Malevolent Benevolence
Altruism in Western society is commonly accepted as not only a viable life choice, but effectively mandatory if you want to consider yourself a “good” person. It’s one of those societal mores that is so commonly accepted as to be ubiquitous, and to even question it earns you looks like you are a pedophile or cannibal. But let’s risk those scandalous looks and just examine the question purely on its intellectual merit: Is altruism actually a good thing?
First a definition, because definitions are important: altruism, when you examine the deeper meaning, is not just about being a nice person or giving charitably to those around you. Even though ‘altruistic’ is sometimes used as a loose synonym for ’nice’, that is a false equivalency. The truer definition of altruism, and the one that is commonly accepted in our minds if not out loud, is the belief that doing something that helps a fellow human being is a moral imperative at every opportunity - not just something to be done when you feel like it, but something you must do even if you don’t necessarily have the spare time or energy. That if you know someone else needs something, then you as a good person are obligated to help them in any way you can. In essence, if you need my last dollar, I am morally obligated to give it to you, even if I need it just as much or more than you do. That is what a good person would do. Altruism means that you are responsible for the well-being and happiness of those around you, and conversely, they are responsible for yours. It is born of the argument that, if we all do this, we will all be better off.
This is specious reasoning, meaning it sounds good and right and logical on the surface, but once you pull it apart, dissect the underlying premises and apply those principles universally, it always and invariably leads to a worse world/society for everyone, not better. Like a used car at a shady dealership, just because it looks good on the outside doesn’t mean it actually runs.
First, let us examine the logical fallacy used to defend the practice. A little math helps demonstrate where intuition fails us: Let us assume that each person has approximately 600 people in their relative vicinity who they interact with and who would qualify as “someone you know.” Let’s call that their circle of influence. And for the sake of simplicity, let us assume that all of those 600 people have the same 600 people in their circle as well. That’s not realistic, but as it doesn’t affect the math, let’s assume for this argument that all 600 people live in the same isolated village and have no contact with the outside world. At first, altruism sounds like an efficient way to share the load of life’s difficulty among the group. If everyone is responsible for taking care of everyone else, then you have 600 people looking out for your welfare. That sounds pretty awesome. And since each of those people is sharing the responsibility, it doesn’t feel like you’re demanding very much of them, so you don’t need to feel guilty about it. You get to be taken care of by 600 people, and none of them is overly burdened. But this is where our mental intuition starts to fail us: when we imagine our responsibilities in return. More than likely, when you imagine it, you are picturing being responsible for the people who more closely surround you - your family, your neighbors, good friends, etc. - but you’re probably imagining around 10-12 other people. But for altruism to work, you are responsible for the welfare of 600 other people. That’s a lot. Once you start working out the math, even if you bear only your fair share of the burden with everyone else in the group, even if no one member of the 600 is shirking their duty or feeling too tired to contribute, you are still responsible for 1/600th of the time and energy required to take care of each one of 600 people. This equates to 600/600ths or exactly the same amount of energy it takes to fully take care of one person. If any of the 600 is anything less that perfectly scrupulous with their social responsibility, the numbers are even worse. When you examine the real numbers, you realize that having everyone in charge of everyone else doesn’t save any time or energy over the method of every person being responsible only for themselves. Either way, you are in charge of taking care of 600/600ths of a person. So while it may “feel” like a more efficient use of time and energy, in actuality, it is at best exactly the same energy expenditure for everyone involved as it would be to only take care of themselves.
But maybe the argument is not about energy- or time-efficiency. Maybe the idea is that among 600 people, the skills needed to solve your problem are much more likely to be present in a group than just your skills alone. After all, we can’t all be experts at every skill necessary to take care of people. That’s what a society is for. If we all pool our skills and resources, we can more easily and evenly handle anything that comes up. This can also seem true, but it is only true for a community that doesn’t follow altruistic principles. To see why, first imagine that altruism is perfectly followed by everyone in the group. Each of us must use our skills to help our fellow community members. But not all skills are equal. What if Manuel is good at whittling wood, but Monique is good at math? A lot more people are going to need help with something that involves math than they will help with whittling. This means that Monique is going to be constantly overwhelmed with all the help she’s required to give to others, while Manuel is going to be lightly burdened. Not only is this no longer a fair distribution of the effort, but in fact, as time goes on, people are bound to start to see these patterns. As a result, there exists a built-in incentive as you are growing up to lean toward learning skills that are less useful to the group. That’s not to say that just because something is easier, everyone will do it, but why would you arrange things such that you incentivize something you do not want to happen? Altruism rewards those in the community that are less useful to the group and punishes those who are more helpful. That will result, over time, in a community with fewer and fewer people who are good at the more useful skills, and more people who are skilled at minorly beneficial abilities or possibly largely unskilled at all.
