Hi James,
The thing is that this “figment” is all that ‘I’ have ever known and all that ‘I’ have ever ‘been’, it is the entirety of ‘me’ and of ‘my’ life.
Your assessment reduces the enormity of what is at stake for ‘me’ into something between hopeful intellectualisation and dissociation. As in let ‘me’ first create some distance from ‘myself’ and then reduce this ‘self’ placed ‘over there’ into a collection of feelings and beliefs, kept alive only because “we make it so precious”. The end result of this exercise is that ‘I’ will then try to end this mere “figment” by some kind of ‘seeing through’ etc. I know this because I have done this countless times!
But the key question here is just how on earth could the above ever trigger altruism? A self-sacrificial instinct.