How selfish is Aikido?

I have some sort of confusion about our martial art when it comes to the concepts of harmony, control, centre, and so on. Connor has already made some comparisons between aikido and other martial arts (see his self-defence post series,[1] [2] [3] [4]), and there he discussed which one is 'better' than the other, which one works better against one another. In this post, I compare aikido to other martial arts in the sense how selfish they are/appear. By writing my thoughts down, I hope to organise my thoughts and share them with you in order to give you some interesting ideas, and to receive some feedback (by the way, all these aims are selfish).

We often say that aikido is better than many other martial arts because we don't want to hurt the other person, because we allow the attacker to get away without serious injuries. Also, we say we don't want to destroy but our aim is to build. We want to achieve harmony with ourselves, with others and with the universe. My focus point in this post the harmony with myself vs. the harmony with others, and I'm approaching it from the concept of selfishness.

Let us inspect this harmony from the strictly martial point of view, i.e. when you are attacked and the attacker wants to destroy you. Here I'm not talking about a dojo situation because, I think, however hard you want to attack, it will never be a full scale, destruction-oriented attack in a dojo. It wouldn't be safe either for the attacked, or for the attacker (you know that you will get the same energy back as what you put into the attack, and you certainly don't want to risk hurting yourself in the middle of a training). So someone attacks you. Are you going to be thinking about harmony and the universe? My claim is - although not based on real life experience - that you won't. You will revert to self-preservation and if there can be a full-scale atemi then there will be. You might say afterwards, perhaps when telling the story to others, that you were in harmony because you only threw the attacker 5 metres but didn't hit them twice and break their arms, but I think in a real fight people will be selfish. Or course, one aim of the training is to prepare you for protecting yourself, and causing as little damage as possible. You train to keep a clear mind when attacked, and if you can see that the attacker is a drunken idiot you might be 'merciful' and just push/throw them into the corner, thus preventing serious damage. But your primary aim is to think about yourself, which is selfishness in an objective sense. You are protecting yourself, just as any other martial artist would when they are attacked.
You might say that we (aikidoka) are less selfish because we don't want to hurt others just to feel superior. But any other 'real' martial artist would say the same. A martial art is an art, among others, because it has some philosophical background, and that background usually teaches that hurting others without or with little reason is not right. So, in the 'hurting others' sense, aikido is not less selfish than other martial arts, I think.

The other level of selfishness appears in trainings, and this is the thing I have been thinking about in recent weeks/months. The question of selfishness arose from the following observation: we are taught that aikido is the way of harmony, the art of two people working/moving together, being one with the other, peace, etc.; however, we keep hearing that you as tori (defender) should be in control, it is around your centre that things (bodies) are moving/moved. Recently, I have attended a training in which the sensei of the dojo talked about aikido techniques from a completely different perspective I had been used to. He said that techniques are all about me (defender)! He said something like that it should be just as easy to do a technique with or without an attacker attacking, holding or grabbing you. It´s your centre, it´s your movements, and since you are moving around your centre, it´s the same with or without anuke. (By the way, this is very appealing to me as I always missed the 'homework' individual practice in aikido ). This self-centred view is very selfish, and I was very confused when I heard this idea at first (I'm still confused now but not that much perhaps). However, the funny thing is that it works. When I focus only on myself when grabbed, things go much better. When I focus on my own posture, own breathing, own centre, positions of my own hands and feet, I can move uke much more easily. That's pretty selfish, isn't it? At the moment I start focusing on the attacker or some sort of common centre or harmonious state, I immediately start struggling more than with the selfish approach. Of course, I pay some attention not to lose the attacker and not to hurt them, but if I understand the argument of the above mentioned sensei well, even paying attention to the attacker is not needed. I understand it like this: if you start your movement in an appropriate time, then even if you lose uke for a bit (which is supposed to be rare, as you should choose your own speed so that you remain in control all the time), they will come back into the (for you) harmonious state. You are in the winning harmonious state, and he is in the losing (damage limiting) harmonious state. But it's certainly not equal harmony from the two sides, which makes it pretty much selfish.

Another aspect of selfishness is when you try to self-regulate your selfishness. I think this is what sensei meant by your 'dark side'. You need to know it's there, you need to feel that - if you wanted to - you could crush the attacker, but you just don't because you think about how bad it would feel later when you realise that you used excessive force. Also, even if you hit an attacker by accident (with an atemi, for example), you would probably apologise to them. Why? Either to feel better (in control of the situation), or to prevent them from 'accidentally' hitting you the same way when they become tori and you turn uke (aka. payback time). You want to minimise the risk of getting out of control, or getting hurt. It's pure selfishness, and it's a part of human nature. Very rare is the person who is capable of acting in a completely unselfish way. Perhaps we are training to achieve this level but before achieving it, talking about how harmonious we can be is just trying to make ourselves feel better, in control, centred... which is pretty much selfishness. Perhaps it's not selfish in a pejorative sense, because then everyone would be selfish and 'bad', but selfish, self-centred in an objective sense.

In the above paragraphs, I tried to arrive at a feel-good type selfishness concept. If you do things to feel better that is self-centred, selfish. You don't need to end up with some material gains to feel better, you can do things purely just to feel better. And since it's for your own good irrespective of the materialisation of your deed, it's just as selfish as anything you do for yourself. If you practice aikido (not the techniques but the principles!) in everyday life, it's easier to look unselfish. You can talk with someone in a way that they will also feel in control, they will feel good, satisfied. But then you will also feel satisfied by achieving your goal of making others feel good (this is why some early philosophers say that you are not selfish only if you have to suffer for whatever you do to try to look unselfish). This above described feel-good thing is also selfish, but - as, in my opinion, everything has levels - selfishness also has levels, and the 'make others feel good to feel good yourself' selfishness is at least one level higher than 'make others feel inferior to make you feel better' selfishness. And maybe it is this higher level selfishness that we call harmony. And maybe the universal level of harmony is when everyone works selfishly to feel better by making everything and everyone feel/become better.