11.24.07
Amsterdam, Montana
6:58a
THANKSRECEIVING
by Ryan Matsumoto
“It’s better to give than to receive.” –Everyone’s mom
“I don’t believe you”–Ron Burgundy
Is it really better to give than to receive? Better for whom? The giver? Sooooo, the giver is actually receiving something that is better? So the giver is actually a receiver too? Doesn’t “better” in this context imply that it is better for the giver to receive the benefits that come from giving rather than the benefits that come from simply receiving? which is really to say, it is better to receive by giving, rather than receive by receiving:I got to see the smile on a child’s face when he opened my Christmas gift,or,I enjoyed helping the old lady cross the street even though she smelled like soup. Even though you are indeed giving the gift, or giving the help, you are really driven by the thing you are receiving (or think you will receive) from the giving (e.g. the joy of giving).So essentially, it is two types of receiving that we’re really comparing. Perhaps, if the child’s smile made you sick, or instead of enjoyment for helping the old lady you received a rash, giving might start to lose its appeal, or dare I say, become worse than receiving, reversing the saying to “It’s better to receive than to give”. Oh I don’t know how you would get a rash from helping an old lady cross the street, but it’s hypothetical asshole. Ooh, I just thought of a way, never mind. Now you might say, “Hold on buckaroo (especially if you were a cowboy, or a Japanese surfer with a really bad version of a Japanese to English “Hip surfer slang phrases of the Pacific Rim” translation book), even when giving becomes difficult, I still give—hell, I’m married!” And I’m sure that’s true: marriage is hell. haha. Just playing. Not really. Anyway, stick with me. Yes, people still give even when it causes them pain. So, it must be that they are giving for the sake of giving right? Not really. They are still giving to receive. If people give despite the pain, it’s only because they’ve considered alternate paths, and after careful cost-benefit analysis, or not-so-careful, they try to decide the least painful route overall. And instead of recalculating every decision for every instance, people make up systems of thought: philosophies, creeds, manifestos, rules, guidelines, and ultimately, personalities–which can apply instinctively and generally to a lot of situations, essentially, for maximum self gain. The systems of thought help cut down on the processing effort of having to make your mind up on every little thing.
I never eat carbs.
I always listen to bjork when masturbating.
I don’t put out on the first date, unless you count head.
We are constantly creating ourselves.We are our own immaculate conception.We painfully carve bad habits out of our brain, with self-loathing butter knives, hoping that someday it will be a beautiful sculpture of pain avoiding perfection.We love irony apparently.We create egos, which we think will afford us the highest amount of pleasure and the least amount of pain for life—you know, selfishness. Control the ego, make sure it’s well rounded: nice guy or nice girl, smart, happy, wise, funny, reliable, fearless, trustworthy, strong values, uncompromising, giving, thoughtful, yada yada yada– and you will also control that bottom line of pain and pleasure for your self.assumption: well-rounded individuals with these type of characteristics tend to have a better time in life.Ticket price to get into society’s game: be giving and shit.Reward: you get to play with others who will help you to be selfish.“Unconditional giving” benefits the collective more than the individual–for there is always that point of diminishing returns. In other words, there is always a condition, upon which we give, and that condition can be measured against its cost. And we are doing this cost-benefit analysis constantly, involuntarily even—it’s just that most of us suck at it. So we end up paying more than we have to for the happiness we seek. People have forgotten that the root of our desire to be “giving” was born straight out of the womb of selfishness.Receiving the best benefit is always the concern of any giver or receiver any way you cut it.
“Ok Mr. smarty pants, what about when someone takes a bullet for someone else? How can that possibly be an example of the giver being concerned about receiving the best benefit? Obviously, death is not the best benefit as far as most people are concerned. You must admit that this is probably an example of someone giving unconditionally.”
Nope. I still think that the giver, which in this instance is giving their life for someone else, is still concerned about what they’re going to receive for giving their life, and that concern is what drives their decision (not that that person will receive something necessarily equal to or worth more than that thing which they gave, but I guess that’s my point—the profit margin of a particular act of giving is irrelevant to how selfish the act is). translation: getting nothing for something always gets you something. even if that something sucks.Essentially, the term selfish in this context is specifically referring to intention as opposed to outcome, and that is why to confuse the two, is logical suicide. How little or how much someone actually receives for their giving is irrelevant to the amount of selfishness involved—it is more of a question of—which reason, among the reasons for giving, is the driving reason, the nucleus reason, without which, the act of giving itself would collapse? Like any good argument: Find the underlying assumption of the opposing argument on which it rests, destroy it, and ipso facto destroy the argument.That is the first time I’ve ever used ipso facto.
