(08-07-2014, 04:54 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: Where one person sees kind and good-heartedness, other people see selfishness and greed.This is an intriguing philosophical quandary.
We could wish a peaceful end to the Garlean war. We could wish Ishgard back to sanity. We could wish for an unending era of prosperity and glory and we only have to pay the price of... one person. Sure, they might just be retconned out of existence. Sure, they might be bound to eternal damnation for eternity just so the rest of the world could see immaculate heaven and light.
We deny that, for all of Eorzea and the entire world, for one person.
In truth, the desire to self-propagate is something written into the very core of our beings. An individual who is completely selfless and altruistic is an anomaly, and might be seen in many peoples' eyes as a freak accident. But even pure altruism can be said to have a "selfish" bent, in that they are often working towards the preservation of their loved ones, often children - and the reason they are so engaged is because those loved ones happen to carry much of their own genetic material within them. (The constant war of the genes is a fascinating subject in and of itself, I should mention.) Because of this, I tend not to value overmuch the ideals of selflessness as much as I do pragmatism. It's okay to be selfish. But it's also good to be aware of how your actions affect others. There is a happy medium to found there, I would think.
There's also the question of the value of such a sudden and all-powerful "solution". We, as living creatures engaged with nature, both without and within, recognize that conflict is a core part of our lives in some form or fashion. A life without some form of conflict tends to be considered boring and uninteresting, something that is very clearly borne out in the way we write our stories to have multitudes of conflict. There are, of course, stories without conflict (ostensibly referred to as "slice of life") where the draw is in other aspects such as the characters or the setting itself, but they are hardly the most popular form of storytelling out there. It can also be argued that the solution is simply too much resembling a "deus ex machina", which most will consider to be a faux pas in any otherwise decent story.
As such, I imagine that many people would balk at the idea of such idealistic wishes due to the possible unintended side-effects such wishes may have in a world where the people themselves starve for stimulation and entertainment. (The Matrix famously asserted that humans would reject such an ideal world straight away, hence the creation of the more realistic recreation of the world used in the simulation.) Of course there are many others who wouldn't think it through at all, but those are the types of people who would get themselves into a bad situation even without any stipulations or side-effects added to the wishes.
At any rate, it really takes a very specific kind of individual to be willing to sacrifice themselves entirely for the good of the world. Someone with incredible passion, an incredible disregard for their own future and their very existence, and someone with the insight to know exactly how to fix the world (instead of just fixing things temporarily only to have them unravel later down the road). Does such a person exist? I'm not sure, really. Maybe they do. But it'd be one hell of a coincidence to have them exist and be in the right place, at the right time, to make that wish in the first place.