The problems don’t stop there, unfortunately. Next let’s look at specifically where in the group that altruism is going to fail if it does. One of the appeals of altruism is the notion that those with more to give can share with those most in need. It appears on the surface like a good and valid approach to making sure that those at the bottom of the societal ladder or those least able to care for themselves are never left behind or neglected. This appeals to us on a deep level and I would argue is one of the most important functions of society. But let us examine how this plays out in a community where everyone believes in altruism. The fact is, life is hard, and there is always more work to be done than there is time or energy to complete. As a result, a significant aspect of growing up into a functional adult is acquiring the mental skills necessary to prioritize those tasks which are most important, and learning to accept that those items which are the least important are just not going to get done. In an individualist lifestyle, this is a great solution, because it means you are always working on and completing the things that are most important to your own welfare, and by extension, you always (at least to the best of your ability) receive the best life you can have given your limitations of time and resources. But how does this play out in an altruistic society? If you don’t have the time and energy to fulfill your responsibilities to all 600 people, how are you going to choose which ones to help? Human nature being what it is, more than likely what you will choose to do is to apply your efforts to those problems where your efforts will do the most good for the group as a whole. These are sure to be problems that you know how to solve and will likely require the least amount of effort so that you can solve a larger number of problems, and hopefully benefit the lives of the greatest number of people. There’s nothing more altruistic than that. That will be how you will maximize the amount of good bestowed upon the community as a whole. But the underside of that approach is that the problems that get left on the cutting room floor, instead of being those which are least important, are now the problems that are hardest to solve - either through difficulty of thought or sheer effort required. And of course, everyone else in the community is following the same or similar guidelines as to what they’re choosing to expend their effort on. As a result, the “hard problems” are not being solved by anyone. I’m sure you can see even on the surface how that could be a problem, but on a deeper level, it is even worse. You know who has the hardest problems to solve in the community? Those most in need of help. The bottom of the societal ladder. This is the first, most devious lie inherent to the principle of altruism: in an effort to make sure that the lowliest of our society are taken care of, it unintentionally increases the odds that those most in need are the least likely to receive help.
But it doesn’t end there. There is an even bigger problem with altruism as a societal policy. If each person is required to be aware of 600 people and all of their problems, big and small, then it is inevitable that no one member of the group will have enough time to be intimately familiar with the nuance and special circumstances of any of their 600 charters or the subtle reasons why conventional thinking may not work in their specific situation. In fact, if you think about it from the other direction, it becomes even more obvious. Imagine a random person from the 600 people you know coming over to you and trying to solve your problem while only devoting 1/600th of their time to its consideration. What are the chances they’re going to understand your life well enough to even grasp the problem in the first place?
“Hi, Joe, I’m here to help. What seems to be the problem.” “I don’t have enough money.” “Get a job. Work and save money. Then you’ll have money. Ok? See you next week.”
And not only is that not particularly helpful, but you get to hear basic variations of that advice 600 times. None of your 600 fellow community members know the ins and outs of your situation well enough to give any but the most paltry version of help. In fact, maybe they don’t even offer advice. Maybe they assume that if you don’t have enough money, you can’t buy food, so they bring by several grocery bags of canned vegetables that they had in their pantry because they are gross and never get eaten, so they drop them by your place and go on their way feeling good about themselves because they helped out someone in need. This in no way helps you when you have your own vegetable garden that is feeding you quite handily, but you can’t pay your mortgage payment.
In fact, of all the 601 people in the thought experiment above, the one person who is most intimately familiar with the ins and outs of your predicament is - unsurprisingly - you. You have been watching the entire scenario play out from the beginning, every minute of every day. Of everyone in the community, you are the one most familiar with all aspects of the situation and are therefore the most qualified to come up with a solution that handles this specific scenario with all the nuances and exceptions and special conditions. No one else in the community could ever possibly be as qualified to come up with a better solution that fits quite as perfectly as you could. That’s not to say that the solution is obvious or easy to implement. It still might be a particularly sticky problem. And obviously, someone who has been in a similar situation may have insight or tips to offer; I am not suggesting otherwise. What I am suggesting is no one is in a better position to come up with a viable solution than you are. As difficult or overwhelming as it might feel, you are the one most qualified to solve your problems, even if you don’t feel qualified enough.
