Altruism

"[...]what makes people worth risking your life for? Why should I risk my life for someone I do not know, for a human being who has hurt me or is generally abusive? And the conclusion, for me, seems to be that not everyone is worth saving, that some human beings are more worthy of life than others.[...]"

I feel that some people have more of an altruistic behavior than others. Almost as if that characteristic, that virtue, was embedded in their way of being, their personality, and that drives them to think selflessly, and to act towards others, to feel a sense of accomplishment of character. There are also people who have no need to serve others, and find no pleasure in dedicating themselves to improving the lives of others, whilst the altruistic ones would serve others even if that implicates a mild or severe suffering to their part. They act in personal sacrifice. And i see it obvious that this variety of people play their part in the world, and by no means do I want to favor one or the other. But for some reason, i feel they are dependent upon each other. What I mean here is that each extreme, 1. person that gives itself to others and has no other life apart from this, and 2. person that lives in order to make people suffer having no altruistic behavior. , exists mutually, and the work one has to obey only needs to be done when the other has work of its own. There is only altruism when there is suffering and inequality. The reason why some people deliver themselves to peace corps is because they can't stand the advantages they have in their lives, they see themselves as not worthy of what they have earned without sacrifice, and feel a need to go out there, into the world that isn't obvious to most people, and expose themselves to such vulnerability. Some of them feel a need to explore what they are capable of doing and i can also see most of them doing it out of the pleasure and satisfaction it brings to save someone's life, improving someone's life. I believe it gives them a sense of purpose, life begins to feel more worthy, as if it was being put to a good cause. And to be honest here, I appreciate the hard-work, dedication, courage and human exposure these people are going through.

However, a part of me feels people are of a selfish nature, no matter what. (people who join peace corps are ideally doing it for a greater cause, but down to the bottom they are doing it for themselves, for the sense of accomplishment, i don't see that they evaluate each human being they are potentially saving as worthy or not of being saved). If we focus on everyday life, circumstances that shape us routinely, most of us won't go out of our way to intrude a path of someone else and help them. Most of us won't even kindly offer simple gestures, we are stuck to what makes our day, and aren't comfortable with changing it for/because of someone else. There is a very egocentric nature here, specially in multi-cultural cities, where people seem to need to learn how to be independent and survive with what they have and with what they can get. There is more of a fierce competitive battle amongst people, to socially prove to be better than others. I realize a contrast with more closed environments, where there are more intimate relationships between people, where people give more of themselves and where peer's are important to control behavior (tend to do things in groups, decide things together, ponder more, see various perspectives, etc). In Norway, a highly civilized country, people build tight and close relationships, have an altruistic behavior that is balanced and tend to be more morally correct. This for me challenges my ideas about personality amongst cities, how they shape us. I know I'm driving away from the main point of this, but my focus here is to understand why it is important to be altruistic? rather than are people worth risking your life for? And it seems somewhat logical that there needs to be a balance in the way we help others. The people who are going to help others are ultimately people from civilized countries, people who have had an opportunity to have a family, education, money, fun, friends, normal life. These people are part of a society that flashes key values at every point of the day, and we blindly follow these values, learn them, and make them pass from generation to generation. So, if people in Norway are striving for respect, morals, sharing, sacrifice, hard-work, and turn out to be highly successful people, happy and stable in life, educated and of A* behavior, it seems obvious that the country will reflect what people they have, and it is certain that Norway had less % of unemployed people, less % of crime, etc. The key point here is that "building" the people, builds the nation. And currently, the only reason we have such a difference between societies is people don't all fall under the same moral code. This gives rise to wars, to political/economic/religious issues, to inequality, etc.

I'm not too sure if i'm addressing the statement, but I guess my opinion falls along the side of individual behavior. And it is not wrong to follow such ideals at to save someone's life, even if that person isn't worthy of it, but there needs to be a deeper look into why there are these ideals. We don't live in a perfect world, neither do we have perfect people, so it seems that this is never going to end. But maybe changing the values that are being set to us as we grow up, maybe that will help us commit less crime, be more of a hard-working nature, be more active and healthy, and also less extremist, less committed blindly to our causes. This will reflect into less wars, hence less reasons for us to be saving people (wars can be the word i'll use to cover all the negative sides of the problems humanity suffers, the light and heavy ones) .

