I want to thank my friend and follower @valued-customer for inspiring me to write this post. Please read his post and the link he provides to the National Geographic article comparing altruism and psychopathy to fully understand this analysis.
Those of you (both of you) who read my posts know that I’m obsessed with the role psychopaths play in modern hierarchical society. People in positions of power are almost always psychopathic. But I never considered the role that altruists play until I read the above-mentioned article.
I have to admit that the article was reasonably even handed in its presentation by not overtly promoting altruism in opposition to psychopathy but the reading stirred my emotions and brought certain personal assumptions to the surface for renewed scrutiny.
I loved the 4-category chart box placing scientists just above psychopaths on the altruism scale. I have to admit, that's accurate in some cases since science looks with a cold eye upon the material world. You can't be a whiny baby if you are first breeding specific strains of mice only to inject them with something to see if it causes cancer and then snuffing and dissecting them to analyze and document the results.
Being a scientist does not necessarily reveal hidden psychopathology, however. A person may become a scientist for altruistic reasons: to help mankind or move technology to a less damaging level.
Surgeons fall into that category as well. Nobody wants a bleeding heart surgeon (now there's an image!). A competent surgeon does what he must to be the best body technician he can be. He can't fret about cutting off someone's leg to save his life, worrying about how the guy will make a living or whether or not the guy would rather be dead than a cripple. That stuff can't even enter his mind. He has to be cold and hopefully competent to do his job. Most of the surgeons I've ever met certainly fit the first description if not the second.
Now let's look at the altruist. Whereas the psychopathic brain has regions that remain inactive in certain situations, the altruist’s brain becomes overactive in those same regions.
Extreme altruism is perhaps as pathological as extreme ambition and the extreme altruist brain might be just as defective as the psychopath's. There are aspects of altruism that make it too much of a good thing.
While a psychopath furthers his own interests ahead of others in most circumstances, an altruist will sacrifice his own well being for another's. This goes against the notion of self-preservation, an important survival attribute in autonomous beings.
The National Geographic article mentions an incident where a woman spun out on the freeway to avoid hitting a dog, and then couldn't get her car started again, wherein an altruist risked his life to run across the traffic to save her.
I believe we are dealing with two altruists here. A clear-headed woman would have simply run the dog down. In trying to avoid it she needlessly endangered herself and the other drivers on the freeway, as did the man who ran out into traffic to save her. While their actions seem laudable on the surface, they were both personally and criminally irresponsible.
From the Darwinian perspective, an altruist favors survival of the species, while a psychopath favors self-preservation. For humans in a natural setting, extremes in either direction might be deleted from the gene pool. However, survival would favor the psychopath over the altruist since the altruist could quite possibly die before reproducing, while the psychopath would tend to make it, at least until the group tired of his selfishness and took him down.
We no longer live close to Nature. The rules have changed, but If this hypothesis is true, humanity would become more psychopathic over time and that certainly appears to be happening, at least in the upper social control echelon.
This brings up another point. Society—which is an abstract idea that involves groups of people—values self-sacrifice over self-preservation. This is certainly the case in social meta-organisms like ants and bees, wherein the workers unquestionably sacrifice their own wellbeing in favor of the group.
Altruism focused on humanity might push us in an evolutionary direction toward becoming more bee-like, more concerned with the group as a whole than with our personal interests. This sentiment certainly rises to the surface in times of disaster, when the usual order of society is disrupted, when people spared freely offer assistance to those affected. I also see social programming efforts via media in this direction, and I do see some apparent adoption of this in the greater population, but this could simply be illusion caused by media bias. This may be the only option for survival in an overpopulated world. Only time will tell.
In a political sense, the right wing faction tends to favor the psychopathic, autonomous-self ideal while the left wing faction favors the altruistic collectivist model. Again, this is not a criticism, simply an observation. I don’t want to open up a discussion on political ideology since I feel a central government and its ensuing politics to be pointless. I only point this out for your own self-analysis, to create awareness of all forms of social interaction and your personal reactions to it, perhaps to uncover some unconscious bias.
What do you think? Is extreme altruism an attribute or a handicap? If it is possible to increase altruism at an early age in those diagnosed with a psychopathic brain through psychological conditioning, could it be possible to reduce extreme altruism to normal levels the same way? Would we want to do that? Please comment.