What Does it Mean to be Altruistic?
We think being good means being selfless--but it's more complicated
Poor old Mr Beast can never catch a break, can he? All he wants to do is help people and he just keeps getting cancelled for it. Whatever the hell that means.
As an aside, you can see from my screenshot that I’m a member of Community Notes, the Twitter scheme that is supposed to replace moderation—whoops, I mean “censorship”—by just having people add notes to shit that isn’t true. I’m as shocked as anyone that they let me sign up for it because they won’t let me do anything else without a blue tick membership.
Anyway the reason Community Notes doesn’t work is because, for one thing, the algorithm apparently requires people from both sides of the political spectrum to agree on everything and it has no way of accurately doing that, and also the notes are kind of just another, more hidden comment section where people either yell at each other or, in this case, vigorously defend Mr Beast from enemies foreign and domestic.
For those who don’t know Mr Beast, his name isn’t actually Beast at all, it’s Jimmy Donaldson, and he’s one of those guys from the golden age of YouTube that made people like PewDiePie rich. He now dedicates his absurd YouTube wealth to philanthropy—he is not to be confused with L.A. Beast, a different YouTuber whose work mainly involves eating strange food until he needs to go to the hospital.
Donaldson’s schtick for the most part involves your bog standard entry level philanthropy—planting trees, feeding the homeless, helping sick kids, et cetera, but every so often he pulls off some grand stunt like paying for a whole bunch of life changing surgeries people can’t afford, or his latest one, building wells in Africa to give poor villages access to clean water. And every time he does something like this there’s a discourse about whether it’s good that he exists and does these things.
On one hand, it’s hard to see how anyone can have a problem with it. Being opposed to giving clean water to sick children sounds like some serious Mr Burns shit, but these are ordinary people on social media rolling their eyes at some kid who is actually using his immense net worth to help people instead of buying a giant mansion in Santa Fe and filling it with gumball machines and video arcades.
What is it about this guy that people find so off-putting besides the fact that he kind of looks like the Terminator when he’s trying to smile?
First of all, one of the most important things to understand here is that the controversy is vastly overblown by people who have an agenda they want to push and Jimmy is a convenient, rather apolitical blank slate to map all kinds of redpilled bullshit onto. You’ve got your standard conga line of white nationalists claiming that he’s being persecuted for being too pale to receive due gratitude for carrying the white man’s burden to the Jungle Folk.
But there is some legitimate criticism out there. Whether deserved or not, it’s over the fact that his philanthropy is always delivered in the form of a branded self-congratulatory ratings spectacular. That what he is doing, in actual fact, are not acts of kindness in the pursuit of making the world a better place, but rather a form of performative charity writ large.
Really it’s just a blockbuster version of those TikTok videos where a guy sits down with a homeless man who shares his lunch with him, then hands he homeless man an envelope, then walks away so his hidden camera accomplice can film the guy opening the envelope to reveal a thousand dollars cash. Sometimes the generous man goes back and gets a hug or whatever while Sarah McLachlan plays softly.
Anyone who’s seen those videos falls into one of two camps—they find them heartwarming and endearing or self-indulgent and annoying. Those who feel the latter are more inclined to have less than favourable opinions of Mr Beast.
The bottom line is: If you’re doing something nice for someone else to benefit yourself, is there any altruism in that, or is it another form of selfishness?
I’m not exactly a Mr Beast fan and I do find his schtick tacky as hell, but I think people have a right to be frustrated at his detractors. It all comes down to this: How far removed from personal gain do you have to be for your acts to be considered altruistic, and to what extent is that even possible?
It might surprise you how difficult that question is to answer.
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When I was starting out in the philosophy degree I never formally finished, one of my first professors mentioned during an introductory ethics class that he once embarked on a project to define exactly what an altruistic act is—specifically, what the ideal or perfect altruistic act looks like. Is it possible to act selflessly?
What he concluded, he said, and why he needed to abandon the project, was that the question couldn’t be answered because it was incoherent. It’s not even that the answer is no. At least that would be an answer. Instead, there’s something fundamentally wrong with the question.
When you think about it, how do you do something with no benefit to yourself? You’re polite to people in the hope that it’s more likely they will be polite to you. It’s why you feel hard done by when someone you’ve been nice to doesn’t return the favour, much more than if you hadn’t treated them well. It’s like an injustice or a betrayal. It’s a failure to live up to a kind of contract.
But then there are things that you do without expecting any reciprocation, aren’t there? Like giving to charity, or even just turning a lost wallet in to the police station. Nobody is ever going to even know it was you who did that. They may not even have a clear concept of the charity having come from any individual at all, only that that something good happened. Or something bad didn’t happen. They might not even know that something bad didn’t happen.
Still, you felt good doing that. For whatever reason, evolutionarily or whatever, your brain has a mechanism that releases the feel-good chemicals when you know that something you have done has benefited someone else. And that’s not really much different to drinking alcohol or eating chocolate to feel good, is it?