Sofia Luz

The Inevitable War Machine?

In one of my classes we’re reading Brecht’s Mother Courage, and most people claimed that the novel itself had no messages to offer, that war was something eternal, and that we learned nothing from war. I found their cynicism very interesting, and pointed out that the play is a cynical text because it wants us to see just how dangerous that sort of cynicism really is. The virtuous characters (really only two of them) displayed their courage and selflessness in an environment where this sort of behaviour does not reward their behaviour in any way, but gets them killed. I said that Brecht does not want us to believe there are no lessons to be learned in war, but that this is in itself a sort of lesson already. If war does not really benefit anybody, if it is ultimately a money making enterprise that causes incredible evil and destruction in order to have a sort of “profit”, then the lesson should be clear – we need to stop these wars instead of settling and believing that they are all “inevitable”.

In the play, Mother Courage loses her three children as she struggles to profit off the war and keep her business running. In the last scene, she briefly mourns her deceased daughter, and decides that it’s back to business for her and marches forward. I think that Brecht wants us to be affected by this image, to not just believe that this is how the world has to be. Many of the other students seem to believe that the play eliminates the need to be virtuous, or that because the virtuous are not rewarded it is useless to have virtues. It does not matter what you act like, you must play the war game in order to survive, and so on. I disagree. The character Kattrin is, at every turn, willing to sacrifice herself for others around her. She retains her virtue, though war has been cruel to her: because of a (presumed) rape she has been left unable to speak, has been disfigured, and so on. There is something incredibly beautiful about her ability to still have faith in the human race, and also beyond that – to want to better the world and reduce suffering, though it may cause more harm to her.

Still, there is an important question on my mind, and what I was thinking about afterwards – why is Kattrin so moved to help those who would not sacrifice themselves for her? Even worse, she wishes to help those who she does not know, who might be cruel to her, etc. Throughout most of the play Kattrin, as I’ve mentioned before, has been hardened by war and abused by many people. The question is… what makes people worth risking your life for? Why should I risk my life for someone I do not know, for a human being who has hurt me or is generally abusive? And the conclusion, for me, seems to be that not everyone is worth saving, that some human beings are more worthy of life than others. This is probably why I’m not looking to join the peace corps, and why I’m not part of life-saving organizations. I often feel uneasy around such idealists, because the idea of sacrificing oneself for an ideal/people you do not really know is one I feel is irrational. Then again, others who are part of such organizations would probably see me as an incredibly selfish individual.

Asking whether people are “worthy” of saving though… that is also quite tricky. Are people who have been indoctrinated into believing in violent scripture not worthy of saving? Are those who have been abused and as a result often become abusive as well worth risking your life to save? My intuitive reaction is that, yes, every human being is made of flesh and blood, feels pain, and has a right to life (trying not to sound too much like a pro-lifer here, but yes). However, I also feel that people have a responsibility to act in accordance to a moral code that at least is respectful of other people and does not seek to exploit them, a moral code that makes one treat people well as ends-in-themselves, not as means to some other ends. I think that this is something both innate and developed through social interaction with other individuals. If someone is bullied or abused as a child and grows into an adult who is extremely aggressive, I think that we should try to help them through stronger social support, a therapy that focuses on making the individual realize that while he is still a worthy human being his learned treatment of others will just cause cyclical harm. However, I do not think anyone should risk their lives to save such an individual. Regardless of what happens to a person, we are all able to control how we react to the situation – though those aggressive reactions can develop, it’s ultimately up to the person to learn to control their impulses and move beyond the past.

