Thinking and Doing

I can still picture myself, 2nd or 3rd grade me, still afraid of the dark and picking my nose, sitting near the back of the class in that tiny desk  with the menacingly deep storage compartment, tentatively wrapping my hand around the lip of the faux-wood desk and imagining it bending like modeling clay in my hands, conforming to my will.

It seemed like such a simple thing: one could simply be incredibly strong. It was just a desk, nothing complicated about it to me. If only I would try or concentrate hard enough, it would simply move. The act, the idea of the act of exerting a muscle seemed like such a straightforward and powerful action that it should be capable of anything.

But maybe that's because I spent more time thinking than actually exerting muscle. That's much simpler really. I hadn't grasped at that point how pitiful muscular contractions were without some kind of powerful emotion or other biological instinct putting some power behind it.

I wasn't ever made fun of a lot, at least at that age, and there was no one at home who hurt me or anything else so heartbreakingly cliche. I didn't feel the need to overcome some kind of great obstacle. Frankly I would have had little to no practical use for this Hulk-like strength had I actually discovered it latent within myself.

One could speculate about the influence of superheroes on TV or the roving band of bigger siblings who were in the habit of knocking out any tooth of mine brave enough to let its roots lose ground, or the incessant habits of the parents of my generation to endlessly expound upon the extensive nature of each child's unique and special personhood, but that particular cultural trope, that 21st century ideological grounding of sorts has already been covered by all sorts of contemporary and "witty" young writers who fancy themselves to be edgy and hip. But then what's been left? What material has not yet been blanketed by the neon-colored tarp of expansive media saturation? What ideas are there left to dry and bake and photosynthesize in the heat of the light of day?

But that's tangential.

My lesson that day was two-fold. First of all, I came to realize that pretty much all life consists of is being, and being is pretty simple. It's being something else that's a little more complicated. That's when I learned that the power of choice isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Family v. Community: Two overlapping yet concentric circles of intersubjective relation

Family is for giving you faith in yourself, while community is for giving you faith in everyone else.  Obviously this is a simplification, but it gets at a fundamental difference in identification between family and external community. Just as an individual can feel distinct and excluded from generalizations about the rest of the world (everyone else is irrational or selfish in some sense, but I am different) so too can family be easily separated conceptually from the rest of the greater community of which it is a part.

People are stupid and obedient, but I know what's going on, and my family--they're smart too. This is also why praise means different things coming from family and outsiders. The immediate family, in the western societal context, is usually perceived in this way as some sort of extension of the self. The family members have established roles and spaces they occupy in and around your life that you have become accustomed to. Outsiders don't usually have these clearly defined parts to play, especially when first beginning interaction. This can make it both more volatile and meaningful in a way. You are accustomed to praise from the individuals fulfilling parental roles in your life and sometimes from the other familial satellites orbiting your personal existence, but this praise never means as much as praise coming from people outside of this familial space. 

Your personal conception of these others  from outside your family is thus much more flexible. This certain amount of distance that makes interaction with them different than interaction with your family -- and even with your close friends -- makes them represent something much different. They can come to fill a border space between the close and familiar place of your family and the distant and immaterial place of the numerous other people of the world.

Your family helps to give you your conception of yourself, but is limited in giving you real confidence and self-faith beyond a certain point. It is even more limited in giving you other-faith -- faith in those people you don't know.

Trust or lack thereof appears very differently with varying degrees of familiarity. From trusting your kin to keep your best interests in mind to trusting your neighbor or friendly acquaintance to respect your wishes to trusting the "unwashed masses" to make rational decisions.

Trust comes out of identification--empathy--with these groups or subsections thereof. Just as you may come to see your immediate family as an extension of yourself, (which is a dynamic that was much more prevalent before the rabid individualism of the modern era) you trust others beyond that when you identify with them.

If you don't have any people around you that you can really respect, how likely are you to respect anything else in the world?  Your family and the community that surrounds you as a child serve as the only representation of the entire world that you have as a child.  However they behave, however they act and react with you, is the only way you can imagine the rest of the world acting and reacting. Without any other means of experiencing the rest of the individuals in the world, you have no reason to expect any different of them. 

If the best people you know aren't really worthy of respect, or if they never show respect toward you,
 you'll expect the same from the rest of the world.

Another way to look at this extension of identification and other-faith (I've presented a couple of randomly different ones already) is the way you perceive people to be like or unlike you. Your family is close to you, not just in that your relative social roles are procedures for interaction are clearly defined yet flexible, but in that they often look and talk a lot like you. If your family and your surrounding community are too uniform, they won't be seen as reliably representative of many other unfamiliar communities.

