Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Pathological Altruism (Guest Video from @Skeptorr)

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July 3, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

21:52

Pathological Altruism (Guest Video from @Skeptorr)

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	Hello, I'm Skeptor, and I wish to thank Sargon having me on his channel doing a guest video.
	I have been discussing social politics for some time now, on my channel, mainly criticizing progressive left, social justice, PC culture, and feminism.
	Although I consider myself a centralist, I have seldom talked about or criticized the other side of the fence.
	Because as I see it, most countries in the Western world are ruled almost exclusively by the left, and the impact of left-wing ideology has been the predominant one in Western societies.
	In a video I made recently, I discussed how political correctness and the increasing hypersensitivity many people demonstrate may have crossed some sort of abnormal and maybe even pathological lines.
	I brought up the idea that our society exhibits some sort of collective mental illness, where PC culture has been pushing questionable and even dangerous norms and behaviors that carry the potential of compromising the mental well-being of people, such as trigger warnings and safe spaces.
	I didn't quite realize how to frame it back then, and I could not pinpoint what was the problem.
	Then I thought about it for a bit and realized something.
	I asked myself, why do so many people embrace political correctness, ideologies and movements such as feminism?
	Why them and not other movements and ideologies like nationalism?
	What is the charm that snares so many people, that gets so many people intoxicated with these high questionable ideologies?
	The answer is quite simple.
	The common denominator of the progressive left, PC culture, and feminism is that they are perceived by the majority of the population as altruistic in nature, that they are motivated by altruistic intents, and such are their actions.
	The progressive left is calling to treat all people as equals, to take responsibility for every individual to make his or her life better, to be free from oppression and discrimination.
	This has a very strong appeal to many people, and that is one of the main reasons that it gains so much traction in society.
	So they blindly follow these ideologies under the assumption that they work hard to help all people, because altruism ultimately is a good thing.
	And how in hell could altruism be a bad thing?
	As I mentioned, I'm a centralist, and as such, I believe that everything taken to extreme is bad, even benevolence.
	So could altruism become a bad thing if taken to extreme?
	Could altruism become pathological?
	Quickly, I realized that whenever I think of something I have never heard discussed before, there's a good chance that someone else thought about it before I did.
	So I went to Google and searched for pathological altruism.
	Not surprisingly, I found it.
	What I found is that there is very little discussion on the subject, but I did find a very interesting paper that when I read it, it blew my mind.
	This is exactly what I was looking for.
	I'm going to read some interesting excerpts and discuss it as I go.
	Link is in the description box, and you can download the entire paper and read it yourself.
	Note that this paper mostly talks about individuals and very little about groups, and it doesn't mention feminism or the left, but stays in a high-level position in order to be as objective as possible.
	Our eyes can be powerless against visual illusions, with our underlying neural machinery leading us to predictably erroneous conclusions about the size and shape of an object.
	In a similar fashion, our empathic feelings for others, coupled with the desire to be liked, parochial feelings for our in-group, emotional contagion, motivated reasoning, selective exposure, confirmation bias, discounting, allegiance bias, and even an egocentric belief that we know what is best for others can lead us into powerful and often irrational illusions of helping.
	And indeed, feminist movements and the authoritarian left is infamous for falsely speaking on behalf of entire communities.
	Feminists talk as if they represent all women.
	Some people of color talk as if they are representing all people of color, and so on.
	In other words, people's own good intentions, coupled with a variety of cognitive biases, can sometimes blind them to the deleterious consequences of their actions.
	This dynamic of pathological altruism involves subjectively pro social acts that are objectively antisocial.
	For example, many feminists take part in divisive practices, the us versus dementality, such as if you're not a feminist, then you're a bigot, and there's no in between, and the concept of zero tolerance to people who exhibit behaviors that they don't care for, censorship of different opinions.
	It's not about disagreement in a discussion.
	It's about one group forcing their beliefs on others with consequences, of being publicly shamed, of being ostracized and banned, and even considered to be criminal.
	So now something which is supposed to be a pro social thing to help all people is now exhibiting antisocial tendencies to outright fascism.
