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Excessive preoccupation with one's own well-being and interests, usually accompanied by an inflated sense of self-importance.
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An inflated sense of one's own importance; conceit.
It defines egotism as:
1. The tendency to speak or write of oneself excessively and boastfully.
2. An inflated sense of one's own importance; conceit.
So while there is a tenuous, tertiary connection between the two words, their primary meaning is very different. Egoism is about a doctrine of self-interest; egotism is about boasting.
This leads us back to Ayn Rand and her quasi-philosophy of Objectivism. As I pointed out two years ago in my article "Illuminating Dichotomies," (OpEdNews, September 19, 2008), Conservatives have taken the position since Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan that human beings are ultimately motivated solely by self-interest, and that liberals have an unrealistic view of the world if they dare to believe anything else. Liberals in turn believe that conservatives have a limited, irrational, even paranoid view of the world. Liberals believe that the conservative Weltanschauung is so colored by their paranoid assumption that everyone is out for themselves, all of the time, it makes conservatives' judgment concerning human relationships at best questionable.
The great majority of conservatives will also try to claim that their self-interest is "enlightened;" that they can set aside their immediate self-interest for some probable (and more substantial) long term personal benefit. They use this to justify their most generous or seemingly altruistic actions, as well as others acts of generosity or mercy, claiming that they are truly neither. Altruism according to conservatives is contrary to human nature and, according to Ayn Rand, immoral. Humanity--by their standards--is a collection of self-absorbed brutes who do nothing except for their own personal reward or self-gratification. Conservatives leave any potential contradiction in the self-interest/altruism dichotomy to the liberals.
And it is a contradiction, because altruism is no more the opposite of selfishness than love is the opposite of hate. Allow me to elucidate.
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