# Now this is remarkable!



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

A guy gives up a lucrative career to help disadvantaged kids

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Maki...-children-rooting-in-Cambodia-s-garbage-dumps


----------



## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Very interesting! I'd like to ask him exactly why he's doing it.


----------



## cwarchc (Apr 28, 2012)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> Very interesting! I'd like to ask him exactly why he's doing it.


Perhaps he's discovered true altruism?


----------



## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

Altruism is a fiction, everything we do is ultimately motivated by selfishness, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. In this instance a millionaire's desire to atone for an excessive lifestyle which he feels guilty about having lived has resulted in the improvement of many young lives. Good.


----------



## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

Crudblud said:


> Altruism is a fiction, everything we do is ultimately motivated by selfishness, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.


You could be right--but I've never liked that argument so I think I'll look for an out!

http://books.google.com/books?id=6z...CD4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=nagel altruism&f=false


----------



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Surely we all in a small way have experienced the 'high' of helping people and making other people happy. It is not a selfish 'high', but a feeling that what we have done makes sense of our lives & is what it's all about. But we don't, or I don't anyway, have the courage, the single-mindedness, the goodness, or the means to devote our lives to others.


----------



## cwarchc (Apr 28, 2012)

I don't think altruism is a fiction.
However, I do agree with the majority of people, doing good deeds is an attempt assuage their feelings for their own lifestyles.
There are genuinely altruistic people, but you don't (generally) hear of them. As they don't have the necessity for the limelight.


----------



## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Ingélou said:


> Surely we all in a small way have experienced the 'high' of helping people and making other people happy. It is not a selfish 'high', but a feeling that what we have done makes sense of our lives & is what it's all about. But we don't, or I don't anyway, have the courage, the single-mindedness, the goodness, or the means to devote our lives to others.


Well, that's the point right there, I think it has to be a special kind of "selfishness" to do a truly loving act. Let me explain: it's one thing to do a kind act that happens to make someone happy, it's another thing when you do a kind action for the sake of making someone happy, and it's yet another thing to do a kind action _because _you find joy in the joy of others. It is self-gratifying when _you enjoy_ serving people. There is no such thing as a loving act without doing it with _pleasure_. This is a type of hedonism. But this is necessary!! Because would the _recipient _want to receive their gift any other way? If the recipient truly didn't care what the motives were behind a kind act and only wanted the goods or service, that clearly doesn't help the recipient in understanding gratitude or even love. It's just pragmatic acts of kindness. However, if the recipient realized that the person enjoyed doing the action _for _them (this is different being a people-pleaser, who actually wants something else, not someone's happiness), that would be a life-changing experience.

The only problem is... where do you get that kind of inspiration?


----------



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

"It is better to give than to receive"


----------



## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

I don't think altruism is fiction, either. Of course nobody is altruistic all the time and grand gestures make me a bit cautious, but there is such a thing as helping simply out of empathy. Sometimes you feel the need to do something that makes a difference on a personal level rather than to advance socially or economically.


----------



## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

I think most of you have taken what I said the wrong way. Selfishness as defined by Ayn Rand is not all there is to it, in fact that is the most shallow end of it; at the deep end it is very complex, we always act to please ourselves, but the things we get pleasure from differ for all of us and could change at any time in our lives. Helping others can be a great source of pleasure, it certainly is for me, but I recognise that ultimately the pleasure comes from a feeling of fulfilment, a happiness the knowledge that I have done a "good deed" as defined by my sole frame of reference: myself. The Hollywood exec in the OP is no different, his point of view was simply altered so that where previously he required lots of material wealth, now fulfilment comes from helping these impoverished children. Helping the children feels good, that is why he does it. This does not cheapen his good deeds, it is simply the only way it can be.


----------



## Svelte Silhouette (Nov 7, 2013)

DavidA said:


> "It is better to give than to receive"


I told all of my girlfriends, fiances and wives that ;-)


----------



## Freischutz (Mar 6, 2014)

Crudblud said:


> Altruism is a fiction ... cf. Ayn Rand


I don't know how serious you are, but the idea that altruism is a fiction is a literary idealism turned into pop psychology nonsense.

No matter what Ayn Rand said - who, no doubt, was writing to justify her own twisted and inhumane politics, but it would make no difference if we went back and cited Machiavelli instead - altruism is real in the sense that we _can be_ and _are_ altruistic for reasons _other_ than self-fulfilment, and if you believe otherwise, whether in your case or others, you are either 1) so attached to this Randian ideology that you can't acknowledge your own selfless feelings, or 2) less altruistically endowed than the average human.

How do I know that altruism is real? Because it is a biologically adaptive behaviour with an understood evolutionary history. In fact, over the past century or so, it has been an interesting controversy in evolutionary biology as altruism seems incompatible with ideas of "survival of the fittest" unless there are other selfish benefits. However, inherent in the synthesis of the 30s and 40s, but more properly understood in the 60s and then famously expounded by Richard Dawkins's _The Selfish Gene_ (and even throw in some game theory, if you fancy it) is the fact that altruism has been selected for by evolution because altruistic creatures are more successful at passing on their genes than truly selfish ones. It's important to stress here that being successful at passing on your own genes is indeed a personal benefit, but it is a benefit at the genetic level, not the psychological level, so altruism evolved _without_ a conscious awareness of its relationship with reproductive success meaning that it does not manifest in the consciously selfish ways that you describe.

