Disadvantages of Selfless Care: A Mathematical, Biological, and Historical Proof of Self-Obsession

This thesis advances the claim that self-centredness—the strategy of maximising individual gain without regard to others—is not merely ethically objectionable but formally self-destructive. We prove this claim through three independent and converging arguments: (i) Hamilton's Rule in evolutionary biology establishes that every conspecific carries a non-zero fraction of the actor's genetic material, making harm to others always partial self-harm; (ii) the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and evolutionary game theory establish that defection is evolutionarily unstable on iterated timescales across all known empirical and simulated models; and (iii) the historical record of civilisational collapse demonstrates that sustained internal or external violence against cooperative networks is the most reliable predictor of failure in complex societies. These three lines converge on a formal unified claim: the boundary of self in any sufficiently complex adaptive system is not the individual body but the cooperative network in which that body is embedded. Violence against the network is structurally indistinguishable from auto-destruction. Version 3.0, revised for academic peer review.