Altruism as Lie and Manipulation

Altruism is a word that has suffered a great deal of abuse throughout the ages. It is adored by some as a great virtue and as a path to a great reward. It is disdained by others as a cynical misdirection from a rational life which can be exploited as a means to gaining power over gullible people, and by “gullible People” I mean just about all of us. This writing will explore both of those positions. 

Altruism is a behavior and behind a behavior must be a motive. The motive in turn has a source which can be from within or without the person exhibiting the behavior. The sources and directions of these component parts of behavior contain the answers to all the questions and judgements about altruism. Generally an altruistic impulse which originates within the actor comes from the ego and is a genuine, self fulfilling act of that individual. However, there is another source of altruism that evinces a sinister motive and a perversion of that behavior. These distinctions and the exploration of the perversion of altruistic motive are the objects of this little essay. 

The dark side of altruism or, rather, the perversion of altruism is in its adaptability as a means of thought and motivation control that can be applied to idealistic individuals. 

Let’s start with a few definitions from some familiar dictionaries:

altruism

1. Unselfish concern for the welfare of others; selflessness.

2. Zoology Instinctive behavior that is detrimental to the individual but favors the survival or spread of that individual’s genes, as by benefiting its relatives.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

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altruism

1. the principle or practice of unselfish concern for the welfare of others

2. (Philosophy) the philosophical doctrine that right action is that which produces the greatest benefit to others

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

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altruism

1. the principle or practice of unselfish concern for the welfare of others (opposed to egoism).

2. behavior by an animal that may be to its disadvantage but that benefits others of its kind.

Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

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altruism  (ăl′tro̅o̅-ĭz′əm)

Instinctive cooperative behavior that is detrimental or without reproductive benefit to the individual but that contributes to the survival of the group to which the individual belongs. The willingness of a subordinate member of a wolf pack to forgo mating and help care for the dominant pair’s pups is an example of altruistic behavior. While the individual may not reproduce, or may reproduce less often, its behavior helps ensure that a close relative does successfully reproduce, thus passing on a large share of the altruistic individual’s genetic material.

The American Heritage® Science Dictionary Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

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altruism

a concern or regard for the needs of others, entirely without ulterior motive. — altruist, n. — altruistic, adj.

-Ologies & -Isms. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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What the above definitions have in common is that altruism is always involves a consideration or concern for the welfare of others. But what the definitions lack is a demand that the altruistic person to degrade or deny himself for the sole benefit of others. This distinction is the definitive difference between the natural occurrence of altruistic impulse and the perversion of the motive and behavior into slavish servitude. The service of others is the virtue; the degradation of the self is the vice and the opportunity for exploitation. 

Consideration or concern for others is only a trait of human decency. It is civil to show and more so to genuinely feel, concern for other human beings or, as a Buddhist will point out even more broadly, not just for humans for all of our fellow, sentient beings. Accordingly, most people have this motive as a natural impulse. They don’t think about it any more than about the urge for a glass of water when they are thirsty. But it is the same, normal and psychologically healthy people who are vulnerable to manipulation. 

The political manipulator takes the normal, altruistic impulse and puts it under a magnifying glass. He enlarges and distorts it, demanding exorbitant volumes of altruistic motive and behaviors a base-line requirement for being a human being. But there is more. The increase in prodigality must reflect a commensurate abasement of the self. That is, you cannot raise others with enough demonstration and sincerity unless you degrade yourself in parallel to it. This, the manipulator knows, is a formula for dominating the minds of conscientious and idealistic people. 

After these tricks are played there are more. The well-meaning but naïve person who is taken that far by the deceit soon finds that his efforts are not sufficient. In fact his efforts will never be sufficient because the level of demand increases without bounds. The Chinese peasant trying to show his fidelity to Chairman Mao exhausts himself and his resources in superhuman efforts of selflessness, only to be endlessly told that it is not enough. The hundred thousand or so German boys who died at Stalingrad had to be consoled that their wasted lives could end there in payment of the debt they owed their government. Hitler was quick to point out publicly that some people have to die in a war and it only matters that the State survive. So said their fuehrer after that grisly battle. The requirement for altruism on demand becomes a trademark of the dupes who are taken in by it. The poet E. E. Cummings put it thus: 

kumrads die because they’re told)
kumrads die before they’re old
(kumrads aren’t afraid to die
kumrads don’t
and kumrads won’t
believe in life)and death knows whie
(all good kumrads you can tell
by their altruistic smell
moscow pipes good kumrads dance)
kumrads enjoy
s.freud knows whoy
the hope that you may mess your pance
every kumrad is a bit
of quite unmitigated hate
(travelling in a futile groove
god knows why)
and so do i
(because they are afraid to love  

The poor winchell, the sap, the jerk, the sucker, the easy mark, the savage, drained of human feelings and having thrown away his humanity on command has nothing left but his own servitude. All of this is accomplished by the unyielding demand on the poor sap to give himself up for the benefit of the undefined, unseen, limitless and abstract others who, he is insistently told, deserve his life’s essence more than he does himself. 