	Various psychological, religious, philosophical, biological, or ideological biases could lead a person or a group to misinterpret, selectively discount, or overly emphasize certain aspects of relevant information.
	Thus, pathologically altruist behavior can emerge from a mix of accidental, subconscious, or deliberate causes.
	This has feminism written all over it.
	I mean rape culture, the one out of five myth, the wage gap myth, all based on cherry picked information and distorted statistics as feminist academia is so accurately described in the sentence could lead a person or a group to misinterpret, selectively discount, or overly emphasize certain aspects of relevant information.
	This paper defines pathological altruism as an observable behavior or personal tendency in which the explicit or implicit subjective motivation is intentionally to promote the welfare of another, but instead of overall beneficial outcomes, the altruism instead has unreasonable negative consequences to the other or even to the self.
	The working definition of a pathological altruist then might be a person who sincerely engages in what he or she intends to be altruistic acts, but who harms the very person or the group he or she are trying to help, or a person who, in the course of helping a person or a group, inflicts reasonably foreseeable harm to others beyond the person or group being helped.
	In the previous century, feminist movements have pushed many women into the workforce, telling them that they should have a full career, telling them that they should go into leadership positions and STEM fields, and funded campaigns and scholarships for women, pushed for laws, and did everything they could to convince women, all women, that this is the best path for them.
	If to consider the altruistic aspect of why they did it, because there are many reasons they did it, not all of which are altruistic, is to give women more financial and personal freedoms.
	But that came with a cost, a cost that these movements willfully ignored, this path is not what all women wish for.
	Many women never wished to go into STEM fields, have a full-time job, or become executives, but many of them were falsely convinced that this is the best thing for them, and now women's happiness has been dropping since the seventies, right from the time that feminist movements became very active.
	And just so I would not be accused of committing the correlation causation fallacy, here's a quote from a study called The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness, and you can find the link in the description box.
	Finally, the changes brought about through the women's movements may have decreased women's happiness.
	The increased opportunity to succeed in many dimensions may have led to the increased likelihood of believing that one's life is not measuring up.
	Now let's discuss the part which said inflicts reasonably foreseeable harm to others beyond the person or the group being helped.
	Feminists have been trying to help women, and in the process they have hurt a lot of men.
	This attempt of being altruistic to women had men take a lot of beating, pun intended.
	Same way feminist movements have been trying to raise awareness on domestic violence against women, the MRM tried to do the same in regards to men.
	Only many feminist movements felt that men are trying to take the spotlight away from women and some of the funds they receive for women's shelters, so they lashed out at the MRM, called them misogynistic and even terrorists, claiming that the MRM is trying to downplay violence against women, where in fact the MRM did nothing of a sort, but say that the problem is bigger than feminists claim it to be.
	On the other hand, feminist movements downplay violence against men all the time.
	They dismiss the notion that men could be victims of violence and consider it a non issue, and even when they do admit it's an issue, they say that it has no priority and dismiss it.
	The best example out of many I could give is how thirty two feminist movements in Israel prevented Israeli MPs from fixing an Israeli rape law which excludes women as possible rapists.
	The reason the feminist movements claim that this law should not be changed is that if women could be charged with rape, the accused men would issue a counter rape claim and that will hurt women.
	Even though this claim has no grasp in reality as almost all Western countries have laws that permit to charge a woman with rape without such consequences.
	As a result, a woman that raped many underage boys recently in Israel will not be charged with rape.
	This is the same for reproductive and parental rights.
	Feminist movements have managed to protect many women, passing laws and funneling many funds to help women in these issues, and in all cases on the expense of men.
	This is when altruism becomes pathological.
	Very different personalities can become entangled in pathologies of altruism, ranging from the sensitive hyper empath to the normal person, to the utterly self absorbed narcissist.
	I know it sounds like I'm making this up, but don't take my word for it.
	Read this paper, which was written by a woman by the way.
	These differing personalities share genuinely good intentions that play out in detrimental ways.
	Indeed, there are feminists out there that we can safely say are driven from benevolent intentions to help not only women but all people, and then there are others which are blatantly self absorbed narcissists.
