Does Altruism Exist?
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
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Altruism does not exist and all motivations are ultimately selfish. A mother has an instinct to protect a child, not because she cares about that child, but because she needs the child for her own emotional and financial self-interests. Christians do charity work, not because they care about other people, but because they think they'll gain favor with God and receive a reward in the afterlife. Men are protective of women, not because they care about women, but because they're trying to preserve the women for procreation. Women do not love men, but they pretend to love men because men are useful utilities. God does not care about man's happiness or peace, everything God does "for" man is ultimately to prove his own superiority. People who fight for social justice are doing it for money, attention, or an ego boost. Politicians do "good" things for people so they can control, exploit and get tax money off them. It's all totally selfish. Altruism is insanity, nobody acts completely selflessly because you would easily die.
Now, this varies on the spectrum of empathy vs psychopathy. I think most people are sincere and have good intentions, and you can do a lot of good for selfish reasons. But I think most motivations are selfish.
I act selflessly, which is why I'm such a loser. I take a lot of shit onto myself, get my ass kicked by the world year after year, all for the protection of people who not only don't appreciate it, but side with the selfish psychopath who clearly has no altruism. This is the story of my life. I used to protect vulnerable people from bullies and thugs, only for them to turn on me and side with the bullies and thugs. They would do everything to keep me weak and keep the villains strong, all because "we care about you." I realized from this that my "altruism" was insanity, and the selfishness of the psychopath is logical. I was brainwashed by saturday morning cartoons, where the hero was good and the villain was bad. Where people would come together to support the good person. But then I looked at reality and it's pretty much the opposite. Everyone comes together to worship the bad guy, they bring all their money and energy to the villain. The "hero" is an idiot, who dies for the benefit of people because he's thinking "if I care about other people it will be a benefit to me." So good people like that are acting selfishly, and people reward evil because evil is powerful, they think they will get some of the power. This proves that people seek only power, above all. Any true altruists die young.
Of course, this is only the pessimistic view. I could be proven wrong. But like I said, I don't think selfish motivations are necessarily a bad thing. I think it's a mutual benefit.
also "loser" or "cool" is one of those pissy attributations that normies use, who the fuck cares what others think about you, are you insecure? stop being insecure, the status other people attribute to your existance are worth the weight of the air they travel through, nothing. what do YOU think makes you cool, what do YOU think is lame, and will you live up those standards, not those that others have created for you?
i think i'm pretty cool overal, there are parts of me that I think are less cool, but i don't care enough to change them right now, i'm getting fatter, which i think is (based on my own thought process that i have personally went through, not others) pretty lame but, eh whatever for now it's acceptable.
demoralizing yourself with the true nature of our flawed, emotional, often irrational brain is not the point, the point is to use that knowledge to live with these outdated mechanisms meant for a more savage time in our species history, and use them to our advantage to become better men.
Too long
Tip for Tat game and Game Theory would explain cooperation is ENERGY EFFICIENT...that is altruism but made by selfishness!
Even simpler. As a social species we are programmed to be social on a very fundamental level because as you say the survival strategy of our species is social cooperation and works because it is energy efficident. Altruism is plainly our social programming operating on its default setting because acting anti social against our programming is actually harder work and overall even if some social behavior of us is not optimal if we would operate by game theory, on average we benefit from it.
Very fundamental concepts of our thinking from child age on include us believing that good people = altruistic people will gain more benefits than bad people.
First you need to know what altruism is. Then you can discuss it. Hint: it has nothing to do with benevolence.
what is it
This was amazing
Call Francis Collins to talk about Altruism
Trump 😆
its not altruism if you help someone for free because it feels good, if it didnt feel good you wouldnt do it
If it felt bad, like being crucified and whipped, would YOU do it?
@@DemonMaldito1 But Jesus knew he could resurrect and get the ultimate power and worship. So his motivations were ultimately selfish. No?
@Mike trotamundos Was Jesus altruistic for his sacrifice? I don't see what he could stand to gain by caring about humans.
@Walter Leroy Aston On the contrary. First of all, even if you get a satisfaction from doing an altruistic deed, that doesn't mean you did it for that reason. It's simply a byproduct of your selfless character. Second, you will not have time to have any chemical reaction if you act out of altruistic instict to save someone that you just saw drowning for example. Altruism doesn't necessarily rule out benefit to the self. For example, if I sacrifice a lot of time helping someone and did it without any expectations of a reward but that person ended up rewarding me anyway, then that doesn't change the fact that the helping behavior was out of pure altruism.
@@nvmffs every single decision you have ever made or action ever taken, even subconsciously, is the direct result of reward/punishment chemicals, and the mechanisms that implement them over longer periods of time, it's completely irrelevant whether or not the act of altruism you undertook was conscious or not, your brain has already implemented helping that person as the default response because it was programmed through past experiences. your reward system recognized that this pattern of behaviour made you feel good, and thus it is now an automatic response.
your altruistic action was only ever done purely because of that reward system and everything rationalisation afterwards or beforehand is a justification for it, therefore it is still not truly altruistic.
people get upset about this and innately try to argue against this reality because it feels depressing to think otherwise.
the truth you need to realize is that idea that people have "true" altruism and do things out of some larger than life "goodness" in their heart is detrimental to real effective altruism.
