The Marketplace of Big Ideas.

Nietzsche once said that we learn more from the errors of great minds than we do from the truths of small minds.

It follows, logically, that we learn more from the errors of great minds than we learn from the errors of self-important mediocrities.

What matters is that we learn. And that means engaging with big ideas, a practice that has largely gone out of fashion. People who indulge in deconstruction are doing something to the text, not learning something from it.

In its Schumpeter column the Economist explains that business leaders have much to gain by learning about the big ideas,that is, by studying the great philosophers.

In fairness, the problem begins much earlier than the first corporate retreat. How many students in the American university system have had the opportunity to study Aristotle and Plato, Hume and Kant?

In an age of political correctness, these thinkers, and others of their ilk are most often labelled part of the white male canon. In many cases their works are not read. If they are read, students are told what is wrong with them, not what they can learn from them.

Worse yet, many students learn about ideas by reading Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler. If you want to know what Johnny and Jane don’t know how to think, you need look no further.

The business world is not much better. Schumpeter suggests that business retreats are more likely to engage budding executives in tug-of-wars and even sensitivity training. Surely, they are less controversial than big ideas.

He sets out the argument:

IT IS hard to rise to the top in business without doing an outward-bound course. You spend a precious weekend in sweaty activity—kayaking, climbing, abseiling and the like. You endure lectures on testing character and building trust. And then you scarper home as fast as you can. These strange rituals may produce a few war stories to be told over a drink. But in general they do nothing more than enrich the companies that arrange them.

It is time to replace this rite of managerial passage with something much more powerful: inward-bound courses. Rather than grappling with nature, business leaders would grapple with big ideas. Rather than proving their leadership abilities by leading people across a ravine, they would do so by leading them across an intellectual chasm. The format would be simple. A handful of future leaders would gather in an isolated hotel and devote themselves to studying great books.

Let’s say we want to teach executives how to engage with the great books. How would we do so?

Schumpeter responds:

Inward-bound courses would do wonders for “thought leadership”. There are good reasons why the business world is so preoccupied by that notion at the moment: the only way to prevent your products from being commoditised or your markets from being disrupted is to think further ahead than your competitors. But companies that pose as thought leaders are often “thought laggards”: risk analysts who recycle yesterday’s newspapers, and management consultants who champion yesterday’s successes just as they are about to go out of business.

The only way to become a real thought leader is to ignore all this noise and listen to a few great thinkers. You will learn far more about leadership from reading Thucydides’s hymn to Pericles than you will from a thousand leadership experts. You will learn far more about doing business in China from reading Confucius than by listening to “culture consultants”. Peter Drucker remained top dog among management gurus for 50 years not because he attended more conferences but because he marinated his mind in great books: for example, he wrote about business alliances with reference to marriage alliances in Jane Austen.

Surely, he is right. To take one example, how many executives doing business in China have read Confucius? How many know what it means in Chinese culture to save face? How many of them understand what a shame culture is?

If they are getting their information about shame from Brene Brown, they don't have a clue.

Since I once wrote a book about these topics, they are near and dear to my mind. Yet, the truth remains, if you want to learn about China, you should read and study Confucius.

Schumpeter recommends that companies offer philosophy seminars. He calls them inward-bound courses:

Inward-bound courses would offer significant improvements on all this. Mindfulness helps people to relax but empties their minds. “Ideas retreats” feature the regular circus of intellectual celebrities. Sessions on the couch with corporate philosophers isolate managers from their colleagues. Inward-bound courses offer the prospect of filling the mind while forming bonds with fellow-strivers. They are an idea whose time has come.

But, how could we sell such an idea, especially when it is sure to be controversial.

One might begin by saying that philosophy will help executives formulate policy and articulate concepts. Knowing how to think will help them to lead and to manage. After all, executives who know everything there is to know about logistics or IT might be unprepared to deal with complex human dilemmas.