“Ipso facto is a Latin phrase, which means that a certain effect is a direct consequence of the action in question, instead of being brought about by a subsequent action”–wikipedia
I think the most user friendly confusion that seems to find its way into everyone’s philosophical inbox like a mass e-mail from Zafutu, the sole heir to the throne of Nigeria, requesting your assistance in laundering 4.5 billion dollars, which, without your help would otherwise be inaccessible, is this retarded notion that selfishness can be gaged by the apparent amount of x (whatever) actually received by the giver:retarded notion: The less received by the giver, the more selfless the giver.This apparent lack of investment savvy gains us unwarranted selfless points:
Oh my god, he just gave us his leftover chicken without any expectation of something in return—how selfless.
leftover chicken
My point: There’s always expectation—even though that expectation is sometimes only visible with the infrared capabilities that come with brutal scrutiny.
I don’t receive anything from my grandma. Trust me. The whole relationship is based on my taking care of her. There’s absolutely nothing in it for me. All I do is give. I give my time, my money and sometimes my tears because it’s so painful to see her in pain. But I still give. What the hell are you talking about, Mr. Way-too-many –‘s and :’s and italics and (parenthesis) (and) (unnecessary) (ands) mother fucker?
You are still receiving the benefit of fulfilling your idea of what a person should be like–The kind of person who takes care of their grandma regardless of apparent reward (“apparent” being the operative word here). But then again, what else are you supposed to do–you selfless saint (sarcasm sarcasm sarcasm), leave your grandma to her helpless state? Doesn’t that route also have its negative elements?”What a selfish not-taking-care-of-his-grandma asshole he is!” she muttered somewhat under her breath while erasing his # from her Blackberry.
Don’t be so quick to pat yourself on the back Mr. grandma care taker, there’s always a selfish reason lurking behind that lame curtain of pseudo-selflessness you display like the wizard of OZ:
enter toto, stageright.
Moreover, those ideas of what a person should be like will be based on what kind of person you think would most likely succeed in your particular environment.But once again, it is still receiving that you are giving for.
Everyone is 100% selfish.
Everyone does everything in an attempt to better his or her situation.And here’s the checkmate:Every attempt to refute this axiom seems to confirm it:I have chosen for my life to be selfless so that I can live in a better…wait, shit. Ok, I want to be an unconditionally giving person because it just feels way better to…dammit!!! Ok here– I don’t necessarily want to always choose the selfless route, but I try choose it anyway, to help others…and overall I have decided that that is the best way for me to be…ARGGHHHHH!!!! In other words, you’ve chosen, as your best strategy for self-gaining, the strategy of “being a giving person”.People tend to like you more. you feel better about yourself. you’re more likely to get employed by more companies who tend to like team players.Being a giving person is just a price that you’ve decided is worth paying for the overall selfish gain of living most happily in this world.From Mother Teresa to Hitler, from Jesus to Dr. Phil, everyone—equally selfish.The real question, once properly untangled from its popularly confused yet genetically inferior adopted question brother is this:which 100% selfish strategy will be the most effective in actually gaining for self?For it seems that we are enslaved to that 100% selfish state. All questions of “whether or not I am selfish” should be upgraded to “Being that we are all 100% equally selfish, how then shall I best be selfish?” And therein lies many complex possibilities, one of which may include—giving presents at Christmas time!So if this is what’s really going on, then I say, it is better to give than to receive sometimes, but better to receive than give at other times. If it were simply as the saying seems to imply, that giving is always better than receiving, then wouldn’t that necessarily mean that you, the giver, are subjecting the one you are giving to, the receiver, to the lesser of the two experiences, depriving them of the “better” benefits of giving—you selfish bastard!
selfish bastard
Happy Thanksreceiving!
Ryan
4 responses so far ↓
Ryan // November 24, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Consider the following:
When you’re traveling alone through a city which you, in all foreseeable likelihood, will never be traveling through again do you tip the waiter/waitress? Because you don’t have to. There’s no repercussions to your decision not. No one will know if you did or not, except some person you’ll probably never see again. If you only cared about your own welfare and were purely selfish, then you would choose to benefit yourself, never leave a tip, and keep the money for yourself.
In case you’re still not convinced, take the following game theory experiment, where individuals A and B sit down at a table, and one individual is given a sum of money (e.g. $10) along with the choice of deciding how much to give the other person sitting at the table with them. If you were correct, and everyone was selfish, then the person recieving the money would never share any of it. However, surprisingly, even though the person receiving the money has no reason to share (since most of these experiments have been conducted where the identity of each player was kept from the other one), most individuals will share on average 20-30% of the sum of money they receive (i.e. $2 to $3 out of $10) with the person sitting across from them.
Now, you could say “well, they did it because they’re selfish and sharing feels good” and wax all philosophical about the meaning of selfishness. But who really gives a shit “why” most individuals behave altruistically? The point is that they do, that they do is empirically provable, because human beings appear to be social animals capable of both empathy and compassion.
