Motivation, Altruism, Personality and Social Psychology

The Coming Age of Altruism

M. Babula

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349440795, 9781137031280
• eBook ISBN: 9781137031297
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Motivation, Altruism, Personality and Social Psychology takes up the debate around altruism and the acceptance in society that self-interest is a healthy guiding principle in life, and argues that helping behaviour can lead to self-fulfilment and happiness and is beneficial to psychological health and society in general.

Part 1

Intrinsic Drive to Become Exocentric Altruists

1

An Unenlightened Developmental Psychology

The USA has a debt about to exceed $17 trillion. Part of that massive debt came from the US government’s bailout of banks, the executives of which purposefully leveraged people 60–70 percent of their salaries, repackaged the mortgages when they noticed it was impossible to collect, and sold them off at a profit in the derivatives market. The lawyers working for major banks later admitted to falsifying thousands of foreclosure papers to illegally remove Americans from their homes.

We observe that the philosophies of modern Western systems mirror those of the Middle Ages. These self-interested beliefs are what are preventing human advancement to a new era of enlightenment. The Middle Ages witnessed the authoritarian rule of monarchies, the sale of indulgences by priests, and religious wars. This era was defined by substantial economic, cultural, and artistic decline.

The appropriate phrase ‘Dark Ages’ has been associated with an attitude expressed towards the values system of the Middle Ages. The historian Theodore Mommsen cited Lucia Varga, who had argued that “... the expression the ‘Dark Ages’ was never primarily a scientific term, but rather, a battle cry ‘a denunciation of the mediaeval conception of the world, of the mediaeval attitude toward life, and the culture of the Middle Ages’ ” (Varga, 1932 cited in Mommsen, 1942).

We can generally expand upon the notion of darkness during the Middle Ages. A dark cloud fell over Europe when the ruling powers asserted that the universe revolved around man. People created extrinsic reward systems for governance, education, and salvation, which still exist in the modern era. The general belief of the Catholic Church, based on the Ptolemaic system, was that the sun and planets had revolved around the earth and that the earth was solely meant for man’s survival (i.e. man was the master of his planet). Egocentrism ruled the day, and vanity and pride had cast a figurative dark cloud over human development by promoting a materialist agenda.

The talents, capabilities, and genius of generations of people during the Middle Ages went towards strengthening domestic military apparatuses, wealth generation for aristocratic families, and encroachment on foreign lands because people thought it was their objective to maximize self-interest. Today, egocentrism within governing systems continues to blind large numbers of people from realizing their intrinsic motivation to negate self-interest and experience more optimal psychological health in doing so.

Ironically, it took the son of a wealthy merchant to challenge the central tenet of the Middle Ages. Nicolaus Copernicus challenged the Ptolemaic system that the earth was the center of the universe in De Revolutionibus. His work was suspended by the Catholic Church and, eventually, Copernicus’ follower Galileo Galilei was placed under house arrest for heresy for supporting the position that the earth revolved around the sun. Despite a strong attempt by Church leaders to suppress Copernicus’ theory, evidence of the truth soon emerged with technological advancements, and a period of enlightenment emerged not only in academia, but also in economics, literature, and the arts. The spark of enlightenment occurred when Europe started to upend egocentrism.

Today, the West has again developed a series of egocentric systems that promote extrinsic rewards over cooperation and thus stunt human psychological progression in a forward-moving direction. Such systems are keeping an era of enlightenment and personal growth at bay, while a minority of gamblers and artificial aristocratic families reap the rewards, and economic conditions become continually worse.

Despite the dark era in which we find ourselves, there is light at the end of the tunnel. An economic miracle following World War II permitted larger numbers of the population to progress from materialistic concerns, such as strong defense and economic security, to post-materialistic pursuits, such as healthcare, child care, and more say on the job (Inglehart, 1977). A higher level of egocentrism is developing, which aims to help people maximize their full potential. We are also simultaneously witnessing another unique phenomenon. Mass survey research in Chapter 10 indicates the rise of a third ‘new values’ type: those who have transcended egocentrism altogether and wish to build a society rooted in pure altruism. These exocentric altruistic value types favor redistribution of wealth and medications to the poor, and a declaration of Swiss-like military neutrality. These altruistic individuals are breaking the mold and challenging the dark era of self-interest, but so far their concerns remain unaddressed by ruling systems that have not kept pace with the populace’s psychological development.