Anyways, I feel like I am getting off topic, but writing like this helps me to sort through the mess and contradicting thoughts that make up my mind. I do believe that those who are virtuous, like Kattrin, should obviously be rewarded in a perfect world. However, our world is imperfect – but this is not something we should be satisfied with. There is something very, very wrong with placing business (war, or capitalism, the two are interchangeable and one in the same really) above human lives, and as simplistic as that sounds, we should not tolerate living in such a dystopia and claim “that’s just the way it is.”

- Nina Jankovic

quick creative writing piece

I feel this incredible surge of emotion – a need to drive forward, to push myself in every way possible. I want to embrace that which might destroy me, to push the boundaries of human existence and break through my own human chains. I want to build and keep building, to feel what everyone who achieves knows: the continuous mastering of the self and the renewal of the spirit. This renewal is a constant, it can have a mechanical basis and consist of improvement through technique, or it can be the steady rhythm and breathing after the fall. The fall which threatens to shatter everything, the fall which diminishes the self as too human and too breakable, as expendable. And yet, to conquer the fall, to rise when its pull is stronger than the sun’s power over the earth tastes almost as sweet as accomplishment itself. The hunger for more, the struggle against self-perceived imperfection, and the rise above that imperfection are manifest only in those who are willing to challenge themselves .They challenge what they have been told they are, and what they have told themselves they are. They challenge satisfaction and perform against themselves, sometimes to the death. This desire should be thought of as dangerous, but it is the ultimate danger – few will know it, and many will ignore it because it is more difficult than leading a simple life, a life free of sacrifice, self-creation, and self-loathing. Those who learn how to master the self, who drive forward in the face of total destruction, will know a pleasure far greater than others can even begin to comprehend.

- Nina Jankovic

Article criticizing Psychiatry

This article from The New Yorker is excellent:


Click here to read it.

Sofia, please look at that. A lot of my problems with psychology/psychiatry do stem from those fears, but I'm really intrigued by it overall.

Superbowl Commercials - not just product, but content: by Nina

I was at the gym yesterday, wondering if I should just listen to music or if there was something decent on television (not an entirely laughable concept, I assure you). Two of the televisions were tuned to a sports network. I’m not a fan of watching sports, but I was fascinated by the program they had on. It wasn’t so much of a program as one long advertisement – a show highlighting the top superbowl commercials. The sports announcers discussed them after, and had some of the scantily-clad women in some of the commercials on their show to talk about what it was like... let me see, what was it that guy said? Something like “what is it like to have more people interested in watching you than in the superbowl itself?” accompanied by that douchebag smile plastered on many a jock that seems to stick with them for life. I don’t want to sound like an annoying angry feminist, but you know the typical women they have to sell sex with the product – fake, brainless, and so on. It’s always fascinated me that men want their women to objectify themselves – not even to be sexy, but to remove any trace of actual personhood so that they are used strictly as a sexual release. There is no desire for connection in these men, and perhaps they are incapable of such a thing. Anyways, that’s a topic for another rant...
There is no longer a difference between content and advertising, between having some substantial storyline/show/whatever have you and the selling of a product. The sports announcers were comparing the commercials, and rating which ones were the best, etcetc in typical competitive fashion. In this sense, advertising can then replace the need for sports entirely. While for a long time sporting events and famous individuals have been sponsored by big corporations, there still remained a more important element in the equation: the game itself. Fans were not cheering for Pepsi or Coke, or Nike or whatever else, but for a team, for a player, for an idea. This idea is very malleable though, and increasingly a famous individual is associated with a brand. It has to happen that sooner or later we won’t be congratulating players on their skills, but on their Nike shoes which helped them to run better, which have been proven to be the top shoe compared to all the other contenders, and etc. It won’t be players vs a different team, but Adidas versus Nike.
Already, we seem to have skipped that step and accepted corporate entities as being on equal or more equal footing than are human beings. The Super Bowl demonstrates that commercials can literally replace players in a different kind of game, but a game that one can easily get excited for. It’s interesting to me that we are able to have an hour-long program in which we do nothing but watch commercials, and we make it something that is a pleasurable experience – it is not simply a company trying to manipulate you into wanting their products, it’s a lifestyle choice urging you that they have the answer to any problems concerning identity (drink Coke and you will be happy and be surrounded by good-looking women, and so on) and that they’re playing a fair, competitive game when they’re reaching out to you.
I think it’s sad, that we’ve reached a state where the only choices we seem to have are between this brand or another, and we are made to believe that this “fair” system allows for real choice and allows for us to obtain purposeful, meaningful lives associated with whatever brand does the best job of psychologically manipulating us. The truth is that, if this is the only way we are able to make choices in our lives, we have absolutely no choice at all – the corporate entity will own our thoughts, desires, and influence whatever it is we want to buy next.
Not really a new line of thinking, but that stupid television “show” had an impact on me.

