Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World by Matthieu Ricard is a hugely popular and esteemed read.
Our author says, "I am altruistic for I must help the other without wanting to", is nonsense.
He opposes the thought, "If I wanted to help and fulfil my want by helping then, I was not altruistic. I got a reward - doing what I want because I want to is my reward."
There is a tautology here. It is:
"Altruism cannot be helping the other without wanting to. Therefore it is helping the other while wanting to fulfil your wish to act."
Altruism has to be phony and irrational if that is what it takes to defend it!
His only recourse is to say we should permit people to promote the view that altruism is helping without wanting to and permit those who say it is helping because you want to.
He cannot for that makes altruism only a word, something indefinable and therefore meaningless.
My answer is that altruism is helping others and not doing it because you have a desire to help.
I am not saying altruism is healthy. [If it is not, or if it depends on lies, how does that impact those who say we must be altruistic towards God? God adds to the problem. He just does. And it is worse when they say that God comes first. He is God and is not the babies who need help from you. It is wholly unacceptable].
I am not saying it is real either. It is not. To do a good act means you approve it as good and thus it goes with self-approval. That is a reward that Ricard has not mentioned. Take the trolley dilemma—a moral thought experiment where you must choose whether to push one person to save a hundred children. It reveals you. It is playing God to use one person to save many. It is also playing God to claim that one life matters as much as many, so that you should cause the children to die. To flip a coin, makes it no better and turns it into a game. You do flip a coin in your head. Life is one heap of trolley dilemmas - they show you are not the altruist you want people to think you are. You are not the person who knows the right thing.
Let us continue on.
Ricard defines altruism as being about the goal another person has not your own. That can be very impersonal. I would have thought you could do it for a person and that happens to give them what they want.
With books like that, they are confused in defining altruism and tend to pressure you into affirming the validity of altruism for the alternative is too terrible to envisage. The paradox lies in their assumption that fear must motivate altruism, while also insisting that acting from fear or for personal gain disqualifies an action from being altruistic.
Predictably, he goes on to argue that for violence to be waged, that people must become more selfish/self-centred and less altruistic. And also, the person has to be reduced in value in your mind enough so that you can proceed to deliberately do harm. So violence is linked in this book to a lack of altruism or to people not being altruistic enough.
For the purpose of argument, suppose selfishness is to blame. Then a society that condemns violence is still to blame for it if it is too much of a selfish society. If you are selfish then what the violent narcissist does has something to do with you. There is something there even if there is not much. You are part of the boiling mixture that produces people like that.
The book says that hatred is characterised by seeing only faults and bad motives in the other. Soon the flaws get exaggerated and elevated to an importance they do not have or deserve. And the good side is explained away as a scheme or ignored. Hatred consists of a desire to hurt another person and also to convince yourself and everybody else that the person is just bad and needs destroying in one form or another. Demonising the other person is what hate is largely based on and feeds on.
Yet we all know people who hate who know very little about the target of the hate. They don't know enough about them to twist the things they do into something bad looking. People have hated others for being good. The book's analysis applies for some not all.
Hate is simply wanting to hurt another and seeing them as needing some kind of destroying. Shockingly, it may or may not use demonisation.
Even if we don't dedicate ourselves to suspecting the motives of others, the fact is we never really know what they are. There is no mention of that point by Ricard. Our not knowing breeds potential suspicion. It may not erupt in violence but can be a slow cooker for toxicity.
The book says selfishness is what happens when you have an amplified and unrealistic idea of how great you are. You have to be real for your own safety, physical, mental, moral and emotional. For example, imagine the agony if you think you can easily get a PhD and are proven wrong! It is hard torturous work keeping up the illusion. If you want to love yourself then being selfish won't work for your only reward for your effort will be frustration and fear and they feed on themselves. Break the cycle or it will get worse! If we are naturally selfish then it is important not to let it go too far.
There is no mention of how you don't need to be a bombastic narcissist for that to happen. The argument that God thinks you are great and loves you infinitely does the same job. It is just another way of channelling egoism without upsetting others too much.
Today's crazy world thinks self-esteem, liking yourself, is what makes everything fall into place in the person and the wider society. The author however says that is wrong and cites Stalin, Hitler and Saddam Hussein as counter-examples. He blames their self-esteem. According to people who knew them well, those men were absorbed in great and wonderful they were.
And Ricard does not tell us that bad self-esteem can be painful, but be a paradox. "I am so wonderful and I cannot feel it." It is really misdirected self-esteem. So whether self-esteem glows or hurts you, you still think you are a God. That is what is in your head.
The superiority complex case, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, stated things like, "I know and I feel that doing good is the truest happiness that the human heart can taste." The dictators in their speeches said equally heart-warming things. They knew that human nature thinks in terms of, "I will be tolerant for they are not all bad." That kind of thinking is good but it can be taken in another direction. It can still be the reason a religion can murder left right and centre and end up cherished like today's Catholic Church. Rousseau was clearly thinking that the more suffering you cause, the more peace can come. That is an act of religious faith.
