Its great to read someone with a more down to earth mind in this field. I regard of paramount importance to the community building movement this issue of getting rid of romanticism and ideas of how humans should behave and really come to terms with how they naturally behave.
True selflessness and altruism are possible. The thing is that it cannot come from a moral dictator, man-made morality will only create neurosis. It comes from authomatic responses to each moment random stimuli. If you walk down the street and see a dog drowning in a swimming pool you may feel a natural urge to rescue him.
Maybe their flaw stems from their “religious” belief of altruism and its institutionalization as a should, as a principle to base our culture upon, and their miss to understand it just as sporadic natural phenomenon.
Maybe it is even counterproductive. It is pressuring the members of that culture by constantly forcing them to be artificially altruistic when the nature of each different moment is not necessarily telling them to be altruistic, but maybe even selfish, for their own survival. In such a moment instead of an good society through forced altruism they would be creating the opposite, a neurotic and conflicted one.
Maybe their flaw is the resistance to admit their own nature, their own selfishness. It would be helpful here to jump out a bit from the good vs evil narrative and just acknowledge our natural instincts. This way we may be able to have a better context in order to build a culture, a system, in which those natural “bad” behaviours, the selfish ones will be totally accepted, included and adapted in order to use them to create more favourable situations, instead of suppressed, originating neurosis and conflict.
Community and its virtues are built upon selfishness. Community is created through a web of human relationships, and human relationships stem from selfishness. There is nothing bad to it. Relationships are always an exchange to cover one owns necessities. Accepting selfishness when it appears and ditching the idea of forcing ourselves to be selfless and altruistic because non-human holy ideals it’s a first step.
If 'self' is an emergent phenomenon from your trillions of cells as well as their connections to their surroundings and heritage .... Dichotomies like selfish and selfless start to loose their meaning.
If you're mass of cells and neurons decides collectively to end their collective life in favor of a dog's mass of living cells ... While both of you co inhabit a living world you are connected to ... Is that selfless / selfish ...? Feels like the selfish and selfless axis is mostly about trying to separate your'self' in some way.
Seeing instead your unique part in a network of living cells and beings can be a bit like realizing you are in a giant intestine .... Or part of a beating heart.
And that’s the theory that sages, yogins and psychedelics have been trying to convey to the rest of humans. What it is behind the veil of thought. That oneness narrative; in opposition to the reductionist Cartesian goggles that we currently have. Like you put in the article the “Retell of the Story” is necessary for change. The perspective that you mention is helpful to make people in our society more sensitive towards our environment. Open our eyes to the fact that we are interdependent and part of the same system.
I have been listening from people in the “Community Building” movement talking about this over and over. Its eye opening, thus essential; but not practical further from that. At the end of the day we operate by thought and its divisiveness. We cannot avoid it. That’s us. Only a handful o humans have been able to break apart from the stranglehold of thought and its separateness; and if you look at those cases, all are by fortuitous reasons. So knowing that we do separate ourselves from our environment and operate essentially by survival instincts and seek of security, what do we do? How do we build a system for us to live in the most stable and pleasant way?
And here is where I emphasize the utility of the recognition and acceptance of the individual survival drive (selfishness) instead of its condemnation, thus creating inner conflict and neurosis between individuals trying to fight their own nature. Incentives drive the behavior of individuals within the system. By understanding what drive them, we can design systems with incentives that encourage desired behaviors and discourage unwanted ones. Conversely we negate ourselves and decide to invite people to strive for the unattainable goal of becoming a selfless and altruist being, pushing us into a constant state of insatisfaction and guilt.
Thanks, Will, for clarifying the facts about reciprocity and altruism in indigenous societies. I have posited that exchanges fall into three categories, gift, reciprocal, and coerced/involuntary. These occur withing a matrix of relationship types based on a dimension I call "interpersonal distance," which I divide into four realms, these are: the Realm of Independence, Self-reliance, and Familial Nurturance; the Realm of Mutual Support and Communal Interdependence; the Realm of Exploitation and Dependence; and the Realm of Coercion and Crime.
"In the case of a gift, if it is truly a gift, something of value is transferred without any particular expectation of the giver receiving anything in return"
If the form of reciprocity is seeing that you use the gift well, are happy, continue to live, make the world happier, being part of a loving community, etc. the quid pro quo might not be easy to measure, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
The Luo culture has a clear warning and criteria on any form of gifting ... You must have a relationship and know the giver and can't be dependent on such gifts.
I think folks that promote pure altruism, selflessness and gifts that seek no reciprocity are actually generally not interested in building social infrastructures
Well said. That's why the allocation and control of credit must be decentralized and centered in small groups in which the participants have personal relationships of trust and caring.
Its great to read someone with a more down to earth mind in this field. I regard of paramount importance to the community building movement this issue of getting rid of romanticism and ideas of how humans should behave and really come to terms with how they naturally behave.