Sapolsky on Depression

I've been watching a few lectures, and i found this one particularly interesting not only because i had a special lecture at university on depression but also because i feel somewhat intrigued about the complexity of this condition. It has been associated with a chemical imbalance in the brain, mainly of neurotransmitters such as seratonin and dopamine (which are main inducers of feelings of well-being and emotional stability). The lack of these neurotransmitters in particular areas of the brain has decreased the amount of synapses which decreases the activity of the 'happy condition'. So, pharmaceutical companies have come up with the so called anti-depressants (ex: Prozac) to try to preserve as many neurotransmitters as possible, in the synpatic cleft, to increase the firing rate of the synapses. The problemo here is that it hasn't worked for 40% of patients on trials. To me, and as prof Sapolsky suggests, stress may play a key role in this condition, this is worth exploring (depression is a far more complex disorder than a mere chemical imbalance in the brain). Somehow, i find it hard to draw the line, to place depressed people on a scale, how do we justify that a 13 year old teenager who broke up with her boyfriend is as depressed as a young boy that came back from war? how to we rate experiences as justifiable for the depressed state? and at a personal level, i think my depression is a way of being (as in character/personality) and not something treatable. i can't seem to believe that there is such a cure for depression, maybe a relief of the symptoms, but we cant expect to make a person who has been chronically depressed for years, to all of a sudden be jumping of joy and all excited to be alive!, this would implicate a whole life style change, and make me question again about the true nature of our identities and existence.

Anyways, the lecture is a definite watch, i love sapolsky.

Sofia

Nina - Thoughts after reading Zizek...

When Zizek was talking about the four threats posed by capitalism that would create an apocalyptic scenario, I couldn’t help but think – why would a revolution be any different than that? Why would the overthrowing of this incredibly flawed system lead anywhere different? He often spoke about how we must begin from the beginning again...
What I’m getting at is that his four threats: ecological catastrophe, private property, scientific developments, and new forms of apartheid (like slums) are of course, terrifying. I think however that we are attracted to these things – just as Zizek is himself attracted to violent revolution, to the destruction of a system, we too are attracted to that very same sort of violence. Aren’t those four threats in a way almost like having a violent revolution, but without the need for a human uprising? It’s the result of self-destructive capitalism that things will eventually change, and has nothing to do with us “fighting against the system” or something.
I wanted to talk about all of these separately, but only briefly, and state why I think we’re attracted to them. Ecological catastrophe is something that seems at once removed and an immediate danger: global warming is happening, and we’re attacked with that information on a daily basis; yet, we go on with our lives as if nothing is happening. Isn’t it possible that we aren’t reacting not out of laziness, but out of an unconscious desire for something like this to happen? I am hopefully not sounding incredibly crazy when I say that.
I don’t want to talk much about private property, but with increasing privatization and mechanization of our lives, we are going to destroy ourselves in a very real way. There is an interesting freedom though, in the thought of being completely transformed into a machine. Perhaps we could be programmed to behave more humanely than we usually behave (I think our behaviour does have much more to do with the situation than our inherent “goodness/badness”) and this makes me think of the creatures in District 9 who were still persons regardless of their actual material compositions. However, I also think there is much beauty to be found in our flaws and etcetc... Zizek spoke of how we would be turning into substanceless substances, but I’m not so sure that this is the case. Again though, I think we have a desire to escape/destroy ourselves by turning ourselves into machines – we do not even have to change our physical compositions. I think it’s happening already: when I take public transportation or listening to the politically correct conversations of other people, I can tell that most of them are already dead. I’m not saying I’m much better... and this is both repulsive and fascinating to me. I have to admit, I am at least somewhat attracted to an entire world that consists of self-absorbed individuals who are robot-like (think American Psycho) while I still find myself yearning for some idealized form of social interaction and understanding that is becoming an increasingly rare thing to find.
So much rambling about this... Anyways. Finally, the last one mentioned is where he was talking about how capitalism would result in the ever-increasing differences between the rich vs poor, so much so that we would have (to an even greater extent) a minority of the incredibly rich and well-off in a segregated section of the world, while the rest of it is starving, diseased, and barely able to survive. I think that this might be the downfall of capitalism, but only if those starving were not so poorly off that they had no way to organize themselves/did not hold onto any ideas of being able to achieve something higher or move up in the system/etcetc, though in this extreme version I think that they would have given up all hope of achieving a change.

