ALTRUISM OR SELFISHNESS?

Ayn Rand famously titled one of her non-fiction books, "The Virtue of Selfishness." This was a combative and provocative title, which reflects her own personality as well as the intellectual environment in which she lived.

The problem with this title, though, is that it creates a polarity in many people’s minds between owning and honoring one’s own life, dreams, and actions, and the kind of loving, compassionate, and empathic human connection which is central to a good and happy life.

That polarity need not exist; there is no contradiction – most of the time – between caring for others and honoring your own life. They are deeply interconnected.

There are moments in life when you have to choose whether to take care of your own needs or to give up those needs for the good of others, but they are not all that common, and such circumstances have their own unique dynamics.

Let’s start with the common definitions of  these terms:

Altruism: unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others; behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species.

Selfish: concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself: seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others; arising from concern with one’s own welfare or advantage in disregard of others

Neither of these is particularly functional in the real world as a way of life.

I’m going to look at this purely from a functional perspective: what makes a human life work well?

If you’ve read A Marriage is a Team, and What it Takes to be a Team, you already have an idea of where I’m going with this.

When you’re playing on a team, you have your personal goals: to play your best, to enjoy the glory of high performance, maybe some degree of fame or notoriety, the joy of playing, for a small handful of athletes perhaps a good living.

You also have the goals of the team, which is to win, to work well together, to enjoy the satisfaction that comes from the intense degree of cohesiveness and effective teamwork, the joy of knowing that you can depend on each other and that others can depend on you when pressure is at it’s highest, the pleasure of being a part of a successful and close knit group.

I could identify more possibilities, but this gives you a good idea of some of the personal and team goals.

Do you see any contradictory goals between these two lists? Me either. There aren’t any.

If you focus entirely on your own glory to the detriment of the team’s performance, you will have neither glory nor success as a team. If you focus entirely on your team’s performance, but neglect your own striving for personal excellence, you won’t be of any use to the team.

Many of the same dynamics hold true for a work team.

Let’s look at another slice of life: family.

When you work hard to make a good life for your kids, is that a sacrifice? No, because your kids are a central part of your good life. You could probably do all kinds of things that you’re not doing now if you didn’t have a family to think about – but then you wouldn’t have a family to think about!

The responsibilities of a family are part of the deal; your kids and your mate are central to your own personal values. If the family is miserable, you’re not going to be happy. Your happiness is interconnected with the happiness of your family.

If you focus entirely on your personal happiness to the neglect of your spouse and children, your personal happiness is going to suffer tremendously. If you focus only on the well being of your family, and you ignore your own needs and desires, you won’t be bringing much good to the family, either.

Imagine that your husband or wife were to say to you: "I love you purely as an act of self-sacrifice; loving you is an act of rejecting all that I most deeply value." Would that feel good to you? Yuck! Contrast that with: "I love you as the deepest expression of what I value, honor and cherish most in life."

We love people because they reflect our own joy, our own values, our own vision to a significant degree. This is not a sacrifice; it is a deepening of life, a magnification of what we value. Being a loving, caring, devoted husband, wife, father, mother, friend, relative, neighbor, etc. is central to what brings us deep satisfaction in life.

We each have our own range of exploration in the world – some people (I can think of one in particular whom we all know) want to see every bit of the world they possibly can. Others prefer to stay very close to home. Many more fall somewhere in between.

In the same way, we also each have a range of human interaction; a sphere of influence and relationship that has meaning to us.

One person will care deeply for a wide swath of humanity, seeking to help people in need, striving to interact with and care about a great number of people. Another person will focus almost entirely on their own family and closest friends. Many more people fall somewhere in between.

This is not on a matter of selfishness versus altruism. It is a matter of temperament, background, circumstances, and personality.

Then there are the extreme examples that proponents of polarity and philosophy professors like to face us with: would you choose to give your life to save the life of another person? Would you choose to save your child’s life over that of another child? Etc. As though the answer to such questions reflect some all-or-nothing goodness or badness depending on the values of the questioner.

But these kinds of Sophie’s Choice questions or circumstances are not, fortunately, what most of life is made of. They also reflect potential choices that, in the real world, are both bad. In this sense the choice, like the choice whether or not to go to war, is not the choice between good and bad, but rather between bad and worse.

A person faced with any of these hypothetical choices will not feel good afterward, they will feel awful, and the trauma and horror will likely stay with them to some degree for the rest of their lives. The question is: which trauma and horror would be worse?

We could debate these extreme examples, but I’m not going to do that here. How we might think we would respond to such horrible choices do not necessarily extrapolate from how we live our lives otherwise. How a person responds to such extreme distress is not "who he is," it is "who he is under such extreme distress."

I’m looking here at how we live regularly.

If we focus entirely on our own wants, needs, desires, to the exclusion of loving, caring for, or being supportive of others, that is not self-interest, that’s narcissism; and narcissism is not a happy state of being.

If we focus entirely on what others want, need, and desire, to the exclusion of our own self-interest, that is not being loving, caring, and supportive, it is a rejection of our self, and it is a recipe for self-hatred, passive aggression, and misery. It’s also not likely to be genuinely helpful to those we imagine we’re helping through sacrificing our own life. It’s more likely that on some level they will be dealing with a huge, seething guilt trip from us, and confusion from our own internal contradictions.

A life well lived is a life that integrates all of the elements of life – a clear awareness, acceptance, and respect for our own ambitions, likes, joys, and values, and an energetic and empathetic engagement with the people we love, like, work with, and interact with.

Being selfish, in real world terms is really just being a jerk.

Being altruistic, as defined above, in real world terms, is really just being oblivious to your own needs – and those unexamined needs will be expressed somehow.

A good life, a meaningful life, a satisfying life, involves devotion to, loving, caring, supporting, and engaging with people, while at the same time staying true to one’s own values, joys, and vision.

This is a balance that takes consciousness, it takes a conscious effort to integrate these different elements, it takes a willingness to deal with conflict, and above all: it takes a spirit of honoring yourself, and honoring others as well.

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