Out political discourse also suffers because too many though leaders cannot deal with big ideas. How many of those who tout the value of equality, in the sense of equal rights, are confused to the point of thinking that equal means same? How much nonsense is purveyed around the notion that everything a man can do a woman can do too… and vice versa?

And how many of our thought leaders understand the dangers in trying to make life fulfill an idea, a theory or a narrative?

To be fair and balanced, how many people on the other side of the political spectrum really understand the idea of freedom? Or better, how many people think it’s an idea and how many people think it’s a practice?

How many people believe that freedom is another term for free-for-all? How many people believe that in a free market everyone can do as he pleases? How many people can explain the difference between freedom for responsibility and freedom from responsibility?

Those who love freedom and who tout the virtue of freedom often do not know how to define the concept. Thus, they end up confused to the point where some of them believe that multiculturalism is the ultimate expression of freedom.

We also see the cost of failing to understand big ideas when billionaires, feeling a need to break out of the constraints imposed by their businesses, decide that they should be making policy.

A billionaire who does not know his way around the world of ideas is more easily manipulated by someone who does. He can be manipulated into giving his fortune to people who pose as experts, but who want merely to advance their own cultural agenda.

Whoever decided that this or that billionaire knows how schools should teach children? The unfolding debacle that is Common Core seems largely to have originated in the mind of a billionaire who had too much time on his hands and who allowed his mind to be hijacked by people who want to impose their bad ideas on an unsuspecting public.

And, think about what would have happened if Sheryl Sandberg knew enough philosophy to have seen that the empty platitudes she learned in Women’s Studies are merely bad advice?

After all, what is “leaning in” but macho posturing? In other terms, it’s a bluff.  It is of very limited value, whether it is practiced by a woman or a man.

The point of any negotiation is to achieve a goal, not to pretend to be tougher than you are. Sometimes it’s good to lean in; sometimes it’s counterproductive. Some of those who learn to assert themselves might gain an advantage from it. Most, however, will not.

Obviously, it’s worse when the public debate over ideas is being led by celebrities. When people in the media spend time debating ideas that were promoted by an empty-headed celebrity they harm the ideas and make it even more difficult for anyone, business leader, politician or man on the street to think coherently, cogently and rationally.

Climate Change Crusaders

Jesse Singal reports in New York Magazine that true believing global warmists are dismayed because conservatives doubt in man-caused climate change.

No significant change in environmental policy can take place, climate change crusaders, without the support of conservatives. They imagine that everyone, including conservatives, must jump on their bandwagon, lest it get stuck in the climate change mud.

This means that conservatives need therapy. But, you knew that already.

But, how to change hearts and minds without using a couch?

Liberal psychologists—that would be nearly all of them-- are hard at work conjuring up ways to persuade conservatives to take climate change seriously. They are undeterred by the fact that the climate has not changed very much in the last two decades. They are happy to ignore the fact that reputable scientists, writing in peer reviewed journals, have questioned whether climate change, such as it has been, is caused by greenhouse gasses or other, non-human influences.

Environmentalists divide the world into those who grasp the scientific truth of climate change and those who deny it. The latter group presumably rejects scientific fact. It prefers to wallow in superstition.

Moreover, conservatives are morally deficient for not feeling the appropriate  guilt for colluding with polluters to destroy the planet. Absence of guilt would than count as a sign of psychopathology.

Environmentalists believe that therapy will help conservatives to overcome their denial and buy into yet another massive guilt trip.

Psychotherapy has not come a very long way at all.

One suspects that the zealots have gotten it backwards. Their blind love for the Goddess Nature has caused them to embrace a dogmatic belief, while mistaking it for scientific fact. There is nothing scientific about their “settled science.”

Rather than brand conservatives as deniers, why not say that they are skeptical. Since they are closer to the real world than to the fictional world of environmentalists, perhaps they are right to ask about the cost, in human life, in human progress, in economic development of implementing the programs that environmentalists hold dear.