I mean if you really want to split hairs and get to the root cause, the root cause is that cooperation (i.e. sharing and not dicking someone over for your own selfish benefit) in these types of games is typically accompanied by a surge of oxytocin (note: not “oxycotin” that’s hill billy heroin–oxytocin is a neurohormone involved in prosocial behaviors, sex and bonding) and dopamine and we can induce cooperation in most instances by giving subjects a dose/spray of nasally administered oxytocin prior to the game. You can also increase cooperative rates by telling the individuals prior to playing the game that they are playing the “Community Game” (and, conversely, reduce cooperation if you tell them they are playing the “Wall Street Game”). So, really, you could say “most individuals exhibit cooperative/altruistic behavior because their hormones and neurotransmitters react to specific stimuli in the individual’s environment that tell them to.”
Of course, not all individuals act altruistically. Specifically, some individuals are inherently, biologically predisposed to being dicks. Some people experience a rush of oxytocin and dopamine not when they cooperate and act altruistically–they experience it when they dick someone over. These individuals are also insensitive to the type of oxytocin administration that would cause most individuals to cooperate. However, that is why it’s incorrect to simply label all human beings as “selfish” because, really, selfishness is a question of degree and lumping everyone into a big box of “selfishishness” ignores that fact. Some people are sociopaths who only care about themselves. Most people are not.
In short, there are sociopaths who really are just purely selfish. But most people aren’t sociopaths. Instead, most individuals exhibit varying degrees of altruism and while the rational choice model you propose (yes, there is a name for your assertion that all individuals are selfish and it’s been the basis for neoclassical economics for the last 60 years or so) can help predict the majority of human behavior (for instance, in the previously mentioned experiment, the majority of the money given was kept and not shared) it can’t explain all of it.
Unless you’re talking about lawyers because, as everyone knows, lawyers have no souls. We have legal briefs.
the "other" Ryan // November 24, 2007 at 7:26 pm
I should really have clarified that I’m a different Ryan. Oh well, worse case scenario, everyone’ll just think you have mulitple personalities/are schizo. And being schizo is totally hot right now.
ryan matsumoto // November 24, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Hey other ryan, this is other other ryan. I think we agree more than you think. Whether the oxytocin rewards the dick or the saint, it rewards. and that is all I’m saying. we do everything for the shot of oxytocin, so to speak. So, if the dick and the saint are being both dickly and saintly for the same exact neurohormone–oxytocin–can you really blame the dick or praise the saint? Aren’t we just rats? Don’t we just do whatever gives us the biggest buzz? Like you said, dicks get rewarded to be dicks. and they aren’t swayed by the same brain candy as the altruists. we’re just carbon based flesh robots, that’s all I’m saying.
In fact, is it even possible to do anything else besides go for some brain buzz? Isn’t it even automatic? Is there even a self? that’s all I’m saying. Isn’t everything an illusion, that’s all I meant. Isn’t this the matrix, yada yada yada. everyone’s buzz is different, but it’s all buzz. All I’m saying is that altruism is selfishness is oxtocin, just as much as dickery is selfishness is oxytocin. it’s whatever buzzes you. for some it’s sainthood, some, dickery. for most, somewhere in between. All I’m doing is removing the morality out of it. All I’m saying is that dickery and sainthood is both oxytocin, aint no one a better person for it. It’s just that dickery, I think, doesn’t actually gain for self, over time, as much as altruism. So we have collectively grown more addicted to altruism.
It’s better for everyone if it’s better for everyone. kind of thing. Dicks and saints are both equally selfish, but not equally effective at actually gaining for self.
in other words, fuck dickery.
I loved your comment!
and I would tip you for it, even if I was just passing though!
other other ryan
the "other" Ryan // November 25, 2007 at 1:49 am
I think your point that, ultimately, we are all engaged in a type of exchange is good. Person A inevitably recieves some type of utility (happiness) for having an effect on Person B. We give and take from each other’s emotional states and however that exchange affects us (or however we predict that exchange will affect us) determines how we will act in the future.
In short, unless A is autistic and just completely unaware of the rest of the world, then it would be irrational for A to intentionally choose to have an effect on B if that choice is likely to result in negative utility for A, just as if it would be irrational for A to choose to put their hand on a hot stove for no good reason. In other words, people generally don’t consciously choose to do things that they expect will make them unhappy.
That said, the whole argument is based on the idea that we all have some type of choice and that we choose to chase after our utility.
Except, I’m not really sure that’s always true when it comes to some acts of altruism and so it can still be argued that there is some truely “selfless” acts. However, it’ll take some explaining on the mechanics of the brain.
