Inheritance - selfishness

Buddha is criticised by some people for leaving his wife and kids and going in pursuit of enlightenment. Selfish. Is it selfish?

Caring for our child and our wife is our duty. Caring for our parents our family. 

What happens if you are enlightened and you start treating everyone as your own? What if you have same amount of love for any stranger as for your own? If you care for yourself more than your family you are selfish, if you care for your family more than for strangers you are still same level of selfish, but it helps keep the society running and stable. 

So when some people transcend the level of family group they may come across as weird or selfish to us. 

To an extent because of governments and taxes we are caring for strangers indirectly.

I was asked a question in a course, if your neighbours child is very smart and your child is average, would you pay for your neighbours child to go to medical school rather than yours? We do it today, by paying taxes and the govt subsidies the seats for children based on merit. Taxes are somewhat of an equaliser that way. 

We are doing it because we are forced to do it, if we were asked to do it voluntarily we would be accused by family for being selfish. 

When things become critical we start being more reasonable, if it became vital for our survival that the best kid becomes doctor and our lives depended on it, we would obviously all pay for education of neighbours kid to be a doctor. 

Our values and morals have very small context, they are not universal. It is to make the present society work, they dont apply to all and everyone. Ever the modern liberal values.