One might argue that environmentalists are dogmatists borne aloft on religious fervor while conservatives are more scientifically minded.

In point of fact, scientific truth does not depend on how many people believe it. Only within a religion or a cult does it matter that everyone embrace the same dogmas wholeheartedly.

After all, as I keep repeating, after Wittgenstein, there is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow.

Moreover, there is no such thing as settled science.

For the edification of the global warming dogmatists I quote the words of Nobel prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman:

It is necessary and true that all of the things we say in science, all of the conclusions, are uncertain, because they are only conclusions. They are guesses as to what is going to happen, and you cannot know what will happen, because you have not made the most complete experiments. . . .

Scientists, therefore, are used to dealing with doubt and uncertainty. All scientific knowledge is uncertain. This experience with doubt and uncertainty is important. I believe that it is of very great value, and one that extends beyond the sciences. I believe that to solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right. Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it.

So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty. Some of them are most unsure; some of them are nearly sure; but none is absolutely certain. Scientists are used to this. We know that it is consistent to be able to live and not know. Some people say, ’How can you live without knowing?’ I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing.

Or else, philosopher John Gray described Charles Darwin’s approach to scientific truth:

Hesitant, doubtful, and often painfully perplexed, Darwin understood science as an empirical investigation in which truth is never self-evident and theories are always provisional. 

                                                                                                  

For environmentalists, it’s not about the facts. Being zealots and cult followers they select out only those facts that prove their argument. They ignore all facts that would contradict their beliefs and dismiss all scientists who do not accept their narrative.

In this case, too, they are not within the realm of scientific inquiry. Richard Feynman also pointed out that true scientists report all the facts, all the data and all the information... especially those that would appear to disprove a hypothesis. True scientists do not cherry-pick only the facts that prove their point.

So, the environmentalists have gotten it backwards. But, you suspected that already, didn’t you?

Singal offers an astute observation:

It’s worth pointing out, of course, that for many conservatives (and liberals), the current debate about climate change isn’t really about competing piles of evidence or about facts at all — it’s about identity. Climate change has come to serve as shorthand for which side you’re on, and conservatives tend to be deeply averse to what climate crusaders represent (or what they think they represent).

But, if the debate--being led, as it is, by the climate change crusaders-- does not concern facts and evidence, it is not about science. It is, quite correctly, about identity.

To be more precise, it’s about the identity that some people gain by belonging to a group of true believers who want their beliefs to be accepted as dogmatic truth by everyone. Apparently, dissent threatens their identity… as cult followers.

Is Psychoanalysis a Scam?

If anyone else had called psychoanalysis a scam, he would have felt the full fury of the Freudian horde.

Coming from Jacques Lacan, the most influential Freudian since Freud, the judgment was not so easily dismissed.

Unfortunately for those who still hold fast to the Freudian faith, Lacan added that analysts’ words, their interpretations were bullshit. And he predicted that the practice to which he had devoted his life would soon become an historical relic.

Lacan made these remarks in Belgium in 1977. They should have been noted and debated. They were not, not even by Lacan’s most fawning followers. They were ignored.

By 1977, Lacan had amassed a significant cult following in Europe and Latin America. Many of them worshiped him as a god and took his word as holy writ. They were convinced that theirs was the truth faith. It had to be, since so many of them were thriving. How could they accept that they were scamming their patients?

At the time, very few Parisian analysts even knew what Lacan had said. It’s ironic, but many of them had mastered the art of repression.

When the statement appeared in the French press in 1980, analysts continued to ignore it. Some told themselves that Lacan did not mean what he said. Or better, that if he meant what he said he did not know what he was saying.

The net effect was that most of Lacan’s followers did not even know that he had accused them (and presumably himself) of scamming their patients.