True selflessness and altruism are possible. The thing is that it cannot come from a moral dictator, man-made morality will only create neurosis. It comes from authomatic responses to each moment random stimuli. If you walk down the street and see a dog drowning in a swimming pool you may feel a natural urge to rescue him.
Maybe their flaw stems from their “religious” belief of altruism and its institutionalization as a should, as a principle to base our culture upon, and their miss to understand it just as sporadic natural phenomenon.
Maybe it is even counterproductive. It is pressuring the members of that culture by constantly forcing them to be artificially altruistic when the nature of each different moment is not necessarily telling them to be altruistic, but maybe even selfish, for their own survival. In such a moment instead of an good society through forced altruism they would be creating the opposite, a neurotic and conflicted one.
Maybe their flaw is the resistance to admit their own nature, their own selfishness. It would be helpful here to jump out a bit from the good vs evil narrative and just acknowledge our natural instincts. This way we may be able to have a better context in order to build a culture, a system, in which those natural “bad” behaviours, the selfish ones will be totally accepted, included and adapted in order to use them to create more favourable situations, instead of suppressed, originating neurosis and conflict.
Community and its virtues are built upon selfishness. Community is created through a web of human relationships, and human relationships stem from selfishness. There is nothing bad to it. Relationships are always an exchange to cover one owns necessities. Accepting selfishness when it appears and ditching the idea of forcing ourselves to be selfless and altruistic because non-human holy ideals it’s a first step.
If 'self' is an emergent phenomenon from your trillions of cells as well as their connections to their surroundings and heritage .... Dichotomies like selfish and selfless start to loose their meaning.
If you're mass of cells and neurons decides collectively to end their collective life in favor of a dog's mass of living cells ... While both of you co inhabit a living world you are connected to ... Is that selfless / selfish ...? Feels like the selfish and selfless axis is mostly about trying to separate your'self' in some way.
Seeing instead your unique part in a network of living cells and beings can be a bit like realizing you are in a giant intestine .... Or part of a beating heart.
And that’s the theory that sages, yogins and psychedelics have been trying to convey to the rest of humans. What it is behind the veil of thought. That oneness narrative; in opposition to the reductionist Cartesian goggles that we currently have. Like you put in the article the “Retell of the Story” is necessary for change. The perspective that you mention is helpful to make people in our society more sensitive towards our environment. Open our eyes to the fact that we are interdependent and part of the same system.
I have been listening from people in the “Community Building” movement talking about this over and over. Its eye opening, thus essential; but not practical further from that. At the end of the day we operate by thought and its divisiveness. We cannot avoid it. That’s us. Only a handful o humans have been able to break apart from the stranglehold of thought and its separateness; and if you look at those cases, all are by fortuitous reasons. So knowing that we do separate ourselves from our environment and operate essentially by survival instincts and seek of security, what do we do? How do we build a system for us to live in the most stable and pleasant way?
And here is where I emphasize the utility of the recognition and acceptance of the individual survival drive (selfishness) instead of its condemnation, thus creating inner conflict and neurosis between individuals trying to fight their own nature. Incentives drive the behavior of individuals within the system. By understanding what drive them, we can design systems with incentives that encourage desired behaviors and discourage unwanted ones. Conversely we negate ourselves and decide to invite people to strive for the unattainable goal of becoming a selfless and altruist being, pushing us into a constant state of insatisfaction and guilt.
Thanks, Will, for clarifying the facts about reciprocity and altruism in indigenous societies. I have posited that exchanges fall into three categories, gift, reciprocal, and coerced/involuntary. These occur withing a matrix of relationship types based on a dimension I call "interpersonal distance," which I divide into four realms, these are: the Realm of Independence, Self-reliance, and Familial Nurturance; the Realm of Mutual Support and Communal Interdependence; the Realm of Exploitation and Dependence; and the Realm of Coercion and Crime.
I have articulated all this in my recently published new Chapter 9—The Evolution of Money—From Commodity Money to Credit Money and Beyond. The text can be viewed at https://open.substack.com/pub/futurebrightly/p/eom-chapter-9-the-evolution-of-money-664?r=1ift4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.
"In the case of a gift, if it is truly a gift, something of value is transferred without any particular expectation of the giver receiving anything in return"
If the form of reciprocity is seeing that you use the gift well, are happy, continue to live, make the world happier, being part of a loving community, etc. the quid pro quo might not be easy to measure, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
The Luo culture has a clear warning and criteria on any form of gifting ... You must have a relationship and know the giver and can't be dependent on such gifts.
I think folks that promote pure altruism, selflessness and gifts that seek no reciprocity are actually generally not interested in building social infrastructures
Well said. That's why the allocation and control of credit must be decentralized and centered in small groups in which the participants have personal relationships of trust and caring.