Disparities have arisen in the past between the psychological advancement of human populations relative to an inability of prevailing ruling systems to support such advancement. For example, soon after the Middle Ages, advancements in astronomy and the period of enlightenment were not to last long. Humanity started to face an inversion to the Copernican revolution with the philosophy of hedonism that was espoused by Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was an adherent to the phrase ‘war of all against all’ (Kavka, 1983). His argument in The Leviathan is that people are self-interested and in a constant state of warfare, and Hobbes again resurrected the egocentrism of humanity. Under Hobbes’ paradigm, we are called upon to give up our freedom in exchange for security from the state, and the state’s responsibility towards us is to help maximize individual self-interest.

The American philosopher John Rawls places the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, in Hobbes’ utilitarian camp and draws upon Smith’s observations in The Wealth of Nations to argue that humans should be left alone to pursue self-interest. Arguably, a book more important than The Wealth of Nations was Smith’s earlier work, Moral Sentiments. In that book, Smith identified how people could use their imagination to step outside the self and help others. For Smith, we are capable of stepping outside the self to sympathize with others through a would-be impartial spectator position (Smith, 1976 [1759]). It is in this position that we use conscientious decision-making to evaluate not only our own actions, but also the actions of others. Through this line of reasoning, Smith created the predecessor to developmental psychology although, over time, a lot of Smith’s concepts about altruism were forgotten. Arguably, his economic philosophy never deviated from the utilitarian viewpoint and believed that leaving people to their own devices permits the ‘greatest good.’ However, a slight revision of Smith’s viewpoint on altruism leads to a positive view of human development that is not aligned to utilitarianism—a point to which I will shortly return.

Arthur Schopenhauer refuted the utilitarian viewpoint in his work On the Basis of Morality (Schopenhauer, 1965). He argued that people use compassion to directly experience the suffering of others as the same as the self and all others. Thus, Schopenhauer did not believe that imagination plays a role.

My view agrees with Smith to the extent that we use imagination in a station outside the self to enter the shoes of the other. Rather than feeling the suffering of another as our own (which is the illogical conclusion of Schopenhauer’s view), we empathize with the plight of the other, and that mental image becomes the motive to negate self-interest. It is important to note that my position is not utilitarian. My theory—that we psychologically develop to negate self-interest—demands new governing and economic systems that cultivate cooperation, rather than rugged individualism and extrinsic rewards.

Today, we are starting to witnesses increasing numbers of post-materialists taking interest in pure altruism as they come to experience the intrinsic motivation to help others. However, there also remains a sizeable minority within the population that, owing to inhibition or threats to human needs gratification, adheres to outmoded self-interest-based systems within the public and private sectors. We have yet to witness a replacement for these systems, which are subjecting humanity literally to a belief system reminiscent of Dark Age philosophies. The reason for this is because attempts at replacing such systems have lacked purpose and have failed to coalesce around our intrinsic motivation to cooperate. Modern day psychology that is rooted in egocentrism has gotten our psychological development wrong and contributed to slowing humanity’s advance towards an inevitable altruistic age of enlightenment.

Sigmund and Anna Freud: The Counter-revolutionaries

A few hundred years after the Copernican revolution, the mysticism of the Church’s faith healers had faded away, and—fast-forwarding to the twentieth century—humanity gets the birth of psychology as a replacement to the faith healers of the Church during the rise of industrialism in the West. Psychology emerges to guide individuals to better states of psychological health, but, as will soon be revealed, it has fallen into the same trap as the hedonists and utilitarian philosophers who inverted the Copernican revolution. We were subsequently left with a psychology directed and used for an outdated materialist agenda.

Let’s start with the ‘father’ of modern psychoanalytic thought, Sigmund Freud. What did Freud have to say about the notion of caritas (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”)? He was highly averse to it:

In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration. The interest of work in common would not hold it together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests. Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of him in check by psychical reaction-formations. Hence, therefore, the use of methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relations of love, hence the restriction upon sexual life, and hence too the ideal’s commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself—a commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man. (Freud, 1961, p. 59)

We find Freud fully in agreement with Hobbes’ view of humanity. Freud pointed to the violence of the Huns, the Crusades, and warfare to argue that humans were out to satisfy their own self-interest at the expense of others (Freud, 1961, p. 59). This negative view of human nature is completely flawed.

It was self-interest-based governing systems that thwarted people’s intrinsic drive to be altruistic. Such systems establish a series of extrinsic rewards that run contrary to human psychological development and resulted in human violence against each other. Freud’s incorrect interpretation of the nature of people provided us with a psychology that fed the industrializing era and unveiled a black curtain over Western civilization.

