FALLING IN LOVE WITH ONE'S OWN CREATION
"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it" - Confucius
Everyone perceives beauty differently. We all have our own elusive, ideal concepts of what we think beauty should be and we look for that in everything around us. Thus, when we fail to find it we try to recreate it. We embellish the things that fail to comply with our often intangible standards of beauty; we mould them is such ways that they become beautiful in our eyes, for we often refuse to accept and comprehend the impossibility of an "imperfect" reality reaching "perfection".
However, as narcissism, selfishness and the idea that we deserve better determine us to resort to such alterations, compelling those we deem imperfect to abide by our rules for beauty and superiority can have serious, detrimental effects on their well-being. While we perceive the conspicuous changes that they undergo as enhancements, estranging them from their prior nature and repudiating their personalities are indeed acts of selfishness. Similarly, considering ourselves superior to everyone around us and using those we deem inferior as means to achieving our goals unveils a certain amount of narcissism and egocentrism that we possess.
On the other hand, as finding beauty in the things and people around us is considered a way of pursuing happiness, how come changing the things around us so as to make us happy is considered selfish? How come, irrespective of the fact that we are constantly reminded that we are responsible for our own happiness, actually taking the matter into our own hands is considered egotistical? Well, sacrificing someone else's happiness for our own is indeed immoral. Hampering people from discovering themselves and improving in ways that they consider appropriate is selfish. Moreover, even though we might think that we are helping them improve, our perception of enhancement is often not one shared by the general public, but one unconsciously forged by us. Thus what we perceive as improvement might be perceived as regression by others.
Furthermore, the conspicuous consequences of such selfish deeds are blatantly emphasized in Bernard Shaw's play "Pygmalion" and, subsequently, in the film "My Fair Lady". The utterly substantial changes that a mere flower girl, named Eliza, undergoes under the auspices of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, ultimately lead to her being exceedingly disoriented and heavily dependent on her "creator". The process of transforming Eliza into the woman that professor Higgins wanted her to be engendered the loss of her prior accurate self and the arousal of a new version of herself, one that she couldn't handle.
To conclude with, I think that irrespective of some people's good intentions, sacrificing someone else's happiness for their own by compelling those deemed inferior to comply with the standards of an ideal concept of beauty is utterly selfish.