	Motives are also important.
	Well meaning intentions can lead either to altruism or to pathological altruism.
	Self servingly menvolent intentions, on the other hand, often have little to nothing to do with altruism, even though such menvolence can easily be cloaked with pretensions of altruism.
	A con artist soliciting for charity that he or she uses to personally enrich herself would not be a pathological altruist.
	Now when I told Sargon what this video is to be about, he read a couple of excerpts and immediately suggested that I should delineate between people who really think they are helping others and people like Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian that ultimately only try to benefit themselves.
	And I guess I don't have to because this study already mentioned this point.
	Indeed, great minds think alike.
	Part of the reason that pathologies of altruism have not been studied extensively or integrated into the public discourse appears to be the fear that such knowledge might be used to discount the importance of altruism.
	Indeed, there has been a long history in science of avoiding paradigm shifting approaches, such as Darwinian evolution and acknowledgement of the influence of biological factors on personality, arising in part from fears that such knowledge somehow would diminish human altruistic motivations.
	Such fears always have been proven unfounded.
	Now not only that I agree with this, as we know how many people are silenced by PC culture, fearing of speaking simple facts, from fear of being immediately branded as sexist, misogynists, and even racist, and they have all reasons to fear it as many people became victims when speaking their minds or speaking the truth.
	It's no wonder that we rarely find people studying and discussing domestic violence against men.
	As for every such person like Erin Petsy and Donald Dutton, which have been persecuted by feminist movements and have never been taken seriously by the media or governments, we have countless cases of studies on violence against women, which are well funded, constantly talked about, and taken seriously on all venues.
	The bottom line is that the heartfelt emotional basis of our good intentions can mislead us about what is truly helpful for others.
	Altruistic intentions must be run through a sieve of rational analysis.
	All too often, the best long term action to help others at both personal and public scales is not immediately the intuitive obvious, not what temporarily makes us feel good, and not what is being promoted by other individuals with their own potentially self serving interests.
	I can think of equal representation, equal pay, and many other examples that show this, but the best one I can think of is the campaign saying that don't teach women how to protect themselves against rape.
	For many women this is intuitively obvious and can make them feel good as they should be free from all responsibility of becoming a victim.
	Only when you run this idea through the sieve of rational analysis, you realize that by doing so you are increasing the chances of women becoming rape victims.
	Some men will never follow the law, no matter how much you tell them not to rape, and when these men will come in contact with women, and they will, if a woman is told not to be careful, she has a better chance of getting raped.
	Realizing that may not make people feel good, but that is the reality we are living in, and there will always be rapists.
	And the altruistic intention to help women feel safe by telling them that they should be carefree de facto makes them not only still feel unsafe, but be unsafe, and become victims of rape that could have been prevented.
	I don't think you can get more pathological than that.
	However, the social consequences of appearing cruel in culture that places high value on kindness, empathy, and altruism can lead to misplaced helpful behavior and result in self deception regarding the consequences of our actions.
	Pathological altruism can operate not only in the individual level but in many different aspects and levels of society and between societies.
	Recognizing that feelings of altruism do not necessarily constitute objective altruism provides a new way of framing and understanding altruism.
	Therefore, an educational, religious, and social one size fits all approach, in essence feminism, everyone should be a feminist, to culturation that uniformly affirms the importance of altruistic caring, which is of course feminism is about equality for all women and men, without a tempered acknowledgement of the trade offs, may inadvertently be harmful for some children in the long run.
	You don't say.
	In other words, social attempts to blindly encourage altruism become themselves a perfect example of pathological altruism.
	For me, this sentence conveys the essence of this entire video.
	Everything that feminism does is a social attempt to blindly encourage altruism with sensitivity courses, with anti-rape campaigns, he for she, leaning in for women, Ben Bossy, and almost any type of PC indoctrination is a perfect example of pathological altruism.
	I don't really know if the author of this article even realized, maybe she did, that she has just pointed out that every ideological social movement is essentially pathological.
