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I wasn't aiming to convince anyone. Sometimes, I find calling something out as bullshit important enough to speak up, even if I have nothing else. For what it'

I wasn't aiming to convince anyone. Sometimes, I find calling something out as bullshit important enough to speak up, even if I have nothing else. For what it's worth, I'm not buying that altruism is just another conduit for the good feels. It can be frustrating, it can be exhausting, it can seem pointless at times because you seemingly make no difference, and it can make you give up for a while. Don't get me wrong: I'm not denying that altruism is about the person committed to it, to some degree. What I'm denying is that it's about some kind of personal gain, in the same way narcissistic supply is. There's this idea of projects of immortality that people commit to in their lives, to escape physical death by becoming culturally immortal through the change they'd effected. Ernest Becker wrote about it in his book, The Denial of Death. The higher purpose, the meaning of life... We're all very much about that – self-actualization – as long as we don't have to just survive. I find it difficult to accept that this kind of effect is entirely selfish and is based entirely in self-satisfaction. > The thought that self-development leads to altruism I've never claimed that. What I did claim is that one may be dissatisfied with the prospect of helping others out of a natural impulse if they're convinced it's selfish – and, therefore, promoting altruism as selfish is a negative consequence, rather than a matter of self-knowledge, as the parent commenter seemed to have posited. It's "reductive" in a sense that it reduces a complex, interconnected system of personality to a basic matter of whether we feel good about something. It makes things seem far simpler than they are. If it were that simple, psychotherapy wouldn't need to exist.

krageon 8y ago
> I find it difficult to accept that this kind of effect is entirely selfish and is based entirely in self-satisfaction. I can't see it as anything but fundamentally egocentric, I'm afraid. What is wanting something of yourself to persist after you die except for a fundamentally self-serving goal? It speaks of a desire to have people remember you (hopefully even commend you) for what is basically the eternity after you live. > It's "reductive" in a sense that it reduces a complex, interconnected system of personality to a basic matter of whether we feel good about something. I agree that being reductive isn't always the best approach. But it does have it's place - with so many people doing what is essentially virtue signaling it can be valuable to remember what the primary driver for behavior like that is. Perhaps it really isn't like that for you, and that's great. If the goal is not to convince me that that is the case, then why talk about it at all? Is it just so I can remember that this is also a thing that people say? Your point on psychotherapy seems to be to be a bit of a tangent. To wit, most of the time the problems and the way you solve them are indeed fairly simple. It's just a matter of picking one of the choices you already know you have and sticking with it. Making choices can be difficult, but not because following through on them is necessarily very complicated. I am purposely excluding big outliers from this, because that's where it might actually be complex (and also because I don't know enough about them to really say anything useful).

krageon 8y ago

> I find it difficult to accept that this kind of effect is entirely selfish and is based entirely in self-satisfaction. I can't see it as anything but fundamentally egocentric, I'm afraid. What is wanting something of yourself to persist after you die except for a fundamentally self-serving goal? It speaks of a desire to have people remember you (hopefully even commend you) for what is basically the eternity after you live. > It's "reductive" in a sense that it reduces a complex, interconnected system of personality to a basic matter of whether we feel good about something. I agree that being reductive isn't always the best approach. But it does have it's place - with so many people doing what is essentially virtue signaling it can be valuable to remember what the primary driver for behavior like that is. Perhaps it really isn't like that for you, and that's great. If the goal is not to convince me that that is the case, then why talk about it at all? Is it just so I can remember that this is also a thing that people say? Your point on psychotherapy seems to be to be a bit of a tangent. To wit, most of the time the problems and the way you solve them are indeed fairly simple. It's just a matter of picking one of the choices you already know you have and sticking with it. Making choices can be difficult, but not because following through on them is necessarily very complicated. I am purposely excluding big outliers from this, because that's where it might actually be complex (and also because I don't know enough about them to really say anything useful).