Altruism
In my despair at contemporary politics I've gone back to my roots and am re-reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Talk about a blast from the past. It's an exquisite piece of propaganda. But more, it seems ingeniously designed to appeal to young men smart enough to read a thousand page book while in high school.
Who is John Galt? Well it turns out that Galt was a genius who organized a perfect society in a hidden mountain valley that was attracting the geniuses of society to do their own thing. As a result, the outer society was crumbling slowly into dysfunction.
Hmmm - I dropped out of university and went to live in the woods about then. I wonder if there's a connection ;-)
Rand didn't like altruism. I read several of her books and a common theme IIRC is that of a hero who is attacked for not using his gifts for the good of others. The villains were people who were trying to take from the hero for "the greater good". That is, the hero should be altruistic.
At the time I was also reading about Marx. I first encountered communism when I was a kid in the late 50s and when I asked what communism was I was told that it means: To each as needed and from each as they can. Sounded like a good idea to me but it was delivered with obvious derision and I kept my thoughts to myself.
We've known since forever that the rich don't earn their riches. Whoever thought that a king or queen or whatever sort of despot you want to name earned their riches?
Did Trump 'earn' his riches by lying on financial documents? Nah - his Dad gave him a leg up and he cheated from there.
How do the rich 'earn' their riches? Not by the sweat on brow from muscular effort.
Let me give a small personal example. When I was living in the woods years ago I was part of a fairly large community of hippies. A few of us were from rich families and were building very nice houses and hiring friends to help. At the end of the process the rich ones had a house and the workers had to find a new job.
My point is that the way to get rich is to hire others to do work for you.
Last week at the humanism meeting I proposed this idea: Altruism is based on the false idea that people who are rich earned their riches and the riches should not be taken away to benefit others unless the rich want to be altruistic
The rich hippies didn't earn their house in the same sense that the poor hippies earned their paychecks.
There are groups of people in society who risk their lives for the common good. I'm thinking about the military or firemen or people who work with infectious diseases. Are those people being altruistic? Not by the definition above. They are people called to provide various services to all of us and they are supported by taxation
I don't recall Rand talking about people giving service like that but she sure didn't like taxes. Taxes were taking from the rich whether the rich were feeling altruistic or not.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.