For me, I don’t really know where to take that last one, except that it’s the one that disturbs me the most... today for an English class my prof compared something else we were reading to a cruise line that is bound for Haiti/is already in Haiti and is going to some safe, tranquil part only a few miles away from all of the people still buried under rubble/displaced/and so on and the imagery of this makes me incredibly sick.. I told my mom this today, and she asked “why would it be different if the people vacationed elsewhere?” and I don’t have a real answer for her. I don’t think the solution is to feel incredibly responsible for what happened or any sort of white guilt, but at the same time, deciding to go there for vacation is really, really sickening for me. It makes me think of some tour guide being like “over here on the left we have all of these poor people dying... and on the right, we have some American tourists with money who are enjoying life and acting as if nothing horrible is happening at all” and yes.

I wanted to make more Zizek comments, he is very fun to read. I will stop though. I love his social critiques, I am probably a bit young to be reading him but that doesn’t really matter. Everyone starts somewhere I guess. I could never embrace Marxism in any sense besides an apologetic Leftist stance that Zizek absolutely despises.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce - Zizek Quotes

On the problem of trying to fix capitalism within the model itself:

“… those who preach the need for a return from financial speculation to the “real economy” of producing goods to satisfy real people’s needs, miss the very point of capitalism: self-propelling and self-augmenting financial circulation is its only dimension of the real, in contrast to the reality of production. This ambiguity was made clear in the recent meltdown when we were simultaneously bombarded by calls for a return to the “real economy” and by reminders that financial circulation, a sound financial system, is the lifeblood of our economies. What strange lifeblood is this which is not part of the “real economy”? Is the “real economy” in itself like a bloodless corpse? The populist slogan “Save Main Street, not Wall Street!” is this totally misleading, a form of ideology at its purest: it overlooks the fact that what keeps Main Street going under capitalism is Wall Street!” - p. 14-15

______________

Comparison between treatment for General Motors and the banks:

“An exemplary case of the way the economic collapse is already being used in the ideologico-political struggle concerns the conflict over what to do with General Motors - should the state allows its bankruptcy or not? Since GM is one of those institutions which embodies the American dream, its bakruptcy was long considered unthinkable… (Zizek talks a bit about nyt article and sums it up in next sentence:) In other words, bankruptcy should be used to break the backbone of one of the last strong unions in the United States, leaving thousands with lower wages and thousands of others with lower retirement incomes. Note again the contrast with the urgent need to save the big banks: in the case of GM, where the survival of tens of thousands of active and retired workers is at stake, there is, of course, no emergency, but on the contrary, an opportunity to allow the free market to operate with brutal force…. This is how the impossible becomes possible: what was hitherto considered unthinkable within the horizon of the established standards of decent working conditions now becomes acceptable.” - p. 20-21

