The Intelligence of Altruism

Here's one of those philosophical posts I warned you about.

I want to talk about altruism. First of all, let's look at the premise that most people think about when considering altruistic behavior: that is that we are each separate entities and we are each responsible for our personal welfare. Altruistic people from this perspective are willing to sacrifice their personal welfare for that of others.

I am positive that this is not a valid premise. I am going to suggest an alternative premise that is based on a more realistic understanding of nature, including the human form of nature.

Let's start by asking the question of how self-awareness evolved and why. My response would be that the more of the world we can know about, the more successful we can be negotiating within and
adapting to that world. So eventually, we see beings evolve who are aware that the universe is their environment, with the understanding that this takes in themselves, not as something separate from the environment, but as another aspect of the environment they can know about.

This means, therefore, that to look out for ourselves, means looking out for that of which we are inextricably a part. The point is that if we don't look out for the larger world, including others, we don't look out for individual selves—because we’re part of that world.

If you ask yourself who you are as a person, every answer you come up with will denote some kind of relationship to the world in which we exist. I am a father, grandfather, son, brother, book developer, student, letter writer, homeowner—it doesn't matter what descriptor I choose. All of my answers or all your answers will imply relationships. The self, then, is really the sum of our relationships to the world.

To look out for the self means to look out for that to which we are related. To the degree we do that, we succeed. To the degree we don't, we hurt ourselves. In other words, enlightened self-awareness has consequences—we avoid behaviors that are self-destructive, physically, psychologically, economically, socially, politically, and any other way you want to describe it. Unfortunately, all too few people recognize this.

Exploitation from this perspective doesn't make sense. Hurting others from this perspective is self-destructive behavior. I often state that I am not my brother's keeper, I am my own keeper, but this means I am my brother's keeper as well.

I have a small business. My whole philosophy for that business is that my job is to facilitate the success of others, to help them do what they want to do. This is not an altruistic philosophy. I am successful to the degree I help others succeed. If you look at the basic premise of the success of any business, it is to create a mutually beneficial relationship between itself and those that it serves. When businesses don't do this, they disappear.

I like to say that profit from this view is a measure of the quality of our service to others. Profit provides the resources that allow businesses to continue to be able to serve their customers and the larger society. When businesses don't take this perspective, they hurt themselves. Short-term profit that comes from exploitation is hurtful because it undermines the long-term success of the exploiter as well as those who were taken advantage of. (With that said, there are certain human enterprises that should not be subject to simply dollars and cents. It’s clear to me that healthcare is one of those enterprises.)

Altruism is a word that suggests selflessness. It's also an idea based on a dualistic understanding of the world—me versus you—and sometimes I'm willing to “sacrifice” my welfare for yours. However, as stated above, this is a false premise. When we look out for others, we look out for ourselves because we are all in this together. Altruism seen this way is just intelligent behavior.

In a fairly abstract sense, we might suggest that all human behavior is aimed at survival. But if we examine what people do, it's never their personal survival that’s at stake, but their personal sense of the order of their world. In other words, we act so as to preserve our world as we know it to be. When world views of different people or societies clash, we have conflict, but here’s the point. We can know this, and we can transcend these differences and act in ways that are to our mutual benefit. Do we do this? Not often enough, unfortunately.

Three final thoughts:

1. Think about how we feel when we help others in one way or another. It always makes us feel good about ourselves. Now think about when we hurt or take advantage of someone else. It always makes us feel anxious about what we did. This is our bodies telling us what behaviors make the most sense for our personal survival. These feelings are not an accident.

2. When we look at conflict, especially war, one way of understanding it is that this is nature's way of deselecting from the gene pool those who don't understand that everything is interconnected, and survival depends on our accommodating one another. It’s sad that many innocent people die in war, but maybe one day we’ll wake up and discover the sheer insanity of such conflict.

3. Finally, with regard to the Golden Rule—a concept related to altruism—my take is this: it's something we cannot not follow. By definition we do unto others as we have them do unto us—for good or ill.

—John Woods, July 2, 2007