I would add that Rousseau might have been listening to this "wisdom". It is that if people suffer for the truth or for peace, they appreciate them more so the long-term benefits are worth tormenting them over. That is a form of faith too. Christianity always said that the cross is the way to salvation, ours and Jesus'. Jesus said that the more you suffer the more treasure you lay up in Heaven. In time, such doctrines mean you will not just stop at yourself. After all you cannot torment yourself without tormenting others. That may not be directly intended but soon it will be.
Is it true as the book says that altruism and compassion, though they allow judging when appropriate, are not based on any form of judgementalism?
They are about wanting people to have benefits even if they don't deserve them so it involves judging. You have to judge what you think they deserve and don't deserve. To want them to have benefits because they don't deserve them is not altruism or compassion for it is rewarding their bad side.
Buddhism argues that people who do harm and are selfish need light for their problem is ignorance. The ignorance and lack of knowledge and unwisdom are doing the evil not them. Buddhism argues that to be altruistic you must bring them light and thus react in a nonjudgmental practical way. Keep the thought of sin or immorality out of it.
This is why as regards a God of justice and fair play, Buddhism is definitely atheistic and should indeed be anti-God.
Religion defines altruism as an unconditional love for God. It argues that selfless love for others is a gift from God and in loving others you really love him for he has made them part of himself, as it were. It preaches that you cannot have or understand altruism without a firm faith. It is interesting that altruistic discussion is markedly secular. The religious view is hardly mentioned.
Christianity sees prayer as representing altruism. It sees prayer as your appeal to God to be a servant of sacrifice and altruism. It is surmised that unless God is asked to give you a spirit of sacrifice and altruism it will not happen. If prayer does not work, then this tells you will be left selfish. Or if your prayer is for some reason not pleasing to God, then you will still be left selfish. Maybe the prayer is not real for real prayer seeks an unselfish relationship with God.
If sincere prayer does not fix your selfishness then is the selfishness punishment? If the prayer is in any way insincere, it stands to reason why the selfishness would be punishment. Or should be. So you are judged as unworthy as a person and as a person of prayer. Prayer then reflects your self-righteousness and that ripples out to others. It asks for them to judge you as being punished.
Society needs to see prayer for what it is. It may be that prayer is impotent for there is no one to hear it. If there is a God to receive it or if there isn't, prayer is just not praiseworthy.
That aside, even if prayer were truly good no real altruist holds prayer in such esteem. She or he sees the person who jumps into the water to save a drowning child and thus risking serious danger as doing something that is better than all the prayers that were ever said.
Our writer talks about Ayn Rand, the apostle of rational self-interest.
Rand thinks that because humankind at the core wants to be alive and to be happy that this is proof that humankind is selfish.
Two arguments are poised now by Ricard against that.
Firstly, at most it would make people self-centred but that is not the same thing as selfish. A person who is sick will be forced by their condition to think too much about themselves and is different from the person that just wants to idolise their own self. When you look around you, you see a competition for resources, so this forces us to be self-centred too. You never really can tell if the person grabbing as much money as they can is greedy or afraid. You know a lot less about discerning selfishness than you think and want to think.
If our psychological wiring makes us self-centred, rather than selfish, what then? The person saying we should be altruistic is just a bully and passive-aggressive and not an altruist at all, ever.
And secondly, that trying to be happy can backfire and lead to misery. You are better off being kind to others and not thinking about your happiness for you cannot be a slave to a desire. That will only ruin you. Reality is not about you or about keeping you safe and happy which is the prime reason selfishness will backfire and not deliver on its promise of happiness.
Now altruism can backfire too. The selfish and unselfish person suffer wreckage alike.
Rand would say that the issue is the KIND of selfishness not selfishness as such. If I am forced by reality and my realism to feed my dog the best of food that does not mean I am unselfish. It means I am just selfish in a way that lines up to reality and keeps on the right side of it.
The argument that we are not selfish for selfishness is too destructive makes no sense. It is like saying nobody is really an alcoholic for everybody knows how destructive too much alcohol is.
There is no real argument against Rand's philosophy. Most who do not like it still argue it is the best of a bad lot. There is something wrong with altruism if all you can do is lie to try and keep people in thrall to it.
The book makes a determined case for altruism but the lack of any real convincing evidence, and a problematic definition of it, shows that there is something wrong with the philosophy of altruism. It is not a philosophy so much as a scheme filled with assumptions and holes. The only alternative is to say that altruists are in denial about how self-centred they are. Like our tyrants, they have huge self-esteem their own way. They esteem themselves for being the impossible - the altruist!
In the end, Altruism: The Power of Compassion fails to deliver a coherent or convincing account of what altruism truly is. And this is despite its putting out all the known arguments for the validity and truth of altruism. Its definitions are contradictory, its assumptions idealistic, and its arguments overlook the psychological complexity of human motivation. If the best defense of altruism requires denying our self-interest or disguising it in spiritual language, then perhaps it is not altruism we value, but the illusion of being better than we are.
22 JUNE 2025 AMAZON