Freudian theory delineates human drives down to the basic-order instincts of sex and death. In his early publications, he defines humans as driven by sexual release and draws upon the myth of Oedipus to describe how male children unconsciously attempt to aggressively overthrow the father owing to sexual attraction for the mother. The sexual drive, or Eros, is described by Freud as the will to power over others.

Freud’s later work revises his notion about the pleasure drive. He adopted the view of death as “... ultimately in the service of restoring or reinstating a previous state of undifferentiated internal being, a drive ‘which sought to do away with life once more and to re-establish [an] inorganic state’ ” (Freud, 1933, p. 107 cited in Mills, 2006, p. 374). Freud believed that there existed a dialectical juxtaposition between Eros and death (Mills, 2006). This theory was not short on detractors. Abraham Maslow revised Freud’s reductive theory that conflict is central for personality development, but accepts that people are initially driven by the pleasure they receive in satisfying human needs.

The Austrian-born psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut observed that “One of the most difficult emotional feats one has to make in understanding the pleasure principle is to be able to imagine, as Freud could, that the primitive unconscious contains nothing but wishes fulfilled. All there is in this primitive layer of the psyche is hallucinations” (Kohut and Seitz, 1963, p. 20) The instinctual drives for pleasure in the system unconscious are thus illusionary, even by Freudian standards—a point to which I will briefly return.

Anna Freud followed in her father’s footsteps by describing all altruism as “altruistic surrender” (Freud, 1946) Her theory has caused many psychoanalysts to conclude that all altruism is pathological or, at the very least, should be viewed with extreme skepticism. She claims that we help others by projecting our desires onto the other. Anna Freud further posits that our unfulfilled wishes stem from the self’s inadequacy. Her theory assumes that we gain pleasure by helping to satisfy our wishes in others rather than realize them ourselves. It is granted that some people do help to gain pleasure by vicariously living through others, and become overtaxed when their psychological resources fall short. In this regard, altruistic surrender defines only a very narrow form of egocentric (self-interested altruism) when a person’s needs go unmet.

However, Anna Freud’s pessimistic view of altruism cannot explain why healthy people have maximized the self-help others. I will discuss cases later in this book, such as multimillionaire Zell Kravinsky, who first maximized the self and then decided to help other people who were significantly different from himself.

Anna Freud failed to take into account human adaptations that constructively use imagination and reflection at higher states of psychological development. We regularly use higher universal principals that cross-cut cultures to reflect in a station outside the self and build a clearer view of the self and the other. Most healthy people who possess the capacity to use adaptive ability clearly recognize the distinctions between the desires of the self and the other, and become empathetically motivated to help the other beyond the aspirations of the self.

My position is that the illusionary drives for pleasure in the unconscious are serving a purpose. Such illusionary drives are building a store of maximized self-interest that a mentally healthy adult later uses to negate. Anna Freud failed to take into account that there may be different forms of altruism based on motivational development, and that a pure form of altruism contributes to improved mental health by counteracting pathology at higher states of human psychological development.

The Human Drive to Live for the Other

This first part of this book is a bold undertaking to formulate a purely altruistic human motivational paradigm. My observations will provide hope to humanity that not all is lost to the darkness of our present age, and, perhaps surprisingly, people who have maximized self-interest stand at the cusp of a profound cognitive shift. This work follows in the tradition of positive psychology to first identify the healthiest psychological state of existence and then to describe how best to bring people to that level of development.

Abraham Maslow originally developed a human motivation paradigm that was a breakthrough for its time, but he did not go far enough. He argued that man is a “wanting animal” who progresses through five stages along an ordered needs hierarchy. They include (i) physiological needs, such as hunger, sexual contact, and thirst; (ii) safety needs, such as protection from crime, authoritarian states, economic insecurity, and disease; (iii) belongingness and love needs, which take the form of friendship, companionship, and camaraderie; (iv) esteem needs, which represent competence, mastery of tasks, and recognition; and, finally, (v) self-actualization needs, which encompass self-fulfillment, knowledge, and maximization of self-interest.

However, Maslow’s paradigm fell short at self-actualization. Despite revising Freud’s notion that conflict was central to personality de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part 1 Intrinsic Drive to Become Exocentric Altruists
• Part 2 A Fresh Look at Pathology
• Part 3 Sequential Confirmation of the Hyperbola Paradigm
• Part 4 The Coming Age of Altruism
• Notes
• References
• Index