Impulse and Selfishness

According to Teleological Atomism, Impulse is a means to private satisfaction, and, so, is innately selfish, even according to those versions of the doctrine which otherwise conceive a human as a 'tabula rasa'. In contrast, Dewey's concept of Impulse as essentially characterless grounds his demonstration that Selfishness is a variety of learned behavior, and, hence, is amenable to re-education. Formaterialism diverges from Dewey's concept of Impulse as characterless, with the thesis that Impulse is a fundamentally outward-directed process. On that basis, Selfishness, which functions to preserve Interiority, as has been previously discussed, therefore represses Impulse. A common but generally unrecognized manifestation of that repression is one's lack of awareness of the exteriority of motions that arise from impulses, and, therefore, of their existence as public events with implications beyond one's inner experience. This lack of awareness is sometimes classified as 'narcissistic', or as 'solipsistic'. The derision, common in commercial contexts, of sociability as a 'weakness', is a familiar occasional explicit example of that repression.