And I’m not a psychobiologist but I’m willing to bet that people whose brains don’t release that chemical also don’t tend to behave in this way.
We can go even further. What about when you do things you legitimately don’t want to do? Like, I don’t know, eating a live tarantula or watching the entire Resident Evil film series. People do things they don’t want to do all the time, I do it every weekday when I drag my zombie ass to work. The thing is, in a weird kind of way, you’re still kind of doing those things… because you do want to. Or to be clearer: it will either lead to an outcome you do want (winning the million dollar first prize in the tarantula eating contest) or save you from an outcome you don’t (the mummy curse that will activate if you fail).
The reason my professor thought the altruism question was incoherent was because there’s no way in which it makes sense to imagine an act that is done entirely without benefit to the actor. In short, there are no selfless acts, because any act committed by the self… involves the self.
The only way that you can truly do something against your will is if you’re possessed. Even then, you’re not the one doing it, the demon puppeteering your carcass is. Someone’s got a gun to your head? Still your choice. You’re acting on not wanting to die. No matter how you cut it, you’re still doing something for yourself.
Understand that when I argue you can’t be selfless, I am not trying to say that you can’t be good. I’m arguing instead that being good is not and can not be predicated on being selfless. We are barking completely up the wrong tree if we are trying to base our system of ethics on an incoherent foundation.
You might want me to shut the fuck right all the way completely up about abstract philosophy right now because what we’re talking about is Mr Beast and his trillion dollar cringe festivals, not you slipping your neighbour’s erroneously delivered mail back over the fence. But we are still talking, in a way, about a natural behavour driven by mutual benefit that is the basis behind all philanthropy on nay scale, no matter how lopsided. You might not give a shit that Jimmy YouTube feels really good about himself as his views, likes, and subscribes rack up even faster than the dollars in his bank account, but there are a lot of kids out there who would be drinking water out of a puddle they had to strain the parasites out of tonight if he didn’t feel that way.
Another argument that I find much more convincing about Mr Beast being generally misguided, if not actually harmful, is that his works distract from solving the root causes of the actual problems. He’s giving the appearance of validity to the arguments of the truly selfish, the solipsistic “me first” and “me only” libertarians and venture capitalists who think all the world needs is for government and society to step all the way back because some rich guy will just fix it.
Basically the “teach a man to fish” metaphor. Donaldson, with all his YouTube bucks, can’t raise everybody out of poverty. For every child he saves there are thousands he didn’t. He’s dumping money on villages, taking his obnoxious selfies with the locals, dusting his hands, and raking in millions while he has the audacity to bitch on Twitter about the fact that only 95% of people think he’s wonderful. Meanwhile, the gifts he showers on people eventually run out. More people come along who can’t pay their medical bills and they can’t get a dime out of him because that was last week’s gimmick—this week he’s building houses for abandoned arthritic farm animals.
The kid is a dweeb, and probably a bit of a dick. But, importantly, from what I can tell, he doesn’t appear to be a hypocrite.
And that is important. He’s not getting around in Balenciaga with heavy gold chains, flicking money at peasants. I’m sure he’s plenty comfortable, but he’s not living like royalty. A great deal of the money he makes circulates back into grander and more elaborate philanthropy. I’m sure he could do better, learning about the root causes of poverty and illness and how much further his philanthropy could stretch if he worked to address those issues. But come on… he’s a kid, he was born in the fucking 90s, how much of that is really on him?
He could do better. But damn, he sure as hell could do worse. I like to think that the same could pretty much be said of all of us.
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I think on an individual level Jimmy is doing a good thing when he fixes a bunch of peoples eyesight or digs wells and gives fresh water to people. I think his existence is symptomatic of a bigger problem. For him to be able to get views by buying people basic human rights, there needs to exist a system that is denying them those rights.
His net worth is closer to you or I than Jeff Bezos, so my question is that if he can do so much with so little, what the FUCK are all the other rich people doing? I think what I find off putting about Mr Beast is not actually his fault. Humanity has so much wealth and resources at our disposal that many of the worlds issues could be either solved or greatly improved. Every time I see his stupid gaping face I am reminded of what we could do if we weren't so entirely selfish or rock fuck stupid. For him to pay to cure blindness in a thousand people, there needed t be a thousand people that could have easily been afforded the surgery by society and weren't.
So at an an individual level, it's good that he is doing what he's doing because thousands people can see or drink without shitting themselves to death. Systemically, that he's allowed to to exist is bullshit.
i wish i had a better explanation for why i can’t compute Mr. Beast = good, but i fundamentally just look into his eyes and see absolutely no soul... i’m not even religious there’s just something... uncanny and bizarre
if i found out tomorrow he was a benevolent alien who had studied earth for centuries trying to figure out how to get humans to accept help from ETs and this was the most palatable method he discovered, it would explain a lot