In 1977, I was in Paris studying with the man himself. I was attending Lacan’s seminars faithfully. I was teaching psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII. As a member in good standing of the Lacanian community, I was privy to most of the relevant and irrelevant local gossip.

In 1980 I was practicing psychoanalysis in New York. I was in continuous, close contact with the world of French psychoanalysis.

Yet, I did not hear that Lacan had compared psychoanalysis to a criminal enterprise until 2011. By that time I had long since abandoned psychoanalytic practice.

Of course, American analysts knew nothing about it. Having dismissed Lacan as a heretic they paid no attention to his theoretical lucubrations.  

By now, however, Lacan’s name has become so prominent in the world of international psychoanalysis that his words demand attention.  If American analysts want to continue to call themselves psychoanalysts, they will be obliged to respond to a charge issued by a man who is recognized around the world as Freud’s most important intellectual heir.

But, what did the notoriously confounding Frenchman mean when he called psychoanalysis a scam?

Evidently, he was saying that psychoanalysts had no business pretending to be mental health professionals conducting a clinical practice. Lacan had recognized that psychoanalysis could neither treat nor cure mental illness. If analysts continued to pretend that they could, they were receiving payment and fostering hope for a payoff  they could not deliver. Thus, they were scamming the public.

But, how could it be? Most psychoanalysts are licensed healers. It is true in France and it is true around most of the world. In America, especially, they have never been shy about showing off their credentials. Many of them even believe that theirs is a scientific discipline.

Obviously, a psychoanalyst who still thinks he is a scientist needs more help than any therapy can provide.

When it came to question of clinical effectiveness, most psychoanalysts have tried to have it both ways.

On the one hand, they tout their medical or paramedical credentials. On the other, they insist that they are only offering knowledge and understanding, insight and awareness.

They will say, as Lacan once did, that if a patient in psychoanalysis gets better, it is a fortunate accident. Insight is nice, but it neither treats nor cures.

Of course, Lacan was not telling his followers to toss their Freud books in the poubelle.  He wanted psychoanalysis to fulfill its destiny by becoming an instrument of cultural revolution and thought reform. He wanted to lead psychoanalysis out of the clinic and into the cultural arena.

If psychoanalysis could not cure depression or anxiety, it would find a higher calling by curing civilization (Ger. Kultur) of its discontents. Taking up arms in the culture war was surely better than competing against medication and cognitive therapy.

A cynic might well imagine, more or less correctly, that Freudians needed to blame someone or something for their record of clinical failures. Wasn’t “civilization” a convenient target?

If Freudian psychoanalysis does not teach you how to shift the blame it has taught you nothing.

To make psychoanalysis a player in the culture wars, Lacan started talking about “the Freudian cause.” Rallying people to an ideological cause was surely safer than risking the future of Freudian theory on its ability to treat or cure mental illness.

Better yet, how do you adjudge the success or failure of civilizational transformation? We have a fairly clear idea of what a successful treatment produces; we have a far murkier idea of how to assess a cultural transformation.

His boundless hubris notwithstanding, Freud did not really believe that he could cure civilization of its discontents.  It did not stop his most devoted disciples from trying accomplish a task that Freud believed to be futile. They believed that they were being more Freudian than Freud.

Freud saw the history of civilization  as a dramatic conflict between libidinous urges that were seeking to express themselves and repressive forces that were trying to stifle them.

He saw no way to resolve the conflict. Believing negotiated compromise impossible, Freud concluded that human beings could never get along. If mental health involved emotional tranquility, spiritual serenity or harmonious social relations, neither Freud nor his most serious followers believed that it could ever be achieved.

Believing that life was a tragedy—a Greek tragedy, in particular—true Freudians believed that the optimistic, can-do spirit that we often identify as mentally healthy was an illusion. They preferred to see people wallow in the Freudian truth, the better to turn—in Freud’s words-- misery into common unhappiness.

But then, how can you live the Freudian truth?

