us — it’s one of the maxims we live and breathe every day because our world has brought us to that point.
I don’t mean to suggest that it’s wrong either. It’s important to take care of yourself, to benefit yourself. I like my independence, I like the freedom and responsibility that comes with carving my own way through life, and I am fairly terrified of the idea that other people and creatures might depend on me — that kind of responsibility feels both constraining and also overwhelming. I am a product of that same capitalist, neoliberal (even though I hate the word), ethos.
I think this maxim should serve as a double reminder then: first, that it’s just fine to look out for yourself and to take care of yourself. But also that it comes from a time when the idea of looking after yourself was actual novel: back then, your community, your family, your nation were in many ways a far more crucial focus of your care. Neither is right, but a balance on this front could do us all good. As always, our social bonds are as important for self care as our selfishness. We are made stronger by networks of support.