If you never see anyone substantially different than you who you can also say is a "good person," you might not have much hope for others. (In fact, it might even alter your demographic conceptions so far as to give you a fair share of bigotry.)

 I've contradicted myself a fair amount and drifted between a few different contextual vocabularies and perspectives, but hopefully thoughts are clear.

Obsessive Compulsive Experience Preservation Disorder

I have notebooks upon notebooks, purportedly for class notes, which have margins and even entire pages filled with random thoughts. Thoughts about life, about reality, about politics, about what I should do over the weekend, about what I should do in the future, about who I should remember to talk to more often, and a billion other things.

I regularly text myself paragraphs of rants, rambles, and carefully explicated rationales for complicated ethical phenomena.

I never throw away a single piece of paper without scouring it for remnants or pieces of terms or phrases that I might've scribbled down in a frenzy.

I've started copying all these sources into googledocs whenever I think to, because the internet seems a lot more reliable than any other solid or electronic text container I can get my hands on.



You might say I'm a little crazy about remembering things. I freak out and pull out my phone to text myself when I get a random interesting insight in the middle of a conversation or Disney movie. I urgently race to transcribe anything and everything that is on my mind at that point, scared to death that it's going to disappear and run away forever.

After I write things or explain ideas too,  I get incredibly anxious about losing the capacity to do anything like that ever again.



Is this irrational though? In a sense, well, obviously. One could predict based on the previous activity of my brain and fingers that I will indeed have more thoughts in the same vein and will write things of a similar style and/or quality.

But in another sense, it's not so unreasonable. Now, if you'll just bear with me as I justify my ridiculous anxiety...


Practically, I could look at my anxious practice as simply a means of keeping me in a writerly state. It keeps me thinking about things creatively and critically, and it means that whenever I finally get motivated to write something I'll have zero excuse for having no ideas from which to start. And who knows what cool thoughts I'll preserve?

But to look at it more... existentially? cynically? Whatever.  At every moment I am a victim of my physiology. The exact mental and emotional and cognitive conditions that I'm inhabiting at this very moment will very likely never coincide again, and thus the subjective experience of the moment is absolutely unique. Finite. This is a bold statement, and it may very well be an exaggeration (*never* coincide?) or a fundamental misrepresentation of the nature of the universe (finite? *absolutely* unique?) but I think (perhaps irrationally) that the thought at the core of the statement is sound.  I can't know if I will ever come to these specific thoughts again, and I know that I will never again have this exact experience in and with the physical world that I'm having at this very moment in time, and thus I should do my best to remember it, if it seems to be objectively memorable.

(Of course "objectively memorable" isn't a real thing, and I'm judging memorability off of probably clearly established societal criteria. sigh.)

And obviously this point extends beyond the urge to preserve random philosophical meanderings or phenomenological puzzlings, encompassing all of experience, for this is part of my anxiety about memory that I've referenced already.

I look back at experiences, at entire years of my life, and only so much is left in my long-term memory. Entire years fade into quickly past, barely differentiated clumps of thoughts and faces. Often I'm left with impressions rather than full-fledged narratival memories, and anecdotes from the past come up unbidden by myself, prompted by external stimuli in the present.  If I tried right now to list as many stories as possible from my childhood that I remember, I could only force myself to recall so many. But a great many more arise occasionally in my memory naturally, and it would be tragic if I let all of those drift away. Anyway these unbidden ones are the ones that often come bringing new significance and give me new ways of looking at myself or the world, which is rad.

Is it weird that I'm often urged to devote hours to simply poring through my memory and painstakingly committing years of memories, from childhood to college life, all to paper, or even better, googledocs?

But if I do step aside and attempt to focus on recalling memories, nothing bright or vivid or imminently describable comes to mind, and I end up with only flat and rushed descriptions of outlines of a few prominent past events in my mind. It is only in the unbidden moment of recall or novel cognition that the luminance and the full significance of the thought or memory is impressed in my mind, and it is then that I must write.

Or text. Or scribble. Depends whats available.

Self-Interest: What's so Interesting about a Sense of Self?

"Everyone is self-interested."

I put that in quotes because it's not necessarily me saying it, but I'm sure I've said it before. It's become a sort of quasi-intellectual quasi-meme that's sort of common knowledge nowadays, almost like the theory of evolution or the water cycle; it's been widely accepted at at least some level and has generally found a place in people's conceptions of humanity. (At least for those people who ever really think about such things.)

This makes sense too, because it's predicated on evolutionary biology, or at least the version of it that's entered the popular consciousness. But what exactly is self-interest, and what does it mean?

