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RE: Extreme Altruism and the Psychopathic Brain.
Very good post! I really like the way you approach the problem, even though I think that whether is extreme altruism an attribute or a handicap is a never ending dilemma.
I'm interested in your opinion about how not living close to nature has changed the rules (of Darwinian evolutionary theory I suppose); I never thought about it, but it seems a reasonable statement up to a certain limit
Thanks for your comment. This is why I write.
Society has taken over the role that Nature once did. Nature dictates survival of the fittest. Society, which favors altruism, dictates that everyone must survive. Babies that would have died at birth because of genetic defects are now saved and live to reproduce to pass on those defects. Old people who would have died because they abused or simply wore out their bodies are now saved through technological miracles. Drug addicts who overdose are saved. I could go on and on. Again, I'm not advocating here one way or the other. Only answering your question.
I know this smacks of eugenics (which is science, and therefore weighted toward the pathogenic end of the spectrum), and seems Hitlerian (the poster child of psychopathy), but what I've alluded to above gives us another chance to look inside ourselves and see how we are affected by social memes, by ideas and ideas implanted into our heads via culture and media. If it makes you uncomfortable, it is an opportunity to examine why.
What you say it's true, although harsh and in some sense mean. But in my opinion, in some cases science has accelerated what nature would have done by itself. Consider vaccination and smallpox for example: if it's true that nature dictates survival of the fittest, and someone having smallpox is far from being the fittest, it means that in the long run the disease would have disappeared anyway. And I think that science, medicine in this particular case, is pushed by altruism in the first place, and here we come back to the never ending dilemma: do you save lives because you care about the others, or you do it because you feel better with yourself? Is altruism just another form of egoism?
I think there is some truth to that. The Europeans brought diseases to the new world that were previously unknown. Up to 90% of the natives died. The 10% that didn't die reproduced and now have natural resistance to things like mumps, measles and smallpox. Sometime in the 1980s the native population again reached its pre-conquest peak, not because of vaccination but because of natural selection. The black plagues is another example: 75% population collapse and the disease fell back to manageable levels long before any sort of vaccine was available. Vaccination may give the appearance of accelerating disease elimination but in fact it allows people who would have died to reproduce and pass on those genes. If there ever comes a time when vaccinations are not available, the ensuing plague will be just as bad or worse than the plagues of the past.
On the other side of the equation is the fact that antibiotics, vaccinations and fossil fuel resources have given us a gigantic population boost in just the last 30 years: many more mouths to feed, bodies to clothe in need of places to live. In biology any untoward population bloom always re-balances with a population crash. This is unprecedented with humanity and we might possibly be able to stabilize it without too much misery, but the reality of the situation is that we cannot continue overpopulating at the present rate without disastrous results.
The ego can certainly hijack the altruistic brain circuits and I think that exalting altruism too much can lead people to stop thinking clearly, to do stupid things because they feel to do otherwise would be too cruel instead of appropriate. One must look at long-term consequences rather than short term solutions. In everything, there needs to be balance.
I'm not trying to be mean but harshness comes with the territory. I'm trying to look at this from an anylitical stance. It seems true to me and quite often truth hurts.
I've said this before. Pain is not something to be avoided but something to investigate because it's an indication that something is amiss. I had a toothache one time in Mexico. I didn't want to deal with it until I got home so I went to the pharmacy and bought codeine. Every time that tooth started hurting I'd pop a pill. One morning I woke up and discovered a big hole in my mouth next to the painful tooth. At that point I went to a Mexican dentist. He said that the tooth had abscessed and rotted through the bone into my mouth. He shook his head and told me I was very lucky, that it just as easily could have formed that path into my cranial vault and infected my brain, killing me. It's not good to ignore pain.