Guybrush

It's a consequence of natural selection when genes and the organisms that carry them compete against each other. I might clear some things up further in my reply to jwb below.


Yes, I agree. I wouldn't say misguided altruism is at the root of all evil, though.


I am one of those people and I do think that selfishness kinda underpins by far most of all human social interactions, even that which on the surface seems like altruism. That's why it's at the root of evil (still hate that word, though).

I've already written on selfishness / altruism this a few times here (like in the ant thread), so sorry for repeating myself. I'll still do it for clarity.


Even if selfishness kinda permeates most basic behaviours, I still think knowledge and discussion about it is useful and could possibly result in better ideas about society. In the ant thread, we discussed altruism. I made an example somewhere along these lines:

Imagine a population of altruists. Let's say they are flea picking monkeys. Every monkey will happily groom any other monkey and their grooming behaviour is genetically coded for. If you look at the overall fitness of that population, this altruism works for everyone so that everyone, as a result, has higher fitness. It's an ideal utopia and something we may consider desirable.

In nature, we generally think of such an ideal state as inherently unstable. The reason is selfishness - the grooming gene (let's just say it exists) can mutate to create a selfish version. It's just a matter of time. In this population (and discounting everything but grooming), a single selfish monkey that doesn't groom anyone will have a higher fitness than all other grooming monkeys. It enjoys all the benefits of altruism, but none of the costs. Because the selfish mutation is hereditary, it will start to rapidly spread in the population. At worst, the selfish version may eradicate the altruistic gene entirely and cause an end to grooming. Even if that doesn't happen, it's likely to cause some kind of temporary crash at least where altruists drop significantly very fast. After a while, a somewhat stable ratio between altruists and selfish individuals may be established, perhaps at 80% altruists and 20% selfish individuals. In the end, the overall fitness of the population is lower than it potentially could be if only the purely altruistic state was stable.

So in this example, selfishness corrupts the individuals' behaviour (makes "bad" monkeys) and it corrupts the population (stabilizes general fitness at a lower level than what would be possible without selfishness). The same is true for human individuals and our populations / societies.

A reason I think it's good to reflect upon this is so we can understand how to avoid it. If we want to maximize everyone's happiness and / or minimize suffering, we should create a society that is stable at very high levels of altruism. That means we should recognize where selfish strategies might flourish and put systems in place to combat them. Preferably, we need to create environments / societies that don't give selfish strategies a competitive advantage. In nature, such environments are created by stuff like animals being able to recognize or remember selfish individuals and reciprocating (at least once) in same manner when exploited. In human societies, we of course have laws and regulations.

The above may seem a little abstract, but I can use a trivial example from my old job. Among other things, it was my job to follow up pollution from car washes. The things that a car wash need in order to have clean wastewater are expensive. Oil separators are big installations that go in the ground. If you do nothing to regulate these businesses, you create an environment where those that don't follow the law are rewarded. After all, they don't have the cost or upkeep associated with oil separators and thus have a competitive advantage. As a result, if you leave this situation to stew, breaking the law by doing nothing is the most competitive strategy and so should be expected to increase over time. The car wash owners know what they're doing is wrong, but society is actually selecting for the ones that don't give a crap. They're the ones that will proliferate.

Needless to say, I'm not an anarchist.

Going into meme theory, you can also argue that selfishness has a way of corrupting ideologies and religions. Instead of monkeys, imagine a religion that has a benevolent god. That religion exists in the minds of many believers. Imagine that it mutates somewhere into something not so benevolent, that not believing in this god will guarantee you an eternity in hell. That mutated version can have a higher fitness because it plays on fear and this may give it a competitive advantage against its benevolent competitor. The hell-version can then have a very high fitness in the religious mindscape and spread around. We might call it selfish because it promotes itself via the fear and suffering of believers, but of course the idea itself has no motive. It's just competitive in an environment, perhaps more so the more fear mongering you have.

In any case, religions and probably also ideologies are other arenas where also selfish behaviours can do very well (selling pardons? "Seeding" money?), but I guess this rant is long enough.


Trying not to be snarky, I'll just say that suffering also happened back in the day and was also bad back then.

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