Another thing I've heard many people say is that "everyone is selfish." Now at first glance this may sound like a simple and logical, albeit somewhat harder-to-swallow, corollary to the statement about self-interest, buttttttt that doesn't seem quite right to me.

Obviously people, being people, are interested in themselves and what becomes of them. Thus the statement about self-interest is fairly self-evident; if it's debatable then we can debate it later.

The second statement, however, comes across a bit stronger.  Everyone is selfish, which is to say that they are interested in themselves to the exclusion of others. Here self-interest becomes the primary goal and orientation, and altruism becomes a myth. Self-interested is no longer a condition that can be measured in degrees; it is simply something that you are or are not. And the presumptive conclusion is that you are.

For the moment, let's take this idiom to be fact and give it the benefit of the doubt; time to give the ol' confirmation bias a chance to shine.

Everything everyone does is done out of self-interest; it is simply impossible to act against your own self-interest. But what is this *interest* that you have in yourself?  You have an interest in your own survival, so deeply ingrained that you don't even need to consciously think about it to act on it; you have an instinct named after it. You also have an interest in reproducing and continuing your genetic line.

Already, however, things are complicated. The interest in preserving your own body may come into direct conflict with the interest in preserving your offspring. History has seen people give precedence to each of these at different times; one does not always supersede the other. Beyond this too, the dynamic becomes even more complex and even less absolute. Let us do our best to rationalize human activity according to our foregone conclusion..

People donate money to charities that don't do anything in return for them.
--Well obviously they care a lot about what people think of them; generosity and goodwill have become requirements for living in a human society. If you want to receive benefits yourself, then you have to give of yourself; giving to charity is simply good business.

What about when people donate money anonymously? What of the people who give their lives to save others with whom they have no genetic links?

You could get sociological here and postulate that it has to do with people's obsession with how they are perceived or their need to play out the societal roles that have been given to them and charity makes them feel good about themselves if nobody knows it was them, but that only serves to illustrate the point that the survival instinct and the genetic preservation instinct are not always dominant. And what is self-interest if it is not these two things?

Even if extraordinarily creative evolutionary biologists are able to rationalize all of these actions according to these basic instincts, the fact is that some people do these things, and some do not.

If everyone is absolutely self-interested, then why isn't there a uniform rule that can be used to perfectly predict what people will or won't do for themselves or others? I'm not going to say that self-interest can be measured by degrees in a linear fashion, but I will say that different people are differently self-interested. It's clearly apparent that different people have different conceptions of what is "in their own interest."

But at this point does this abstraction still have any sort of significance? "Everyone is self-interested but to different degrees" is clearly logical, but what does it really mean now? "Everyone is self-interested, but some people hoard all their money for themselves while others die in poverty doing dirty mission work in AIDS-ridden countries in Africa." It's like saying that "everyone is blind, but some people have 20/20 vision and can spot birds on mountains miles away while others can't see their hands in front of their face." Enormous amounts of rationalization and over-analyzing is required to continue validating the now incredibly complicated and somewhat unintuitive "people are selfish" statement.


But that's only considering "interest" and what that entails; we haven't spent much time on the "self."  So let's expand self-interest a bit and try to wrap our collective metaphysical head around the differences we've seen in self-interest. Our goal at this point in time is to reduce self-interest from a meaninglessly all-inclusive label to something that once again applies equally to all people, yet also stays true to evolutionary biology as something that reigns supreme over our other interests.

To be self-interested is to act in (what you perceive to be) the interest of (what you perceive to be) your self. These are equally fluid variable concepts. If you see yourself only as your body and your genes, then you will act only when your actions will directly benefit your own well-being or that of a direct descendant. If you see your family as connected to you genetically, you might see them as just as much a representation of yourself as your direct descendants are. You can see kinship bonds in general as extensions of yourself. If you look beyond genes (or if you happen to zoom farther out in examining the collective human gene pool) you may see communal bonds as familial bonds too, and then an individual might end up viewing an entire community, large or small, as part of himself.

This might again be a meaningless rationalization of the "all people are self-interested and selfish" hypothesis, but it is the only one that controls for the difference in behavior among self-interested individuals. It all depends on what is identified as "self." (Also on what is identified as being in the interest of the self; humans aren't always good at figuring that one out)

I had solid ideas for how to cohesively organize this post, but then I didn't.

Conclusion!:

Assuming all previous conclusions have been valid: altruism does not exist except as a word to describe those who are generous and unrestrained with their self-identification. Which is about the same as saying that yes, it does exist, but solely as a product of empathy.