By Lacan’s lights, you needed first to become a true-believing Freudian, a totally convinced cult follower.

Theyn you should live the civilizational drama between libido and repression by turning your life into a perpetual psychodrama.

It will not solve your problems, but it will show that you have truly understood Freud.

[Adopted from The Last Psychoanalyst.]

The Disorganization Person

Among the casualties of the counterculture is the Organization Man.

So explains David Brooks, and his point is well worth considering.

The term Organization Man comes to us from a 1956 book by William H. Whyte. At a time when America was the dominant world power, when American soldiers were using the martial habits they had learned in warfare to rebuild a great nation, Whyte, among others, denounced the American Organization Man as a mindless automaton who lacked creativity and individuality.

He recommended that companies, and presumably armies would function better if everyone dispensed with archaic notions like loyalty and commitment. Thus, even before the Vietnam counterculture, the Me First attitude was promoted.

Whyte’s vision notwithstanding, his utopian idea produced the dystopian Disorganization Person.

It took the Vietnam War to bring Whyte’s attitude to the masses, largely, it is fair to say, because the greatest of American institutions, the government and the military was anything but successful in Vietnam.

Or so everyone thought.

Of course, the difference between Dwight Eisenhower, successful military leader and successful, fatherly president and John F. Kennedy, elected because of his charisma and celebrity, not his experience or demonstrated competence foretold the replacement of the Organization Man by the cult to celebrity.

Eisenhower was a man’s man. Kennedy was a ladies’ man.

Today, Eisenhower is largely ignored, while Kennedy, the architect of the Vietnam War, war that was largely conducted by people he had put into office, is lionized and idolized.

Anyway, the Organization Man is over and done with. In fact, you would not even be allowed to use the term any more. You would have to say Organization Person.

In any event, many people have found Whyte’s idea enormously seductive. Not one seemed to notice that the assault on civic virtues could not end very well. Ask yourself what happens when you dispense with loyalty toward your spouse, your friends, your community or your nation?

What happens when institutions are no longer run in the most efficient and effective manner, but aim at producing creative individuality and self-actualization?

More often than not creative, individualistic solutions are not solutions at all. They are ways to cover up the fact that the person has failed. It’s like what happens in public schools when children cannot write proper English and are still given good grades because their teachers believe that their incoherent ramblings are in fact poetry.

Brooks describes what we have lost:

A few generations ago, people grew up in and were comfortable with big organizations - the army, corporations and agencies.

They organized huge construction projects in the 1930s, gigantic industrial mobilization during World War II, highway construction and corporate growth during the 1950s. Institutional stewardship, the care and reform of big organizations, was more prestigious.

Now nobody wants to be an Organization Man. We like startups, disrupters and rebels. Creativity is honored more than the administrative execution.

Post-Internet, many people assume that big problems can be solved by swarms of small, loosely networked nonprofits and social entrepreneurs. Big hierarchical organizations are dinosaurs.

Among the large organizations that no longer function very well, if at all, are government agencies. Witness the Secret Service. A demoralized workforce, incompetent management… and you get the scandals that have caused its director to resign.

Julia Pierson was elevated to her leadership role because the political powers had come to believe that the biggest problem in the agency was the tendency of agents to whore around. They decided that putting a woman in charge would solve the whoring around problem and would therefore lead to more efficient functioning.

Ann Althouse wrote:

It's as if they thought having a female director would fix — image-fix — their women-related problems. There's more to the Secret Service than just making it seem as if someone is stopping them from whoring. Did she even succeed at that? Or were we just supposed to feel better about it?

Political correctness, is based on the notion that institutions will best succeed when they allow each individual the maximum in creative self-fulfillment. But this also entails ridding the institutions of all the sins that are supposedly inhibiting that aim: those being racism, sexism and homophobia.

How is it working out?

