Not merely untrustworthy, but automatically condemning. Humility is merely suspicious. E.g. nigerian princes. Claimed selflessness is always a lie, and their real goal is the destruction of the cosmos. Omnicidal.
It's almost impossible to hide false selfishness. Tamper evident. You can be sure what the selfish is getting out of the interaction.
The selfish remind you to ensure you get yourself paid.
Because the selfish have to pay you, they inherently acknowledge the value of your work.
Being selfish is a position of vulnerability - it's an unforgeably costly signal of cooperation.
Being selfish is pragmatic - you can tell how they intend to sustain themselves and the interaction.
The selfish are easy to deal with.
Being selfless is the opposite of all these things. Foggy and easy to tamper with, trying to get something for nothing, disrespectful, cheap, impractical, and a giant pain in the ass. Inherently impossible to trust.
Before I go further, let's talk about humility.
If someone selfishly claims they want to get rich, they're very easy to deal with. "Cool, if I help you, how do I get rich too?" It's easy to check that their plans are likely to make them richer, and you can see they can afford to support you as well. If they start unnecessarily giving up money, it's all but impossible to hide that they lied about their motivations.
If someone, humbly, merely wants to avoid starvation, that's suspicious. It's not impossible, the way true selflessness is, but it's ludicrously unlikely. If they're asking for little, it makes it easy for them to welch on the deal, thrice over. If they want to trick you into giving them something big (nigerian princes) when you refuse to pay up the little thing they said they wanted, they don't lose enough to worry about. You both want to be paid up front, but when the humble say they don't need to be paid up front, at first it seems less suspicious, because what they're willing to give up is so small.
Since there are lots of things which offer small benefits, if the humble want to lie about how they're getting paid, it's easy to do. If they're not getting paid it's hard to tell if it's an accident or not.
Those who aren't lying are usually insane. They want little not because they don't want to partake of the glory of the cosmos, but because they can't see the glory. They think they can have a healthy body on onion+banana juice. They think a little is a lot.
Greed is a virtue, not a sin. "Humbly" eschewing greed is a vice, not humility.
Humility is typically performed by those with something to hide.
In a Ponzi scheme, it's hard to tell who is being paid and how, as long as you think to check. "I don't want much," is usually a way of saying, "I can grab a lot without your permission."
Which is why you shouldn't trust blog authors. "I'm offering truth, for free." Are you now.
Although a fortiori you shouldn't trust TV, newspapers, or other cheap broadcasts. "How are you getting paid for this? 🤔 How do you afford it?" If you're not paying for it, you're the product, not the customer. Musk's twitter is less untrustworthy because he overpaid. You know it's not lip service and you know where the money came from. On the flip side, if twitter continues to lose money, it will either trade trustworthiness for getting paid, or cease to exist.
Trust is expensive. If you're paying for trust there's less left over to take home. Hence, ironically, the trustworthy don't ask for much trust. Nothing beyond the absolutely necessary. If you try to get a lot of trust on the cheap, you're getting scammed - the cost of the trust you tried to use will be taken out of your hide.
Because psychological egoism is true, selflessness is logically impossible.
You can't feel someone else's feelings, only your own. If you could feel their feelings, that contradicts the premise: they are your feelings. That 'other' is just you, but again.
E.g. "I feel warm fuzzies when I'm helpful," that doesn't mean you felt their feelings or wanted to help, it means you value warm fuzzies highly and are willing to pay money &c to get them.
All motivations are inherently selfish. All values inherently refer to effects on the self.
Because selflessness is impossible, anyone claiming selflessness is inherently treacherous. That's why they lack all the virtues of selfishness.
A devil can't speak its own name. The devil always comes in a guise of virtue. They have to tell a lie to get up in the morning and not die instead. It especially likes the temptation of the image of a selfless self-sacrificer.
If someone says they're getting warm fuzzies out of the deal, how do you know? How do you check they're getting paid? Claiming such things is humility: it's technically possible, but it's also exactly what a liar would say. Inherently untrustworthy.
"I'm not getting paid to do the soup kitchen. Why should you get paid?" If they're being paid under the table - poisoning the soup, for example - now you're slave labour.
Also you're slave labour anyway. They claim your labour is worth nothing except perhaps empty wind. "Thanks so much." Using cheap signals to avoid unforgeably costly signals. If you're genuinely grateful, validate it with cash...
If someone wants to get rich, now you know how to attack them - take away their money. Make them poor. If they're trying to rope you into a specific plan, you get hints on how to sabotage it. The devil has to hide its motivations, because deviant and defective motives can't be secured. Devils are scared; as cowards ought to be. If they openly fence off their poison supply, nobody will eat the soup. Trying to secure treachery is counterproductive.
"Who is going to pay for the soup next week?" Ultimately a soup kitchen merely delays the inevitable; the poor will starve. Eventually the money runs out and nobody pays for it. Charity is unsustainable. Only the poor will have kids before the bill comes due, so the group starving to death is bigger if it's done later. Not to mention all the extra humiliation in the middle. Truly vile.
If they're poisoning the soup and you try to get a better soup supplier, they're going to raise a huge fuss. It will be impossible to pin their confabulations down, and you'll have little to no idea what's upsetting them so much, because they have hide the truth at all costs. Und so weiter. The problems won't stop with adjusting the soup.
A devil is a spirit which is inherently in conflict with Existence. It doesn't like Existence, it doesn't want to Exist, but it Exists anyway. It wants black to be white and down to be up. It must constantly struggle both externally, pushing Existence away from it, and internally. The devil doesn't want to Exist yet continually chooses to Exist.
The ones that weren't masochistic and crazy already accepted nonexistence. Selection effect: all devils are utterly insane. Wholly delusional.
In a sense, you can say devils are inherently unselfish, as they have to give up their highest values simply to go on Existing.
One solution is to destroy everything it conflicts with: all the rest of Existence.
There's a conflict because they're insane. They're insane because there's a conflict.
It's crazy because it hurts. It hurts because it's crazy.
Selflessness is of the devil. All devils come in the guise of selflessness.
Some want to provoke you into killing them the way they refuse to kill themselves.
All of them would appreciate all of Existence being destroyed. Either so they die too, or so they no longer have to struggle against the law of identity.
Either way, if you meet a devil, it's inherently an us-or-them situation. They cannot cooperate, and they would refuse to try even if they could.
Selflessness, taken literally, is achieved by losing the self. By ceasing to exist. There's no self there to be selfish. No identity. Selflessness is not merely vicious, it is annihilation.
The god who died ended up dead by reducing his self until there was no self left.
Greed is a virtue. The divine is incomprehensibly grasping. Desire is holy.
You can tell it's a devil if they're selfless or asking you to be selfless.
