In the maze of thoughts ... You can't be altruistic for selfish reasons.
And throwing a bone to the gullible masses doesn’t suddenly make you generous. A small conversation from a fellow writer Benny here, which then became a longer write-up, got me inspired. The post that started the writing parts of our brains was this response:
“Does anyone truly earn billions of dollars?” If someone claims so, a nice follow-up question would be: “At whose expense?” Sadly we can often figure out the disturbing answer.
“Can we even hope to rely on their altruism?” I'd dare to go as far as saying that being a billionaire and being altruistic are mutually exclusive. If you desire to hoard, you can't give honestly. More often than not altruistic people have barely anything (sometimes to their own detriment but that's a different story). The “generous” gestures of the wealthy are just that; a hollow gesture designed to gain some surface level sympathy and to “appease the masses”. See every single present populist.
Benny took a bit of a deeper look into the first part of the response so I’ll refer to his post linked above. I’d like to look at the second part. I’m sure everyone has heard *insert your “favourite” populist “leader” here* scream about how they’re doing things for people. How they’re going to hand out all these resources. Uh huh, sure. How did you earn those in the first place? Who did you screw over so you can now play this “benevolent god”?
See where I’m going? Why I’m not considering their acts altruistic? Like, it’s really easy to give when you already effectively robbed someone else. Or even worse when you exploited the very “base” you’re now pandering to. But who’s the more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him? Because there are almost overwhelming numbers of followers, “grateful” for the bone thrown by their “merciful” leader, “wisely” leading them towards better times. Good lord, I’m just typing this and it makes my skin crawl.
But it is what it is. A cheap trick, playing on the most basic feelings and weaponising act of generosity for evil purposes. And you know what’s worse? That all these acts of false or transactional generosity undermine the original value of said virtue. Because why be generous when you eventually get cheated? So you start expecting an act of reciprocity. And it doesn’t come, it erodes your trust in others further, eventually isolating you. But generosity isn’t necessarily a one for one exchange, especially in altruistic sense. So coming back to the original context, an act of altruism motivated by personal gain isn’t altruistic at all. Because a selfless act can’t be motivated by selfish reasons. Otherwise you’re still acting selfishly, just with an “acceptable” excuse.
R.R.A.