Have the rich and powerful lost their altruistic instincts?

Have the rich and powerful lost their altruistic instincts?

Humans are the most altruistic and good of all the animal species, yet at present, our rich and powerful allow the poorest of us to starve to death by hoarding their wealth. This is unheard of in the animal world.

9 out of 10 Americans are completely wrong about this mind-blowing fact.

Generally speaking, in ancient days the rich and powerful insured that the poor were taken care of to the best of their ability. In the past, the rank and file demanded that the rich and powerful live up to that good altruistic trait by revolting against them. The French Revolution is a good example of this. Have the rank and file lost their altruistic and good characters by allowing the rich and powerful to let people starve to death while doing nothing?

Are the notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity dead in the world?

Is mankind at the point of losing the altruistic instincts that has made us the greatest animal that the world has ever produced?

Regards
DL

 

Yes. It's complete cockamamy Bond.

 

Can you think of the solution or will it take violence?

Regards
DL

 

No I'm pessimistic and don't expect a solution. Things will deteriorate for many people but there will be bubbles of civilization. It forces people to be selfish because everyone is just trying to survive. It's divisive. I see an increasingly polarized World. And there will be violence and much suffering. Maybe this is how it's supposed to be. People get care fatigue. It's just too much for any one person to bear, so we disengage and turn the page.

 

Wouldn't this imply they had them to begin with:..

 

Here's hoping you are wrong.

I think a good start would be to rid ourselves of our regressive VAT and Sales Taxes as they have the poorest paying a higher % of their income as compared to the lowest% for the richest.

Regards
DL

 

Research shows that we are all born with it.

Regards
DL

 

People just think about material things. As some aspects of life get worse, other aspects can get better.

 

The material is quite important to a species as insecure as we are thanks to being the weakest animal on the planet.

What aspects of your life do you think would get better if you suddenly lost your job, or had to drop to a way lower life style?

Regards
DL

 

Above a certain level of comfort an excess of material product becomes a burden to me. I chose to follow a creative path in life. I draw and paint and write music. Everything I own fits into one large room which functions as a studio. I am able to be happy because I have been able to develop a spiritual and philosophical outlook that is sympatico with my lifestyle. In our fully industrialised first world societies we have become conditioned to seek happiness in external things to the detriment of our more essential needs which is to be in harmony with other people and our environment. There is no evidence that people in less developed societies are any less happy than us largely because they have extended family structures and tight knit communities that support and sustain themselves.

 

The rich depend on the lower class to serve them. Where is a king without servants? Where is a CEO without employees? Under Capitalism there is not room for compassion. It's competitive you should not worry about others only what you can acomplish.

In America at least altruism is not respected. The successful never had it in the first place.

 

i'd get enough sleep at least.

 

In fact, we even developed a popular ideology called Objectivism that considers altruism to be a vice. Ayn Rand, the "Prophet of Profit" who developed it is celebrated in the libertarian circles of power as a great liberator who freed the greedy from their consciences.

 

Problem is biological altruism seems to be limited to kin or people whom we perceive as being like us. Beyond that, culture has to take over. The great world religions have helped to expand the lboundaries of brotherhood and neighborliness, but conflicting material interests can easily get in the way.

 

Great

As someone said did they ever have any?

Well yes some did but taken as a whole and in general not so much.

And wealth’s ‘altruism’ has often come with strings attached, I will give you aid if you vote for me, worship the same god as me or if you fight for me.

And while there are philanthropists that give eye watering amounts of money to ‘good’ causes many studies have shown that actually proportionally the poorer in society give more to charity that the wealthier do and it has also been found that unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of the poorer cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.

I don’t like comparing human to ‘other animals’ who don’t have the social constructs that humans have constructed when leaving a state of nature, such as the idea of money.

Wealth has often promoted Social Darwinist type thinking (and still does through think tanks like the Cato Institute) this is about using the concepts of a twisted form of natural selection (or free market) to explain why some have more money than others and can even go on to explain why it is a ‘good’ thing that the poorest in society should suffer or starve.

The thing is that it’s exactly because we are not like other animals that we can order societies so that people do not have to starve or suffer from want.

Not exactly, remember slavery was also very prevalent in past societies, and while some of those slaves were taken care of many were not, they could be used and abused as the owner wished.

Can you give me an example of which society you are thinking of?

Actually most revolts were suppressed often very brutally - just off the top of my head, the Spartacus revolt, the British Peasants Revolt, the German Peasants revolt, the revolts of 1848 and so on. Even peaceful movements suffered many hardships for example look up the Peterloo Massacre.

As to the French Revolution it lead to The Terror and ended in the dictatorship of Napoleon.

But yes progress was made the problem was that wealth adapted, bamboozled people and took back many of the gains that had been made and is try to subvert the rest - the question is do we let that continue?

 

To me the political history of the 20th century (in the industrialised nations) has been to one degree or another about the curtailment of the adverse effects of exploitative capitalism.

People in many nations fought for voting rights, social benefits, safer working conditions, progressive taxation, and decent living wages. The result of that movement was that the economic benefits of production were much more distributed. Many people saw their wages grow and in the period between the end of WWII and 1970 many in Europe and the US gain middle class status.

But from the 70’s onward a new idea was promoted in some of these nations (often referred to as neo-liberalism) it was in many ways opposed to the ‘distributive’ system that had developed. One thing it promoted was economic globalisation, which basically allowed back some aspects of exploitative capitalism by promoting the moving of production to nations that had not developed the more distributive systems away from those nations that had.

In this way the long fought for distributive system has been undermined in those places where it had developed. Neo-liberals argue that to ‘compete’ in the global market the elements of the distributive system need to be dismantled what is needed they say is deregulation, the cutting of welfare, tax cuts that benefit the rich, lower wages, weak government oversight etc etc.

So what we are getting in is the dismantling of the distributive system in the developed countries while in some developing countries the conditions resemble what was happening in the west before the people’s struggle to got rid of exploitation.

I think we need to fight again for social balance but this time it has to be global. To counter the economic globalisation that has already taken place we need social globalisation to be brought in, and that means social global governance to counter the already in place economic global governance.