It goes much deeper than selfishness. It is that the West is object oriented, from atoms to individuals.
Context is assumed to be emergent from the objects bouncing around.
Rather than the organism and the ecosystem as reflections of the other.
Consider in the West, we tend to think of the future as in front of us, while the past is behind. Yet in the East and among Native Americans, the past is seen as in front and the future behind.
That is because we see ourselves as objects moving through our world, while the other perspective is the past and what is in front are known, while the future and what is behind are unknown. Which accords with the fact we see events after they occur, then the energy transitions to other events and observers, as that larger context.
The node is one. The network is oneness.
"Entangled particles" would not be such a mystery, if modern physics originated in the East.
Synchronization and harmonization, with resonance and reverberations as feedback in the middle.
Yin and yang, than God Almighty.
When it's just that singular focus, whether religion or self, the centripetal dynamic of the feedback loops with no circuit breakers has everything spiraling into the abyss.
For one thing, money is a networking mechanism, a medium. So the premise of capitalism is to make it the message. Yet to store the asset side of the ledger requires a debt on the other side. So while everyone rants about all the debt piling up, it is a consequence of the system trying to store the medium. What if your body tried to store blood, or air and water? Those are mediums, not stores. They might be a big part of what we are, but they are as much part of the larger ecosystem and why the line between is a feeble illusion.
The problem is the only effective way for large societies to save, is for the society to function as a larger social organism, much as tribes have, for millennia. Yet nation states of millions of people can't quite develop that sense of a larger community, so we try to save individually, which only really empowers the systems propagating this notational wealth. Which if not studiously policed, will become extremely corrupt and can only be sustained as long as it can grow metastatically. Though that bubble invariably pops.