The Washington Times (via Maggie's Farm) headlines a recent story this way:

Navy sailors distrust commanders, fear crippling political correctness

Complain of zero-tolerance disciplinary environment, excessive political correctness

Should great institutions, like government agencies, the military and  corporations be judged by how well they do their job or should they be dedicated to offering individuals the maximum in self-actualization?

When Marissa Mayer famously outlawed telecommuting at Yahoo! many people were outraged at the corporate interference in different individuals’ pursuit of happiness. Naturally, they all argued that people function better when they telecommute, but they failed to notice that a Yahoo! filled with telecommuters was dysfunctional and chaotic.

When ideologues look at these organizations and declare that there are not enough women and minorities are they saying that the organizations would better function with a more diverse staff or are they saying that they do not care whether the organizations function well… as long as they “look like America?”

Just as Whyte suggested that more creativity and individuality would enhance corporate functioning, today’s proponents of social justice declare that having a more diverse workforce will do wonders for Silicon Valley. It remains to be seen.

How to Improve Your Memory

You can throw away all the memory-enhancing pills and supplements.

Science has discovered two sure-fire ways to improve your memory.

First: resistance training… that is, weight lifting.

Second: beer… that’s right, a brew.

For the first, via Melissa Dahl at New York Magazine:

Researchers from the University of Georgia Tech found that people who did a simple resistance exercise for just 20 minutes demonstrated stronger memory abilities than people who didn’t exercise. 

For the second, we turn to CBS Seattle:

A researcher at Oregon State Universtity points to a compound found in hops, one of the main ingredientsin beer, improved cognitive function in a group of mice.

The mice were given large doses of xanthohumol, a flavinoid found in hops. Flavonoids are compounds found in plants that often give them their color.

Then the mice were run through a special maze to determine whether they showed signs of improved spacial memory and cognitive flexibility.

“Xanthohumol can speed the metabolism, reduce fatty acids in the liver and, at least with young mice, appeared to improve their cognitive flexibility, or higher level thinking,” reported Daniel Zamzow, with the University of Wisconsin. “Unfortunately it did not reduce palmitoylation in older mice, or improve their learning or cognitive performance, at least in the amounts of the compound we gave them.”

In fairness, we underscore the fact that the hops in beer only do wonders in the brains of younger mice. They seem not to be as effective in older mice.

The researchers add the caveat that they did not test the older mice with larger amounts of beer.

How Exercise Treats Depression

We all know that aerobic exercise is an effective treatment against depression. Yet, many people who would profit from more exercise do not do it because they do not understand how physical exercise can impact a mental state.

Recent research has addressed the question.

Gretchen Reynolds reports in The New York Times:

Scientists have also known that exercise seems to cushion against depression. Working out somehow makes people and animals emotionally resilient, studies have shown.

But precisely how exercise, a physical activity, can lessen someone’s risk for depression, a mood state, has been mysterious.

How do scientists diagnose depression in mice?

Reynolds explains:

We can’t ask mice if they are feeling cheerful or full of woe. Instead, researchers have delineated certain behaviors that indicate depression in mice. If animals lose weight, stop seeking out a sugar solution when it’s available — because, presumably, they no longer experience normal pleasures — or give up trying to escape from a cold-water maze and just freeze in place, they are categorized as depressed.

Submit the mice to stress and they develop symptoms that characterize depression.

But, isn’t that an interesting suggestion in and of itself? Presumably, the mice do not have the mental means to do more than suffer the stress. Human beings, however, do not necessarily turn stress into depression. They can adapt to stress; they can manage stress; they can avoid it; they can submit to it.

In other words, human beings have free will. Subjected to stress they might withdraw from life and hole up in their rooms. But they can find other ways to manage and to overcome stress.

As for the scientific findings, Reynolds writes:

A wealth of earlier research by these scientists and others had shown that aerobic exercise, in both mice and people, increases the production within muscles of an enzyme called PGC-1alpha. In particular, exercise raises levels of a specific subtype of the enzyme known unimaginatively as PGC-1alpha1. The Karolinska scientists suspected that this enzyme somehow creates conditions within the body that protect the brain against depression.

