She took the snake home and nursed it back to health. She came upon a poisonous snake frozen in the snow. Once upon a time, a woman was picking up firewood. Pathological altruism might be summed up best by the Parable of the Woman and the Snake from the film Natural Born Killers: This is a pathology because helping the ungrateful will quickly end up destroying the helper. A pathological altruist, by contrast, will keep making sacrifices for others even when those others clearly demonstrate that they aren’t grateful. It’s a phenomenon closely related to both narcissistic masochism and virtue signalling.Ī kind but non-pathological person will withdraw their kindness once they see that it isn’t respected. It can be seen everywhere people attempt to stop abuse by showering love on the abusers. In Clown World, pathological altruism manifests as kindess and tolerance towards people who show no inclination to reciprocate it. In populations like this, people can mistakenly come to believe that low rates of predatory behaviour are normal, and therefore precautions do not need to be taken. It’s most common in populations where the crime rate has stayed low for an extended period of time. Pathological altruism arises when a population forgets how dangerous the world naturally is. Too much of it, and it becomes pathological. But there’s an upper limit to how much altruism is appropriate.
This led to the range of pro-social behaviours that we see on display in the world today. In the biological past, groups of social beings that learned to be altruistic outcompeted those who were more selfish.
Altruism is the mortar holding together every community of social beings.
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