Selfishness may be a single word but it comes with countless strands attached. The word it-self, apparently, came into being relatively recently, in the 1600s, when a Presbyterian arch-bishop is thought to have ‘coined the word from his own mint’. It is believed to have emerged out of the ‘history of the time’, 1640, when Charles I signed a treaty with Scotland after his army lost to a Scottish Covenanter force at the Battle of Newburn, or the Second Bishop’s War.

It is hard to believe that the ancient Greeks with their philosophers (Socrates, Aristotle, Plato) as well as some of the religious texts that go back to early times and are filled with ethics against selfishness, should not actually mention the word itself. Some linguists think that the notion of selfishness existed, but in a fashion related more to the ‘body’ than the ‘self’. Any-how, flash forward a few centuries — four hundred or so — and the word can be heard ringing from every corner, as did church bells peal in the days of yore. We are well acquainted with the seamier side of selfishness, so there’s no point dwelling on that aspect too long. A friend told me recently how bad he felt for ‘eating up’ the last piece of Black Forest at a charity dinner when, clearly, the same piece was coveted by a dear old lady who even had one hand half-outstretched.

“I could read every word in her mind,” he told me, “There was I, a donor/patron to the charity event, behaving like he was never going to be able to lay his hands on a wedge of Black Forest again.”

Then, of course, there’s Oscar Wilde’s moral fable, The Selfish Giant, which has a good ending because the giant realises that sharing is at the centre of happiness, not keeping things for one’s self (like the last piece of Black Forest, although one cannot be sure if such a treat featured on the giant’s list of Desserts I Like Best and Refuse to Share with Anybody.) However, in a new take on selfishness, a young man is suing — wait for it — his own mother for being selfish. “Ah well,” I hear some readers say upon reading that line, “What’s new? Judge Judy is full of selfish mothers who’ve diddled their poor darling sons out of a livelihood.” True, maybe.

But not many sons have marched their mothers off to court for looking after them just too well. The implication being that the young man has been so sheltered (aided by his mother’s perceived anxiety of the big cruel world and what it might do to her son-let-loose-in-it) that this ‘over protection’ has ended up providing him with little or no social and survival skills. “She’s been nothing but selfish and I’d like the court to make her pay the maximum in compensation for a more well-rounded life, now lost,” said the young man, through his solicitors who, no doubt, couched the whole appeal a lot more cogently, aided and abetted by appropriate hard-to-fathom legal phraseology.

This bizarre incident reminds me of a story — also a mother-and-son story that I got told as a youngster. The young man in question, as soon as he starts working, warns his mum, “Now don’t start expecting me to hand over my salary, okay? I’ve got a life to live.” When he re-turned home that evening, next to the dining table was a blackboard. On it, under the heading What Peter Owes, his mother had drawn up a list of items. For 22 years providing him three square meals ... No Charge; for 17 years of education (including university) ... No Charge. And so on.

Footnote: (I offered my mum my entire first pay packet and she wrote back expressing incredulity, asking, “And what am I expected to do with it?” “Use it towards household expenses,” I urged, to which she replied, “We have enough.” She didn’t, I know, and although it was only Rs.350, it was a lot back then.)

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.