Salvaging the Savior

Often in life, we wish to be saviors, redeemers, and don the mantle of patrons, parents and trouble-shooters. We are on the lookout for people, whom we can adopt in a psychological sense, and help them come up to our expectations, and these are the people who are vulnerable in one way or other, and wish to come to terms with their own dreams and aspirations. There is a greater amount of selfishness in any patronage and desire to “help” someone in need; the parent in us pops up at a moment when we find a scope to exercise certain amount of control over the vulnerable, and what a joy it is to have someone who listens to us with ears and heart wide open, and even promises to follow our roadmap to happiness.

When we sincerely seek to help someone who is in dire need of assistance, counsel or a helping hand, subconsciously or unconsciously we are trying to help ourselves, even though we may not accept this fact easily. But how do we test if our spontaneous help to another person in need is genuine or it has a reasonable dosage of selfishness? The criteria is rather simple: if the person we seek to help is someone we do not know, one with whom we do not have longtime association, one who may not remember us after the help is rendered, one who may not even say ‘Thanks’ for the valuable help we provide, one who does not ask for our mobile phone number or address, one who may not even speak kindly to us after receiving help, then we can say with certain amount of certitude that our help had been genuine. Needless to say, if it happens to be otherwise, then there are all the chances that it is our need and not that of the other person.

As an average human being, we all of us are born with same amount of selfishness and self-centeredness, and what makes us different is the tactics we use in order to fulfill our ego. Human mind is capable of devising any amount of ways to “trap” others, especially those who are in some way vulnerable and limited, and most often we may not even be aware of the fact that we are on the prowl looking for a victim. But the tragedy takes place, when the victim begins to seek his/her own selfish needs, and we are caught unawares. We realize the sheer futility of our “sincere and genuine” desire to help others, when the recipients take advantage of our generosity, and ultimately make us suffer in the end.

But does that mean I should not be prepared to reach out to others in need? Of course not; that is not the point. The point is that I need to be conscious of the fact, while I am trying to help someone in need, I am trying to help myself too, and the other person is also going to make use of me (either positively or negatively). The tendency to be saviors and redeemers can go to a higher level, when on realizing that I had been taken for a royal ride by the victim I was trying to help, I begin to console myself saying that it is alright even if I lose, so long the other person is happy! That is the savior-syndrome entering through backdoor, while we let the ‘victim’ has his/her final laughter!

I am surely not against reaching out to others in need; we all of us need to strengthen the bonds of cooperation and collaboration, and it may not be possible for us (human as we are) to completely overcome selfishness, which is mixed with our blood. Even an eternity may not be enough to remove this dosage of self-centeredness from us. So, let us not camouflage ourselves as doing good to others, while in fact we are trying to do good to ourselves. Being conscious of this tendency in us can make us reach out to those who are in real need of our help, and if we are there to give a helping hand without counting the wounds or the cost, not even the psychological satisfaction of doing good, then we can be proud that we have climbed yet another difficult step towards divinity.