Talk about selfish

Some people have problem with dissociation, in which case they're not able to be selfish because they're divorced from themselves. Other people have martyr complexes, in which case they take no responsibility for their own desires, but do what they imagine other people want them to do, even though this has no relationship to what other people actually want. It's difficult to call it selfishness, because it comes from a strange mixture of self-negation and self-will.

Beyond this and other pathological cases, my opinion is that yes, healthy people are selfish to the degree that they look after their own human needs before worrying about other people.

 

Taking into consideration that empathy is a learned behavior, yes, selfishness is defined ingrained into human nature; we can only control the extent of its influence.