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The Meaning Of Ismay : Is Survival Is Selfish?

Decent Essays

There’s no denying that we want to survive, but does it ever become selfish to want to survive? The meaning of selfish is “concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself: seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard to others” (Merriam-Webster). I think that in some situations survival can be selfish. But usually you just want to survive to not put your family through anything. Survival can be selfish if you put yourself before others, for example in the reading “Is Survival Selfish” it states, “After the disaster, however, Ismay was salvaged by the media and the general public for climbing into a lifeboat and saving himself when there were other women and children still on board”(Wallace pg. 23). In this situation it was selfish for Ismay to put himself before the women and children even though it protocol to let children and women to go before the men. Even if people are frozen in place because they are scared I believe you should still try to help others first. In these two examples from “Is Survival Selfish” the people who survived pushed through people or climbed over people who were frozen in place. “My friend and I walked quickly and calmly outside, but to get any further, we had to push our way through a crowd of people who were staring transfixed at the column of smoke rising from the front of the station”(Wallace pg. 22). Wallace could have helped people get out of their frozen state of mind. “People were

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