She continues:

So the scientists looked for which processes were being most notably intensified in their PGC-1alpha1-rich mice. They found one in particular, involving a substance called kynurenine that accumulates in human and animal bloodstreams after stress. Kynurenine can pass the blood-brain barrier and, in animal studies, has been shown to cause damaging inflammation in the brain, leading, it is thought, to depression.

But in the mice with high levels of PGC-1alpha1, the kynurenine produced by stress was set upon almost immediately by another protein expressed in response to signals from the PGC-1alpha1. This protein changed the kynurenine, breaking it into its component parts, which, interestingly, could not pass the blood-brain barrier. In effect, the extra PGC-1alpha1 had called up guards that defused the threat to the animals’ brains and mood from frequent stress.

I will leave the brain science to others, but if exercise can modify brain chemistry, perhaps changes in the way one deals with stress can do so as well.

Extreme Altruism

In the case of empathy or sympathy, can there be too-much-of-a-good-thing?

If psychopaths, by the common definition lack empathy for other people can there be people who have too much empathy or sympathy for others?If psychopaths exploit others ruthlessly, super-empaths would make self-sacrifice a fetish.

Researchers call these people with the ill-chosen term: “anti-psychopaths.” But, if a psychopath is all take and no give, these people might well become the perfect enablers for psychopaths… being all give and no take.

They might allow themselves to be used and abused, at times to a frightening extent, because they want to be more giving than anyone else.

Melissa Dahl reports on some new research in New York Magazine:

New research she just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests an answer: If the dark, scary end of the caring continuum is inhabited by psychopaths, way down at the other end is a group of what she calls “anti-psychopaths” — ultra-do-gooders who are extraordinarily compassionate, prosocial, and empathetic.

[Georgetown psychologist Abigail] Marsh wanted to study the characteristics of these sorts of people, so she sought so-called “altruistic kidney donors” who offer up a kidney to anyone who needs it (as opposed to those who donate a kidney to a friend or loved one), figuring they would fit the bill.

Altruistic kidney donors fit into a debate that has long been raging among psychologists and others who study human nature: Does true altruism — good deeds for the sake of good deeds — really exist? And if so, how did it evolve? “In theory, you’d have a species where nobody wants to help anybody else,” said Marsh. “And the fact that humans do is, I think, really amazing and not well understood ... So these kidney donors, they’ve done something I call extraordinary altruism, because it’s extremely unusual — it’s something most people would not do. It’s a pretty major decision to undertake, especially for a stranger.”

Altruistic kidney donors voluntarily sign up for an invasive surgery, which results in the removal of a perfectly healthy organ, all because a complete stranger (whom they’ll never meet) needs it. And, as you might guess, these donors are very rare — there are fewer than 1,400 in the U.S., Marsh said — but they help meet a huge need for donor kidneys in the U.S. (Kidney disease is among the top ten causes of death for both men and women in the U.S., according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.)

How do we explain super-empaths? Perhaps they want to be role models who will lead the world toward a more moral future. They might believe that they are sacrificing something of value in order to be the antidote to selfishness and psychopathy.

Researchers believe that super-empaths are genuine altruists. They give more than most; they are kinder and nicer than most… surely this cannot be seen as pathological behavior.

Unless, of course, they are more prone to sacrifice themselves for strangers than they are for their friends and family.

Obviously, no one is going to fault anyone for giving up a kidney to a stranger. A sacrifice that saves a life must certainly count as the ultimate in benevolence.

But is it really true to say that these extreme altruists gain no benefit from their sacrifice? Don’t they get to revel in their moral superiority? Even if the recipient of the kidney does not know who gave it to him, the friends and family of the super empath certainly do.

The psychologists note, however, that extreme altruists are very humble about their capacity for empathy.

