How to be really selfish

Some months ago, listening to a talk by the Dalai Lama, I was struck by one of his remarks: “Paying attention to one’s own needs is a producer of suffering; cherishing others (is) a giver of happiness.” His emphasis on acting solely out of concern for others rather than from self-interest stayed with me because altruism has had a troubled place in the reigning climate of modern thought. 

Economic theory, based on the premise of homo economicus — economic man — acting rationally out of self-interest and selfishly, is uneasy with altruistic behaviour while the influential notion of  the ‘selfish gene’ in biology has been commonly misunderstood to mean that selfishness is essential to evolutionary success. Much of modern psychotherapy, too, believes that a ‘healthy narcissism’ is essential for mental health, maintaining that a person can love others only if he first loves himself.

Was the Dalai Lama, I wondered, like all religious-spiritual sages, talking about human nature as it should be and not as it is? Mahatma Gandhi, too, had considered altruism “a test of true spirituality. All our prayers, fastings and observances are empty nothing so long as we do not feel a live kinship with all life.” Were they both talking of the few spiritually evolved people and not us ordinary mortals who rarely take off the armour of self-centredness that encases us?

Yet, further exploration and reflection convinced me that this dichotomy between egotism and altruism is false. It seems that doing good to others is doing good to yourself. Altruism and narcissism are not in conflict but complementary; indeed, they are inextricable, the former being a significant contributor to the raising of an individual’s self-esteem.

This advocacy of altruism is not an ideological stance, underlined only by the authority of great souls or wise sayings which may or may not be true, but very much a matter of empirical fact. And here I am not only talking of psychological well-being and happiness, which some may consider as vague categories, but of concrete, physical health. The benefits of altruistic, helping behaviour are so large that they even show up in improved health and longer lifespans.

In a large, longitudinal study from the US, those who reported giving more help and support to spouses, friends and relatives went on to live longer than those who gave less, whereas the amount of help that people reported receiving showed no relationship to their longevity. In other words, it is indeed more blessed to give than to receive. Since this particular study also studied the effect of specific altruistic actions, it might be of interest to give some details regarding these.

As we all know, aspirin is often prescribed as a preventive to those at risk of heart attack. However, helping another person has a five-fold greater positive effect on longevity than the ingestion of aspirin. Just to listen to another person is twice as good as aspirin for one’s survival.

Indeed, recent research in social neurosciences suggests that empathy, and helping behaviour that is motivated by empathy, may be wired into our brains. Witnessing the pain of a stranger activates a similar ‘pain network’ in our brains, the so-called ‘mirror neurons’, although in contrast to women this empathy reaction almost disappears in men (society’s designated ‘punishers’) if the stranger is perceived to be a ‘bad’ person.  To witness good deeds — altruistic behaviour — gives rise to feelings of elation (some call them religious feelings), that are physiologically related to the rewarding release of the hormone oxytocin.

In an ingenuous experiment, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt gathered 45 nursing mothers with their infants in a psychological laboratory where half were shown videos depicting altruistic behaviour while the others watched comedy videos. Almost half the mothers who were shown the morally uplifting video showed increased milk flow, or nursed their babies after watching the video, while only a very few mothers did so after watching the comedians. The first group also turned towards their babies more, touching them and clasping them to their breasts. Haidt comments: “The effect was one of the biggest I ever saw.”

Other experiments demonstrate the presence of altruistic behaviour in children as young as 18 months and even in two- to three-year-old chimpanzees that spontaneously help a familiar adult who appears in some distress.

In other words, acting on the Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others what you would have them do unto you’, present in various forms in all the world’s religions, may not only be vital for an individual’s spiritual progress but also for his physical health and psychological happiness. The Dalai Lama’s remark, then, is not only a moral exhortation but an empirical truth, an evolutionary reality rather than a utopian dream.