When I tell people that I „never do anything for others“, they tend to be rather confused. They would remind me of my numerous social activities and mention some particular events where I helped friends. And that, if what I say were really true, I would be a complete asshole - which I do not seem to be [1].
But I'm not lying: all these things I really never do for others. The reason is, that I actually enjoy doing these things. I therefore do them for myself. And I’m more and more convinced that this motivation to do things „for others“ is (or rather: should be) totally sufficient.
Most modern philosophers would disagree with me here. Doesn’t history show very impressively that our primitive social instincts are insufficient to prevent humans reliably from harming each other? And because of this we need to cultivate „higher“ moral standards which keep our problematic „animal“ nature in check?
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions. Most people assume that the human ability for self-control is what differentiates us from animals: the ability to do things we don’t enjoy (but are helpful nonetheless). This is not completely wrong, but it’s essential to understand what this term means exactly:
Self control does not mean that humans are able to act against their own interests. A sane human brain, highly optimized by an evolutionary process over hundreds of millions of years to ensure survival and procreation, will never allow this to happen. Truly self harming behavior is - even in its weakest forms - is exactly what our mind is trying to avoid at any (mental) cost.
„Self-control“ actually means something quite different: we have - compared to animals - developed far superior planning capabilities. And to make best use of them we also mastered - over millions of years - the art of delayed gratification: because we have acquired the cognitive tools to predict what happens if we put an apple into the soil, we have also learned to resist swallowing the apple immediately to harvest a full tree of apples a few years later.
Therefore, if we do something we don’t enjoy to do, we actually always expect to be compensated somehow in the future. We either expect to get rewarded for our actions in the future or we hope to avoid a future negative reward (i.e. a punishment). In the end, we are always trying to optimize our own total (= present plus future) expected reward. This creates the illusion that we are able to do things for „for others“. While such actions might not come with an immediate benefit for ourselves, we expect future benefits for ourselves (or our offspring) nonetheless.
And, seen in this light, all our actions performed for reasons of morality become actions we ultimately do only for ourselves (and never for others!). Humans are, albeit highly social, intrinsically incapable of „true“ moral behavior (in the sense that we can do things truly „for others“).
Maybe you find this view rather depressing: can it be true, that we ultimately only care about ourselves? Yes! And this is not at all a problem per se! We are highly social creatures and our wellbeing was deeply connected to the wellbeing of the people around us during 99.99% of our history. Therefore, it is (still!) deep in our nature to enjoy helping others - even to the point of risking our own lives for them - to ensure our own survival and the survival of our offspring. Our desire to help is therefore genuine: we love to help others because we subconsciously know we can’t survive without them (and not only to gain social status or because we expect some other benefits in return). Therefore moral should actually not be required. Think about it: this is a great thing! Helping others is deeply built into our nature (and not something which needs to be added arduously and can get lost easily).
But why then do we feel so little of this urge to help anymore? Why do we have to more and more force people nowadays - with moral and laws - to support each other? The reasons for this are diverse and complex and - in detail - not the topic of this post (my text „Once helping meant bliss“ contains an example). But it seems that humans started to make ill-fated decisions which led to these problems already in prehistoric times. And because the problems already exist for such a long time, we have come to the conclusion that they must be consequences of our nature. And that we therefore have to accept them as given.
We always help others to help ourselves (and not really to help others). But why does this - seemingly academic - difference in view matter so much? Because if we are not aware of it, we fundamentally misunderstand the challenges humankind is facing today. If we believe that the problems of our world are caused by a „lack of moral“ of - at least some - humans, we totally misunderstand what’s actually happening and our chances to improve our lives are consequently zero.
The construction of more and more moral duties and laws in our society is - very similar to the appearance of antibodies to an infection - an indicator for a diseased society. It’s an inevitable social emergency reaction to serious structural problems of society. And focusing on the reaction never helps to alleviate the real underlying problem, to eliminate the root cause.
Therefore: any attempt to solve the problems we face today with even more moral, borders and laws is doomed to fail. It’s treating only the symptom instead of the disease. If we focus on our allegedly flawed nature, we won’t shed light on the true source of the problem: our highly unnatural living conditions. The fact that we have unconsciously created an extremely strange society to which we are only very poorly adapted. That we have completely lost ourselves.
The fact that today a large part of our actions are motivated by fears of punishment (ranging from running out of money over getting fined to imprisonment) instead of expected pleasures should be a warning and a hint that our modern society is an extremely poor construction.
If many humans more and more fail to adhere to this metastasizing maze of rules, it does not indicate an increasingly (!) flawed human species (how could this be even possible?). It only means that there is something seriously wrong with this brave new world we are building for ourselves.
Adhering to moral standards can be damaging in unexpected ways:
If we expect to get rewarded in the future for some „good“ actions, we are actually making an investment. And if we invest, we always try to make sure that the investment actually pays off. Therefore we try to contribute to make the future we imagined actually become reality. This is how moral gets perpetuated: we impose our rules on the young in the hope to be able to harvest the fruits from following them ourselves all life. And like this we stabilize this ill designed society without questioning it - only to secure our own past „moral investments“.
[1] These were my friends talking. I’m sure not everybody agrees.
Image: pixabay, by „Sasint“. Thank you!