RE: Extreme Altruism and the Psychopathic Brain.
Very interesting article, I love these thoughts:
However, survival would favor the psychopath over the altruist since the altruist could quite possibly die before reproducing, while the psychopath would tend to make it, at least until the group tired of his selfishness and took him down.
This brings up another point. Society—which is an abstract idea that involves groups of people—values self-sacrifice over self-preservation. This is certainly the case in social meta-organisms like ants and bees, wherein the workers unquestionably sacrifice their own wellbeing in favor of the group.
As you more or less pointed out, I believe that extreme altruism is good for the society, but bad for the individual. However, if we would all be extremely altruistic, that would be fantastic for everyone. I hope that the genetic selection will push the mankind towards being more bee-like and less individual!
Regarding your note about surgeons: every human trait is good for some purposes and bad for other, as @katarinamiliv explained through a surgeon example in a comment to one of my posts. .
Cheers! : )
Like everything else, a little bit of something can be good while too much can be poisonous. Surgeons are a good example. Then there is the surgeon who was branding his initials into his patient's livers. Not a deadly thing, but certainly narcissistic and a bit north of appropriate.
Can't really agree with you that extreme altruism will make the world a better place. I do think that less self-concern and more concern with the bigger picture is the way we need to head, but too much altruism wouldn't necessarily lead to those ends. We need people who can make tough decisions and perhaps do things that might be bad for us all in the short term but better in the long term.
We westerners consider half the world's population to be poor. Let's be altruistic and take all the money in the world and distribute it equally. I'm not sure of the numbers exactly but lets say that there is 10 trillion dollars and only 5 billion people. That would give everyone $2000. While those who were desperately poor would now be far richer, they still would be poor by western standards and the westerners would be much, much poorer, while consumption would ramp up putting even more pressure on scarce resources. In other words, everyone would now be poor and the biosphere would be even more stressed. My numbers might be wrong, but I doubt they are that far off.
A more bee-like existence wouldn't sit well with me. But my generation is handing the baton over to your generation and I'm not going to have to live in the world you want to create. It might be fantastic, and you well suited to live in it, but I know that I'll never see it and that's okay with me.
Thanks for the comment.
"Then there is the surgeon who was branding his initials into his patient's livers." - OOOK. A lot north of appropriate. : )
I agree that the tough decisions with long-term benefits might be somewhat in contrast with altruism, thanks for pointing out. Making this sort of decisions somehow comes naturally to me and I personally consider them altruistic, although my terminology might be wrong (I consider everything that ends up as beneficial for the society - everything that improves the total happiness/unhappiness ratio - as ultimately altruistic).
Your logic with money makes sense to me. The feeling or poorness/wealthiness comes from what we are used to and what we see around us. I've always considered that it is unnecessary to insist on some sort of ideal wealth distribution. That said, the current imbalances are horrible, with 1% of the population controlling the majority of the total money.
As long as we continue to work toward a better world it will get better. In many ways it has gotten better. Of course, in many ways it has gotten worse too. Remains to be seen who will prevail.