But what of the people who are not such willing saps for the altruism con-game? For them there is the flip side of the great deceit. If one asserts himself against any extreme of the game he is calumnized by a campaign of lies and accusations. This is part of the manipulation. He is called selfish in the most extreme and condemnatory language. He is called anti-social. He is called an egotist and egotist in the context of these calumnies is a very bad word. Such a person is painted as without any human feelings or regard for his fellow man and thus he is a thoroughly evil creature. Is there a person who does not kowtow to every extreme demand for his demonstration of the altruistic imperative? – why he would not give the scraps off his dinner plate to a starving child. That’s how the manipulator deals with the few who resist the campaign of altruistic propaganda and manipulation. It is very effective. Just talk to a person who styles himself a political liberal. You will get the whole story by rote recital. You see, kumrads really do die because they’re told. They do everything because they are told. 

And if even all of this is not sufficient to enslave the mass mind into the servitude of mock-altruism there is the familiar, last resort: violence. You will pay your taxes or you will be slammed into a hell-hole prison to have your mind and life destroyed day by day by living intimately with real criminals. That tax money will then be used for whatever the politicians decide to label as altruistic at the moment. This will be perverted into schemes to make an ever-increasing stratum of the population dependent on government for their daily needs. This is the final and most destructive lie of altruism: increasing the power of politicians over an ever more defenseless and dependent mass. When properly orchestrated it feeds on itself. The pseudo-altruistic handout creates demand in the market for sloth and malingering. The mass responds by selling all the sloth and malingering the politicians want to buy and they want to buy as much as they can until they run out of your money. The bottom line on the balance sheet of altruism is power. 

But that’s the extreme case. Here are some less than extreme cases: 

St. Francis of Assisi made it all the way to sainthood on the strength of an exaggerated and maladaptive altruism. He spent his life denying his own right to exist and reviling himself mentally and physically for the sin of being alive. Thus he has become a great inspiration for the manipulators in that great, organized superstition known as the Catholic Church. Francis was also, apparently, a tragically neurotic figure if you peel off the veneer of church propaganda. (Remember, it was the Catholic Church that gave us the word: propaganda.**) Church propagandists have found the story of the man from Assisi highly valuable. They continue to profit from his life whether it was the product of sheer gullibility or merely psychopathology. Francis, poor bastard, was taken in completely by the altruism con-game. 

Then consider the young Kamikaze pilots of Japan in 1945. Is it not ultimately selfless to crash your airplane into the warship of an invading enemy in protection of your beloved homeland? Well, again, maybe. Young men are always impressed with their duty to further the ambitions of the political manipulators who always find them useful for the purpose. If the propaganda about duty, honor and glory are not sufficient there is always conscription. Thus nations go into terrible wars with armies of gullible, ignorant young men convinced of the great virtue of selfless altruism. In the late phase of the Second World War the gullible, the young men of Japan were subjected to the highest demand of that altruism when told they must kill themselves and make their lives useless except for that brief instant in which they became weapons. Perhaps some of them realized they had been conned from the beginning but with an enemy in sight of your own shores it is too late change course. 

There was a song in the ‘60s titled Where Have All the Flowers Gone? that posed the question of young men who had gone for soldiers. The words of the refrain were, When will they ever learn? Probably never. 

There are also puzzles, great ethical puzzles. In 1873, Father Damien deVeuster, aged 33, arrived in Kalaupapa on Molokai Island in the Hawaiian chain. Kalaupapa was the leper colony for the islands. He spent 16 years there serving the needs of the twice-condemned* inhabitants where he contracted the disease and died from it. He has been declared venerable by Pope Paul VI which begins the process to Sainthood. Later he was declared blessed by another pope which moves him one step closer. Generally, Father Damien is regarded as a selfless individual, that is, one who was completely altruistic to the sacrifice of himself for the poor, leprous souls on the colony. Well, maybe. But maybe not. 

Father Damien may well have been seeking himself on that island, trying to make sense of his life and looking for something worthwhile to devote it too. If that is true, and I certainly hope it is, then Father Damien was acting from total selfishness. What he did went far beyond mere courtesy and consideration of others that can be defended as a rational altruism. But, alas, he may have been a dupe of the great superstition of the Catholic Church and may have deliberately mortified himself thinking that to be the way to progress into a mythical heaven. Even that may be a selfish act but at this point the analysis has ground down to a defining of questions which cannot be answered. Suffice it to say that the same acts or at least the outward appearance of those acts may evince different motives and the motives may yield very different judgments. Whatever drove Father Damien was his business and the best part of the story is that no one forced him to do it, or forcibly prevented him from doing it, for his own good. We can respect that he knew what he wanted to do with his own life. Many other well-intended people would either beatify him for it or throw him into a jail cell to prevent it. 