let's imagine a scenario: you have a cookie, and you're going to share it with a guy next to you on the train, you lose a cookie doing this, but it makes you feel good because hey, you just gave that guy a cookie, cookies make people happy, you just bettered the world a little bit, and now that dopamine releases into your brain and you feel flightly better for the rest of the day.
you get off the train, then, unknown to you or him, the cookie reciever has an allergy for that particular type of cookie, after you get off the train and enter into your office or wherever you were going, the cookie reciever dies of asphyxiation because his throat expanded. this doesn't actually matter to you, because you already got your reward, the world doesn't magically, telepathically correct your emotional response until you come face to face with what results your action actually caused (and accept that what you did wasn't actually helpful but detrimental, something that people with ego's and a strong perception of self-virtue will struggle to even accept in more subtle versions of this scenario) you haven't a clue in the world that you just made the world worse.
that is what the perception of true altruism will do, and why there is so much suffering, everyone believes they're doing the right thing because for most people their brain is naturally hardwired to be empathetic, and as a result will get chemical rewards for feeling like they've done an altruistic thing, with this mistaken mindset that people have, they will intentionally take shortcuts to whatever makes them feel empathetic faster, skipping any effort to intelligently check whether or not they are biased in their thinking and whether or not what they did TRULY ACTUALLY helped. in my cookie example this wasn't really possible, but in the real world you genuinely can improve your effect on the world by actually being intelligently empathetic and doing research on whether or not you'll be helpful through your actions.
i've run into this on a personal level in my job where animal activists leave extra food in the woods for the deer population after a hard winter so they don't starve, the area in question lost the only apex predator that hunts deer many years ago (though the wolf population in a neighbouring country is slowly moving towards ours) this doesn't actually help, as the well-fed, surviving deer create even more deer and the population goes even further beyond the threshold of what that area was able to provide food-wise, this turns into a population bubble where the added food doesn't help anymore, and many thousands of deer starve to death because with or without the added food, competition for food becomes so strong that barely any deer at all can meet their caloric intake, the population plummets dangerously low and many deer die a horrifying death to starvation (the one thing the activists were trying to prevent in the first place). other knock-on effects that these activists never cared to consider in the first place is that deer mainly feed on the buds and young leaves of trees and shrubs that are low enough to reach. as a result, new growth completely dies, almost no sapling gets high enough before dying for lack of photosynthesis and depletion of their nutrients, this stifles the growth of the forest and can in worst cases deforest small areas over a long period.
in conclusion to all of this, i think it's a dangerous and childish mindset that most people have, and if we are to have the closest thing to real altruism, we ought to grow out of it, realizing true altruism doesn't exist makes you a MORE altruistic person.
He used an awful lot of words to say nothing...
sociology lol
Kinda your fault that you didn't understand it
100%
@@muhammadedwards8425 spitting facts
I believe that some people feel a desire to want peoples to be happy, even if they have no idea who that person is and will say anything in an attempt to make the person feel good, well actually I feel it’s less about wanting to make people feel happy and more about not wanting them to feel bad, I myself have always had that compulsion, for instance if someone during a conversation is getting lost in the point they are making and starting to feel embarrassed I will feel the need to say something usually with a hermetic suggestion of positive intent, or on Facebook someone getting negative comments I feel a need to say something that I feel will have a subconscious positive affect on that person to make them feel good, and sometimes it might mean making a negative suggestion about myself with the silly idea that it might make them feel good if I drop a suggestion that at least they are better than me at whatever we are talking about, and it definitely is not for any selfish reasons because often it will be a latent suggestion or even a comment on line without my profile being known
So does it exist???
No
Yes
Short answer to video title so you don't waste your time: No. No it does not.
You don't think so?
@@jasongr3219 I know so. Every action we make is based on how it makes _us_ feel, regardless of why.
@@apex_prey I agree. We all follow a reward/punishment system: We do "good" deeds because it gives us a dopamine hit. But I think if there was an objective standard off good/bad, people could conform to it and would be acting selflessly. They'll do the good even when it doesn't feel good. Also, insanity can cause pure altruism.
@@jasongr3219 You're not too swift.
"doesn't feel good" is irrelevant, you can carry someone's heavy luggage and get a sore back, that doesn't feel good, but your brain weighed both options, and figured that feeling virtuous and altruistic would be more rewarding in the end. you can be pissed off and even hate the person you did the altruistic thing for, doesn't matter what negative emotions end up being involved, they were not enough to outweight the potential reward your brain calculated.
so that "they'll do good even when it doesn't feel good" still doesn't exist even if there was an objective, perfected, angel-like form of objective good/bad (which does exist, humans will just never be able to get close to it, because it would be a fundamental calculation of every event and every interaction in the universe that has ever or will ever happen and how it affects people's wellbeing (and then you have to perfectly define what wellbeing even is)).
What if altruism didn't lead to benefits for ourselves (assuming for the sake of argument that it does). Would there still be reason to be altruistic?
Yeah. To benefit others.
@@Mrocznyy666there would be a reason to do it as you said, but that’s out of the question because this video isn’t about if altruism has a particular sense or importance but about if anything we mean to do for others is truly about them and not about us. And in that case altruism doesn’t exist at all which you notice when you realize how everything we do for others actually ends up benefiting us, wether it be a good feeling or an uphold of a sense of duty we have
@@Zach_Morrow You can use pure altruism when you help people without power and you feel miserable doing this. Most educated people think that it is not possible, but it's real.