Dahl describes them:

The world’s nicest people, in other words, don’t even grasp how nice they really are. Which, if you think about it, makes them even nicer.

It might be the case that they are competing to see who is the nicest. If so, researchers have crowned them the kings of our moral universe. Unless, of course, they are being exploited for the benefit of others.

But then, questions arise.

How do we know whether the person who offers the kidney to a stranger likes to feel that other people are in his debt, that they owe him something… like their lives? Does he believe that if he himself is in dire need, a stranger will rescue him? Perhaps he believes that his goodness will reduce his time in Purgatory.

And yet, can you ever really eliminate the element of reciprocal exchange? Even if your true reward will be delivered in the afterlife, you are still making an exchange.

Moral beings reciprocate favors. If you have received a gift from a stranger you will be more likely to return the favor… not necessarily to the stranger… but to someone else.

Perhaps self-sacrificing altruists want to provoke a cycle of virtue, thus to make the world a kinder, gentler place.

But, Steven Pinker explained, people often do good deeds without any expectation of their being reciprocated:

Nor does reciprocal altruism — the evolutionary rationale behind fairness — imply that people do good deeds in the cynical expectation of repayment down the line. We all know of unrequited good deeds, like tipping a waitress in a city you will never visit again and falling on a grenade to save platoon mates. These bursts of goodness are not as anomalous to a biologist as they might appear.

One might suggest here that tipping the waitress is a payment for services rendered. Being part of an exchange, it involves reciprocity. The tipper has been rewarded before the fact. As for falling on a grenade to save your platoon mates, one might believe that the return on investment will be enjoyed by others, by friends, family and even country.

Pinker added:

Sympathy prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone in need for whom it would go the furthest. Anger protects a person against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by impelling him to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship.

When someone asks you for a favor, you normally grant it. I would quibble a bit over whether your actions are motivated by sympathy, rather than, say, generosity, but if you refuse to do someone a favor you are saying that you are not a friend.

Obviously, if someone does you a favor you are obliged to return it. If you fail to do so, Pinker suggests, you have accepted the first favor on false premises and stand exposed as a cheat.

Participation in such exchanges defines your moral being. Failure to uphold such responsibilities shows you to be suffering from a character defect.

But, isn’t there a problem in the example chosen. Doesn’t the choice of people who are willing to give a kidney to a stranger load the dice? Would these extreme altruists be more or less altruistic if they had received payment for the kidney? Are those who give up a kidney for a relative or a friend be less altruistic, because somewhat more interested than those who donate to a stranger? If someone gives a kidney to a stranger who belongs to his community, isn’t there something of a social link between the donor and the recipient?

From here the concept becomes even more complicated. We will not be able to solve the complexities here, but we should be aware of the difficulties in conceptualizing the issue, difficulties that the example of kidney donors obscures.

For example, sociologist Emile Durkheim identified a class of people who commit suicide for altruistic reasons. Some of them kill themselves because they feel that they only cause trouble and want to do one good thing for other people. Others, like military leaders, take their own lives as a way of taking responsibility for defeat. Presumably, they are relieving their troops of the responsibility for failure.

And then there are cases where abused spouses who stay in their marriages because they want to continue to provide a stable home life for their children.

Are they making an altruistic sacrifice for their children? Do they expect to be rewarded in kind or is the well-being of their children a sufficient reward?

What about people who suffer abuse because they want to please a partner who enjoys abusing people. Are they still being abused? Would we say that they are being nice? Do they think of themselves as being nice or being accommodating? Or are they so desperate that they will put up with anything in order to sustain a semblance of a relationship?

And then there are those who make what appear to be altruistic sacrifices when the sacrifices effectively cost them nothing.

A billionaire who gives a few million dollars to charity is not really making a sacrifice. The money will not in any way cause him to change his life style. Is he being altruistic if he is not sacrificing anything of value to him? Or is he just showing off?