It is not what a person does or how he values himself that is under scrutiny here. It is the fellow telling you what to do in order to be a moral person, especially the one who tells you to debase yourself in order to be so. But the one who tells you that you must only consider yourself and not show any outward sign of altruism (by that or any other name) is equally guilty. Any time you are marching to a drum being beaten by someone else you are behaving altruistically. You are living your life for the purpose of pleasing someone else instead of seeking your own being and destiny. You have made yourself a fragment of a person and have thrown away your integrity. 

Ayn Rand wrote a great deal about integrity. Let’s look at its dictionary definition: 

in·teg·ri·ty  (ĭn-tĕg′rĭ-tē)

n.

1. Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.

2. The state of being unimpaired; soundness.

3. The quality or condition of being whole or undivided; completeness.

The first definition above is the one hooted and howled about by politicians and preachers. It means following rules and demonstrating behavior that other people will approve of. Let’s look at the second and third definitions. The idea of being unimpaired, of being sound or whole is what we want here. A whole person makes his own decisions and seeks his own ends. A whole person never defiles a child by telling him to ask himself what Jesus would do. 

And what a vile, immoral and destructive thing that is to do to a child. It seeks to diminish the child from a whole, unimpaired entity to an appendage of another entity. And this is done for the self-serving purpose to exert power over that child while hypocritically extolling an imaginary virtue. A whole person would tell the child to decide what the child, himself, would do and then do it, but to do it knowing why he did it. More closely to the words of Ayn Rand we might say: A person with integrity would tell the child to seek his own integrity, inside himself, the only place where it can be found. Then the child should act as that integrated person who makes his own decisions, knows his own mind and can defend both his own thoughts and his own acts. And then, even if those thoughts and acts should prove wrong, accept the error and stand by himself, undiminished, as an integrated but merely imperfect, entity. Then he will be ready to join the ranks of a civilized humanity. 

A child’s first need in life is to find himself. Impeding that all-important object of childhood is the most deleterious kind of child abuse. Without knowing who he is the child cannot know how to live his life. The ultimate purpose of life is thus taken from him at an early age when he cannot defend himself. Every human being has the goal and object of living his own life. I must live my life; you must live your life and even our pet dogs and cats must live their lives. Ingraining into a child an imperative to emulate the life of another instead of finding his own is the destruction of a human being. 

This discourse leads to the ultimate by which I mean the final question in this inquiry. The final question is this: If a person decides entirely on his own and for his own reasons to be an altruist, has he given up his integrity? Let’s avoid examination into how we could ever know if the person really made that decision entirely on his own resources and deal with the question as given. He then came to this conclusion as the best way to serve his own ego. That being true he has given up nothing and is, in fact, acting selfishly. Yes, there is such a thing as honest altruism. Else the word would probably not exist and the manipulators of altruism would have had to coin a new one for their hypocritical purposes. 

A case on the point, the altruism of Christianity: 

Compare that to the paradigm beaten (sometimes literally) into the children of Christians in which Jesus goes to the ultimate sacrifice because he is not allowed to have his integrity but must subordinate himself to the will of God. Jesus certainly made the ultimate sacrifice. But he made that sacrifice when he destroyed his own, autonomous existence in order to become the lackey of his God. His life as an integrated individual was already gone by the time he was nailed to the cross. (And that assumes that the event actually happened, which doesn’t matter. It’s a story with a point and my point is that the point of the Jesus story is a villainous con-game.) How many times have you read the word Christian used as a synonym for altruistic? It was very Christian of him to do that. 

By putting this example of Jesus before us and by drumming in the idea that Jesus was somehow a noble person instead of a lackey, we are told to emulate him in the greatest detail in becoming lackeys ourselves. This is the lie and manipulation that is altruism. It’s the cleverest and cruelest power play ever invented. And it’s the most popular. As Jesus threw himself away in his altruism toward God you must throw yourself away in your altruism toward Jesus. Or toward the mass. Or toward whomever is in political power. You don’t even need a Jesus in the game. This game can be played equally well by Nazis, Communists and other socialists of every stripe, right alongside the Christians, Jews, Moslems, etc. ad infinitum. And they play the game to the final winning point, game, set and match. 

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* Once by their disease and again by the society that had rid itself of them. 

** The word, capitalized, (Propaganda) originally was the name of a committee of cardinals, established in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV, having supervision over foreign missions and the training of priests for those missions. [Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.]