How does that work? In the case of altruism towards people who are distantly related, the simple explanation is tit-for-tat dynamics - you do something for me, I'll do something for you - and that does have some degree of selfishness (though I'll explain more of that in a second). But for people who are closely related (and therefore already share many of your genes), kin selection means that no return is necessary for your altruism because your altruistic behaviour is already benefiting your genome by aiding the success of someone that has many copies of your genes already, whether or not they're your own offspring (this is in fact one of the candidate explanations for the adaptive nature of homosexuality - having closely related conspecifics with (usually) no children of their own helps improve the survival of offspring that share both the parent's and the homosexual relation's genes).

_Only_ in the case of humans is tit-for-tat intuitively understood because of our complex understanding of social dynamics, but other animals exhibit the same adaptive behaviour without a conscious understanding of its personal rewards (bats are a fun example that I could go into, but I'm going on a bit already), while even humans are not born with an intuitive understanding of genetics and its implications for kin altruism. Therefore, because our genes promote altruism for personal rewards that we are not aware of, our _conscious experience_ is only altruistic, not selfish.

The kind of selfishness you describe, such as that motivated by happiness and fulfilment, is a markedly conscious one that is, in fact, not necessary for altruism, and I feel sorry for anyone who does need such motivations. In the first instance, this idea confuses cause and effect anyway - the fact that happiness and fulfilment are likely (but not certain) effects of altruistic actions does _not_ mean that they must be the primary motivation of that behaviour. They could be, but you can't establish that as a fact merely by pointing to them and saying, "Aha! A correlation!"

In any case, there are some counter-examples. For example, many people are compelled into charity by community tithings, others are persuaded by guilt-ridden advertising, and others consider it a necessity entailed by their personal moral philosophies regardless of their emotional impulses. In each case, you might try to colour our understanding of this by suggesting that because people are doing what they _want_ to do, they are therefore doing what makes them feel good and, voila!, this is selfishness, but that is tantamount to stating the obvious that most humans are not masochists. This is not an insight into human psychology, it is casuistry.

Perhaps an even better counter-example is the human amplification of biologically adaptive behaviour, as in this famous experiment:






When people watch this video with simple geometric shapes, they instinctively personify the shapes with character and intentionality because we have a cognitive capacity for such personification that is here being over-applied. This is a rudimentary facet of normal life which we experience whenever we feel some kind of emotion for an inanimate object or image. But what this demonstrates is a predisposition to the application of perceptions and behaviours _beyond_ their ordinary biological utility, and in the case of altruism, this expresses itself in the sense that we help people we know we will never see again, people we may never even know the names of, because what evolved for the sake of tit-for-tat mutual benefit has expanded such that it needs no personal rewards as motivation, just as seeing personality in shapes has no real usefulness.


----------



## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Actually many evolutionary biologists believe that altruism is innate within humans and presumably other animals. Supposedly Thomas Huxley, an early evolutionary biologist, once said, "I'd lay down my life for 2 brothers or 8 cousins" referring to the fact that each brother has 50% of his genes and cousins 1/8 of his genes. W.D. Hamilton gave the idea of inclusive fitness mathematical rigor in his 1964 paper, "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior".

The general idea is that humans act to spread their genetic endowment. If doing something that hurts oneself can actually increase the possibility of "spreading one's genes", that behavior has evolutionary fitness and can be selected for through evolutionary processes. There is much research on reciprocal altruism as well - doing something that has negative consequences for oneself (giving food to someone else) such that others will do something for you later.

The bottom line is that evolution appears to have mechanisms for the evolution of altruism as an evolved behavior trait. We don't have to be altruistic out of selfishness. Rather we are altruistic in order to perpetuate our genes.

I just saw Freischutz's post above. We are, of course, talking about the same thing.


----------



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

mmsbls said:


> The bottom line is that evolution appears to have mechanisms for the evolution of altruism as an evolved behavior trait. We don't have to be altruistic out of selfishness. Rather we are altruistic in order to perpetuate our genes.


Dawkins has quite a discussion of this in one of his books. He even describes a computer model that, after many generations, achieves a stable percentage of "altruism" based on the successful passing on of DNA. So in a way, altruism is a strategy built entirely on selfishness.


----------



## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

*Original post deleted*


----------



## Freischutz (Mar 6, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Dawkins has quite a discussion of this in one of his books. He even describes a computer model that, after many generations, achieves a stable percentage of "altruism" based on the successful passing on of DNA. So in a way, altruism is a strategy built entirely on selfishness.


Your summary crystallises why he often regrets the title of his book - the kind of selfishness you describe is only _metaphorical_ selfishness, it is not selfishness as it is commonly understood as a conscious behavioural state. It's very important to separate these two conflated things otherwise we end up misunderstanding altruism, which is _both_ a mechanism for gene selfishness, _and_ a behavioural state of conscious selflessness.


----------



## Katie (Dec 13, 2013)

Now THIS is remarkable...slighted chick cuts out own tattoo to spite former lover, attain closure...Freudians debate the procedure's psychotherapeutic merits!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/13/torz-reynolds-tattoo-boyfriends-name-_n_4784307.html

Ahhh, that fine line between love, hate, and disfigurement! / K


----------