Thus, in an individualist society, each person is responsible for solving their own problems. But much like a CEO of a large company, you are responsible for solving the problem, but that doesn’t mean you must be the one who actually performs the work to solve it - only that it’s on your shoulders to make sure it gets done. But how would you get it done if you do not have the skills necessary? How do you supplement your own limited skills to achieve whatever you need to live a happy and healthy life? By trading with someone who can do what you cannot. This is where the whole concept of commerce comes from. If Paulo has the skills or items that will solve (or help solve) my problem for me, then I do something or give him something of equal or greater value in return. In fact, if Paulo and I are good at trading, then I will trade something to Paulo that is more valuable to him than what he is giving up, but is less valuable to me than what I am getting in return. In this way, there is no benefitting one person at the expense of another. Instead, we both benefit from the transaction and the whole community is benefitted more than what it cost. (Of course, in any reasonably advanced society, this evolves into using a communal currency to represent value and trading that instead. But the principle is the same)
The benefit of this approach is the antithesis of an already-mentioned weakness of altruism. If Paulo’s limited time or resources are beneficial to both Janelle and me, then he will need to prioritize one over the other. The ideal mechanism by which the whole society would prefer Paulo to prioritize his time and resources is to trade them to the one who needs it the most. However, this can be a very tricky thing for Paulo to determine and might require an extensive and time-intensive discussion between the three of us, each describing to Paulo our backstory and why we need his help and to what extent - in essence taking up valuable time that could be used to solve the problem or possibly both problems.
Instead, it is reasonable to assume that if Paulo’s help will benefit me greatly - perhaps even vital to my well-being - while only offering Janelle a minor benefit, that I would be willing to offer Paulo something more valuable in trade than what Janelle would offer, and therefore Paulo benefits more from trading with me, and can shortcut the evaluation process by just assuming that the person to whom his work is worth the most will offer the trade that benefits him the most, while at the same time providing him with the most incentive to get the work done.
It is not a perfect substitute for need-based decisioning, however, because it is easily conceivable that Paulo’s help may be more important to Janelle, but she simply doesn’t have as much to offer Paulo as I do. This points to the other benefit. In an individualist society, Janelle and I are incentivized to steer our own lives in a way that we can be most useful to other people, and therefore be able to offer the better trade to get what we need. This counters the rapid decline of useful individuals, and encourages each member of the society to become as useful as they can be.
Truly, even this is not a perfect solution. There are still questions of opportunity to benefit our individual station or improve our ability to serve others, personal genetic talents or handicaps, etc. that might result in someone with more advantages but less need getting Paulo’s help. These are genuine problems that still need to be addressed. But at least in a non-altruistic society, the system is working to reduce those that slip through the cracks, rather than exacerbating the effect.
An interesting variant is when some people (especially those from Mediterranean or Eastern cultures) attempt to bypass these issues by using a version of altruism that only applies to “family.” These people tend to have very close-knit families and teach that family is paramount, and when a family member asks for help, you help them. By extension of course, this means that this same imperative to help does not apply to non-family members. This would, on the surface, appear to be a pale imitation of altruism, but has the advantage of limiting the scope of the number of people each person has to care for. If you reduce the number of people from 600 down to 20-30, then it could work, right? Right? No. Not really. The math is the same either way. No matter what number you choose as the size of your group, your best-case scenario is to break even, and when the time or energy runs out, it is always the ones with the most difficult problems that will be left unattended while they themselves are still trying to carry the weight of the group and leaving their own happiness or well-being to be borne by other people who are failing to do so. The second aspect - that someone whose attention is spread among trying to care for multiple people cannot focus on any of them - is somewhat mitigated by reducing the number of people in the group. However, as anyone who has ever had a family knows, even your family members can sometimes have a difficult time grasping the complexities of what makes your situation so difficult. In the end, by a wide margin, the only person who knows your situation well enough to come up with a viable solution, is you.
The third and deepest lie of altruism is perhaps the most malevolent in its effect. It ignores the very important truth that problems don’t just spring up out of the ground with no cause. The uncomfortable truth is that the problems in your life tend, more often than not, to stem from your own actions. When you are responsible for solving your own problems, this is a very beneficial feedback loop. Each time you screw up, it results in more difficulty and energy expenditure on your part and encourages you to make better decisions next time. But when you are responsible for fixing other people’s problems, that feedback is reversed on itself. Those that are making the bad decisions are now not the same ones bearing the consequences of those decisions. Not only does this mean that the person who can best improve the situation has no material incentive to fix it, it also means that those most incentivized to prevent future scenarios (those who are depleted of time and energy from repeatedly fixing the problem) are incapable of making the changes necessary to prevent the next occurrence. When you employ altruism in your own life’s values, your time and energy reserves will always be at the mercy of factors that you cannot control. In the end, the actual, real-world effect of altruism is always to interminably increase the amount of work required from each member of that society, while reducing the useful benefit that each member receives. Those who are trying their hardest to be a “good” person are rewarded with more and more work, with no upper limit or even downward pressure.
When you try to set your shoulder to something so impossibly big, you set an impossibly high bar for yourself that you will never be able to meet on any kind of regular basis, and you will know it. As such, you will always feel like a failure, exhausted and miserable. And so will 600 of your closest friends. Does that sound like a great society to live in?