______________

An important paradox that I wish more people would come to realize:

“…What Miller ignores is how the very state regulations he so ferociously opposes are enacted on behalf of the protection of individuals’ autonomy and freedom: he is thus fighting the consequences of the very ideology on which he relies. The paradox is that, in today’s digitalized society where not only the state but also big companies are able to penetrate and control individual lives to an unheard-of extent, state regulation is needed in order to maintain the very autonomy it is supposed to endanger.” p. 32

______________

The importance of thinking through the problem instead of being reactive:

“Immanuel Kant countered the conservative motto “Don’t think, obey!” not with the injunction “Don’t obey, think!” but rather “Obey, but think!” When we are transfixed by events such as the bail-out plan, we should bear in mind that since this is actually a form of blackmail we must resist the populist temptation to act out our anger and thus wound ourselves. Instead of such impotent acting-out, we should control our fury and transform it into an icy determination to think - to think things through in a really radical way, and to ask what kind of a society it is that renders such blackmail possible.” p. 17


----


“Over the last several months, public figures from the Pope downwards have bombarded us with injunctions to fight against the culture of excessive greed and consumption. This disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation if there ever was one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into the matter of personal sin, a private psychological propensity.” - p. 37

—--

“The first lesson of psychoanalysis here is that this “richness of inner life” is fundamentally fake: it is a screen, a false distance, whose function is, as it were, to save my appearance, to render palpable (accessible to my imaginary narcissism) my true social-symbolic identity. One of the ways to practice the critique of ideology is therefore to invent stategies for unmasking this hypocrisy of the “inner life” and its “sincere” emotions. The experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is thus a lie - the truth lies rather outside, in what we do.” - p. 40

A few thoughts on 'We are what we pretend to be.' (Vonnegut)

Is pretending to be someone not showing a part of ourselves that we just want to think as a lie? Do we pretend to be people who we fear to be all the time? Do we pretend to extend ourselves into a different dimension to fulfil the needs and desires of whomever watches us, so we can feel the pleasure of being looked at, being the inspiration of someone? Is pretending to be someone not a justification that the one we pretend to be exists within us, as an exaggeration of an aspiration to become someone? And when we pretend to be less, to run away from responsibilities, does that not show the cowardness in us, is that not the way we choose to camouflage our weaknesses?
Where does the pressure come from, what is the nature of pretending to be someone? Most of the time, there are random people with random lives who just want to appeal to be somewhat more interesting than the person next to them, almost as if there is a dispute, a fight, a contest, some sort of rule that makes them crave a fakeness to stand out in the crowd. And most of the time they aren’t aware of the despair within them to be someone else to fit in social groups. Ultimately, for them, it is about people, showing off to people who surround them, ones who know them, others who don’t. But there are the exceptions where people choose deliberately to mask themselves, most of the time to get away with confrontations, responsibilities, etcetera; those who commit crimes and don’t want to be caught, those who suffer from psychic illnesses and don’t want to be exposed to cruel prejudices, those who suffer the pressure of being idealized, and so on.
When we pretend to be someone, is it really making up an identity, or is it shaping our own self into a given circumstance? We are vastly complex, a wide range of features determines who we are, a line that curves and bends and moulds to the air that surrounds it. Pretending is just curving the line. But does this mean we as a line are timeless, don’t suffer change, just happen to show off different sides to us at different moments? Or do we as a line progress and put forth what comes with us in that moment of time? Basically, is there a core self that remains throughout our entire existence, camouflaged or apparent? A core self that is aware of all the fragments left at different stages of life? A core self that is the source of the multi-diversity of persona’s, that chooses the projections of fake characters?
Is it fair to make up a person’s features from what their physical nature shows? Are we this transparent, this obvious so that we chose to paint our outside as a reflection of what the psychological inner being is, almost as a tattoo that correlates to a belief system, a share of opinions? Can we go beyond prejudices, or do we need to make sentences upon behaviour by judging what meets the eyes?

by Sofia