Most of us learn through empathy rather than trial and error. It’s actually one of the things that seperates us from rats and autistic individuals. We can learn by watching someone else touching a hot stove and screaming that we should not touch the stove. However, rats and autistic kids have to learn through trial and error of touching the stoves themselves; i.e. instead of just learning by watching, they have to be conditioned like rats in a maze.
What seperates us from rats and autistic kids is not whether or not we’ve been conditioned towards altruism by society, which gives us rewards when we act a certain way, it’s the inherent biological presence of mirror neurons.
Mirror neurons are, essentially, empathy neurons. Person A gets hit in the crotch and the areas corresponding to that sensation light up in the brain. Person B sees Person A’s crotchal shot and the same parts of the B’s brain (via mirror neurons present there) light up almost as if he had been hit himself (though to a slightly lesser degree). This reaction is instinctual/biological/innate. Person B has no more control over whether this is going to occur than I have a choice in jerking my leg when a doctor hits it with a hammer. There is no choice.
Because we have evolved this tendancy to feel the pain of others, which is evolutionarily beneficial (since it allows us to learn faster), we frequently will react instinctually to prevent a harm to others if the potential harm is severe enough. The potential pain of others is instinctually seen as a threat to ourselves via the functioning of motor neurons. But, my point is, frequently, we have no conscious choice in the matter and so it is inaccurate to claim that everyone who acts to help others is ultimately selfish. Mother Theresa chooses to go save lepers in India. That’s a choice and, in the end, she’s choosing to chase after her own utility. So, going by that definition of selfishness (i.e. everyone does what they do because they’re chasing a buzz/utility) it’s a selfish act. However, the reaction of a passerby who sees a random kid/stranger about to walk in front of a bus and suddenly finds themselves grabbing the kid and preventing him from stepping off the sidewalk even though doing so puts them potentially in danger of being hit by the bus themselves–that’s innate. That is not the result of social conditioning, or conscious thought, that is the result of millions of years of evolution over which the individual had no choice at all. Consequently, calling the act selfish is like saying that my knee-jerk reaction to a doctor hitting me with a hammer is me being selfish–it doesn’t fit apply because there is no conscious choice.
Also, on one final note, the type of buzz you are referring to, where individuals are rewarded, is more linked to dopamine. The dopaminergic system in the brain is the brain’s “reward center”. Coke, caffeine, nicotine–the most highly addictive drugs–all operate primarily by stimulation of the brain’s dopaminergic system. When we condition rats, it is the dopaminergic system which is being effected. Oxytocin, on the otherhand, simply links to prosocial behaviors. Specifically, There is a species of voles with oxytocin receptors and a species of voles without. The one with engages in prosocial behavior, the one without is solitary and dicks each other over almost all the time. Given that oxytocin seems to be related purely to social behavior, and not reward (I recently tried the stuff after picking it up in Mexico and there’s no euphoria or rush when you take it) no one is really sure why some individuals seem to experience an increase in the hormone when dicking others over. There is no corresponding increase in their rate of dicking over others when they are given it nasally, so it doesn’t appear to be simply that, for some people, it creates prosocial behaviors and, in others, it creates antisocial behaviors. The only thing that we do know is that women during some period of their menstrual cycle are unaffected by nasally administered oxytocin and will be less altruistic/cooperative since one of the hormones involved in regulating female menstruation (don’t ask me which) is an antagonist for oxytocin (i.e. it prevents oxytocin from binding with its receptor).
Consequently, my own theory is that the brain of most sociopaths (i.e. individuals who dick people over) is ultimately divided. There is the prosocial part, which is trying to induce cooperative behavior by causing a surge of oxytocin in the brain in reaction to stimuli, but that, for some reason, the parts of the brain that would otherwise lead to cooperative behavior are not being activated by the released oxytocin (specifically, the emotional parts of the brain since those are the parts of the brain with the highest concentration of oxytocin receptors). My guess is that they are not being activated because the oxytocin receptors in that part of the brain are either damaged or mutated in some way. Consequently, those individuals with the highest degree of damage, such as psychopaths (i.e. serial killers) end up killing people, not necessarily because it provides them a buzz in the same way altruistic acts provide most of us a “buzz” (I mentioned it only briefly before in my prior comment, but cooperative behavior seems to stimulate the dopaminergic system in most individuals alongside an increase in oxytocin) they commit these behaviors because they literally have no other way of actually feeling, well, anything. Which appears to be what most of studies on serial killers seems to tell us. They literally lack genuine emotional affect and kill because there’s no reason not to. In short, sociopaths are closer to autistic kids than they are to most of humanity. Consequently, comparing the internal motivations of sociopaths to the motivations of most humans is like comparing avocados and oranges. We’re talking about two different species of fruit with motivations that are not even opposite, they’re completely unrelated.
Unless you’re talking about which one is better. In which case, everyone knows avocados are better than oranges because California is awesome and Florida is filled with old people.