The working title for the next book I am working on is called Restoring Balance. My first book, Systems out of Balance, was a referential guide for how our social systems work and how misinformation affects that. Restoring Balance will be more of an inspirational guide and much shorter in length. I will post chapters on this site about once a week. Here is the first installment. Feel free to comment.
INTRODUCTION: ALTRUISM
Are we naturally bad, victims of original sin? Are we naturally good as spiritual descendants from God? We might get caught up in one fixed belief or the other but if we truly look into ourselves and observe the behaviors of others the answer is undeniably: neither. We are naturally variable. We vary in our “goodness” or “badness” from one individual to the next and even within the same individual. There are consequences to succumbing to fixed beliefs, particularly the one that holds we are naturally bad, which I learned the hard way.
When I was a junior in high school a vocabulary word engulfed me in spiritual darkness. The word was misanthrope, defined as a belief that all human behavior was self-motivated. For better or worse I was always a thinker, and the more I thought about the word misanthrope the more I became convinced of its apparent truth. Thankfully, a penny saved me from this mental morass.
After high school I took a year off before going to college. In hindsight that was a critical step in understanding life, rather than automatically accept whatever fixed beliefs were being taught by schools or scholars. I had the opportunity to form my own beliefs based on real experience.
I was Christmas shopping in a mall when I decided to get myself a fifteen cent ice cream cone at a Baskin and Robbins outlet. The disheveled, elderly woman in front of me at the counter paid the fifteen cents for her cone but was informed there was a penny tax. I detected a look of concern on her face. As she rummaged through her purse for an extra penny I instinctively took one out of my pocket and slapped it down on the counter.
That experience provided several revelations. Why did I detect a look of concern on this stranger’s face? The simple answer is because I could. We all can read other people’s emotions fairly well, that is part of being human.
Why did I donate a penny to a stranger? The misanthrope would say the cause was to boost my own self-esteem, or to get the line moving, or because I’ve learned that general reciprocity makes a better world for me to live in. Though I was a misanthrope up until that moment I did not accept any of those motivations for my altruistic behavior.
Instead, I felt compassion for a total stranger that looked like she was down on her luck and I behaved out of pure instinct without any thinking or “self-motivation” involved. As hard as my mind wanted me to believe that my behavior was self-motivated my heart would not allow it. My new conclusion, based on my own experiential evidence, was that not all human behavior is self-motivated.
I had not realized my spiritual impoverishment up until that moment. For I now felt truly buoyant. I skipped in a crowded mall. I went up the down escalator and down the up escalator. I became a child at heart once more, similar to what fundamentalists would call being born again.
I indeed was saved from a life of cynicism. When I later went to college I did not automatically accept popular but unproven assumptions such as “the selfish gene.” Some of what my general field of science assumes as truth amounts to tautology, or circular reasoning. For example, we assume life to be selfish because life has the “self-motivation” to survive. Survival then “proves” selfishness.
If we step back from this assumed dogma we can attach greater meaning to the observation of life. Some organisms do indeed fit the meaning we attach to selfishness. Bacteria behave totally as individuals. The only responsibility one bacteria has for another is through asexual reproduction. Otherwise, each individual bacterium seeks merely to consume resources only for itself.
In contrast, there are organisms whose survival absolutely depends on functioning as a social group. As part of a group individuals sacrifice for each other with even their own lives. You could chalk this up to selfish survival of the species if you want, but you would lose a great deal of meaning for how whales survive in contrast to bacteria if you claim both to be acting in their selfish self-interest.
Though science may be guilty of such tautological assumptions, I find science now to be a saving grace for western culture. Science ultimately depends on experience, not on scholarship. Though many of us are not comfortable with the mathematical or technological tools used to further science, we all were born scientists. We all were given the ability to make educated guesses from our own experiences, and strengthen or adjust our guesses with further experience. That is the essence of science.
By honestly valuing and experiencing our own lives we can discover many problems with traditional western beliefs, including some perpetuated by dogmatic miscarriages of science. This inspirational guide draws from my own experiences as a wilderness backpacker, as a lifelong resident of a small village and, yes, as a trained scientist. These experiences refute the assumption that all human behavior is self-motivated. As both you and I know if we give due credence to our own observations and experiences, human intent and behavior is variable.
Though we have variable natures humans evolved to function as an altruistic species, behaving more like whales than bacteria. Both our individual and social well-being depends on realizing the full potential of our altruism. When culture persuades us instead that selfishness is not only natural but good, as evidenced in the way Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of self-interest” has been worshipped (and distorted) uncritically by economists, we have lost our natural balance.
Another instigator for an otherwise Enlightenment culture losing balance is Thomas Hobbes, who claimed that our natural condition was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Because of his misanthropic assumptions Hobbes concluded that paternal institutions, namely government, needed to save bestial humanity from ourselves by establishing order for us. This is utter hogwash that Hobbes derived from observations of “industrial man,” not “natural man.” Hobbes failed to understand that industrial man is caused, not prevented, by paternalism. This inspirational guide counters that you and I can save ourselves if independent from paternal influences, precisely because of our naturally evolved altruism.
This book could have been called Restoring Well-Being, Restoring Health or Restoring Cosmic Harmony. They all refer to the same thing: how to once again live our lives the way we evolved to live over hundreds of thousands of years of fine-tuning. The concept of Balance fits with the naturalist approach for how to live one’s life well in the natural order of life.
Most inspirational guides focus on the individual. They might include social goals as important, but undermine this with a focus on “me.” The focus of this inspirational guide is very much on “us” because no matter what impression you might have been given by Enlightenment philosophers or economists, we cannot attain individual fulfillment except as a social creature, that is how Mother Nature hotwired us. Ecologists and cultural anthropologists understand this, even if the natural supporting observations and experiences eluded some of the great Enlightenment thinkers.
I wrote a previous book called Systems out of Balance with original research and number crunching to inform us how we have been confused about what is natural. That book was a referential guide for explaining how our social systems are now out of balance and how misinformation got us in such a predicament. This inspirational guide focuses instead on heading towards where we naturally need and want to go. Five sections address five areas of prevalent social confusion. Eliminating the confusion about our natural rights, sense of belonging, democracy, public interest and quality of life will help us to restore our balance as a naturally altruistic species.
Tags: 001 Social Balance
