People take many actions every day. Those actions, more often than not, are intended to benefit one person or another. However, there’s a presumption that is often held that, if you were to benefit yourself, you could not benefit others. Doing something to help yourself is seen as exclusionary. Yet, doing something to help yourself, and to help others, is necessary for existence. Both must occur, often at the same time, else the members of a society would perish either for lack of their own care or the care of others that they depend on. Self help and other help aren’t antipodes, but, rather, they join together in cooperation.
Self help is our self care. If we don’t help ourselves, we die. It is us maintaining ourselves for continued existence. There’s a vast expanse of actions that this can encapsulate, e.g. eating, working, playing, sleeping, and it can occur in multiple environments, e.g. inside society, outside society. We can take care of ourselves alone in the wilderness, but it is more beneficial for us to take care of ourselves in society. Being in a society allows us to enjoy the labors and safety of others. The best way for you to help yourself is to live in a just, healthy society.
Other help is our care for others. It’s when we use ourselves to better another person’s life. The requirements for betterment are the same as for self help, except the requirements are from another person. The reasons for helping others are varied, e.g. some see it as an end in itself, some see it as a requirement for some other end. Other help needs at least two participants, the one helping and the one being helped, but it can involve enormous sums of people. Because other help has two sets of people, the helpers and helped, it requires that the helpers are in a state to be able to help.
Self help and other help can be concurrent, even if they’re not concurrent by necessity. For example, if someone needs me to hold a ladder, such that they can paint my house, it is both self help and other help to do so. I help the other person do their job, and I help myself by helping them do the job. There are many instances like this. The two come together in a whole where each party benefits. This creates the most productive society, as everyone’s needs are met in an efficient manner. Uniting the two at the same time creates a flowing cohesiveness, ideal for cooperation.
Self help and other help must coincide if there’s to be a functioning society. If there was only self help, people would live in isolation and wouldn’t get the benefit of other’s help. If there was only other help, people would not help themselves, and people would eventually be in such a poor state that they couldn’t help others, either. If the two couldn’t coincide, you would have to have a society where people switched off of helping themselves or helping others, never allowing the two to meet at any instance. This would, at best, create a wonky society where people are restricted to isolated moments to serve one purpose or another, never creating any cohesion.
Cohesion between self help and other help is possible and desirable. The two can exist at the same time in the same act, as a single act can benefit multiple people. This concurrent cohesion is ideal for the well-being of societies. Without it, societies would fall apart, as their members lack for either self help or other help.