	Without insight into the undesirable effects arising from empathy and altruistic intentions, children and adults with an existing hypersensitivity, I'm not making this up, towards others find it more difficult to detect and react appropriately to manipulation or to situations in which natural feelings of empathy could lead to undesirable outcomes.
	Indeed, it seems that caring for others, helpful as it sometimes may be to those receiving or demanding this care, can have pernicious long-term consequences for the caregiver, including guilt, burnout, depression, and stress disorders.
	Stress resulting from empathic caring has been shown to produce errors in medical treatment.
	This reminds me of an argument that I had with a feminist that works with women who fled forced prostitution, and she claimed that any type of prostitution is rape, even when this is a personal choice and the woman is enjoying it.
	She has witnessed the suffering of so many women.
	It completely clouded her ability of judgment.
	This is also apparent when some people state make the personal political, where the personal experience of taking care of others or yourself for that matter will impair your judgment.
	Empathy is not a uniformly positive attribute.
	It is associated with emotional contagion, hindsight bias, motivation reasoning, in essence every study which is conducted in gender studies that starts with the conclusion that women are all oppressed and so the motivation is to prove it, regardless of reality.
	Caring only for those we like, in essence women, or who comprise our in-group, again women, jumping to conclusions, found in almost every paper from gender studies, and inappropriate feelings of guilt in non-cooperators who refuse to follow orders to hurt others.
	Oxytocin, the goody-goody hormone that underlies maternal bonding and many aspects of empathy also increases both envy and gloating.
	I actually made a video on this topic.
	Empathy could also be used by the self-serving, including psychopaths, to deduce how to further their own ends.
	Judges, almost all of whom are lawyers, favor the legal system in their decisions.
	This bias has far-reaching and deleterious effects on American law, quietly going along with the flow.
	Refusing to blow the whistle on objectively criminal behavior, for example, also sometimes may be a form of pathological altruism that grows from the feeling of empathy.
	In other words, the altruism and empathy we feel often isn't really about the person or group ostensibly being helped, but instead often are about us.
	For me, this is a great explanation of why so many women support feminism, also known as coffee shop feminists, that enjoy the fact that there is a movement out there which is about them, yet completely oblivious to the aspects that come with it.
	But it can also explain many leaders in that movement, the women who stand to benefit from being considered empathic, as the following paragraph suggests.
	Sometimes they relate to the pain we might feel of being ostracized or shunned for thinking or acting differently, or they relate to building our reputation.
	We wish to be publicly perceived as being altruistic, whether or not our efforts are truly altruistic, so that we can receive the reputational benefits of indirect reciprocity.
	As the work of the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahanman, a fellow Israeli, Jonathan Haight, and others has shown, human possesses both intuitive, fast, and rational, slow cognitive processes.
	Intuitions come first.
	Reasoning follows and supports that intuition.
	Empathy is driven by fast processes.
	We often make snap judgments as a result of empathy and superficial notions of altruism.
	Then, as both Kahanman and Haidt has explored in depth, we are experts in justifying an emotionally based decision with backed field rationality.
	The inability to see another solution once the initial solution is prefixed in our minds means that the superficially helpful approach can become rifled, further reinforced by motivated reasoning, selective exposure, belief perseverance, and growing overconfidence, along with moral heuristics such as those involving omission bias and outrage.
	This describes perfectly social justice warriors, and so does the following paragraph.
	However, surprisingly, an individual can be oblivious to the consequences of these interwoven effects as a consequence of a biased blind spot.
	In this fashion, an initial snap, common sense judgment about what seems right in helping others, can gel quickly into formidable certitude without consideration of important relevant facts.
	And as noted by Mercier and Sperber, there is considerable evidence that, when reasoning is applied to the conclusions of intuitive inference, it tends to rationalize them rather than correct them.
	Reasoning pushes people not towards the best decisions, but towards decisions that are easier to justify.
	Intelligence is not a safeguard regarding these confirmation bias related issues.
	Highly intelligent people, for example, do not reason more even handedly and thoroughly they simply are able to present more arguments supporting their own beliefs.
	Now I am only halfway through this amazing study, but this video is becoming longer than I anticipated, and I shall end it here and make a follow up video on the rest of the study.

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