Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World

by Matthieu Ricard

That's quite a lot of meditation. It would be good to show that shorter periods of meditation provided benefits.

include in this loving kindness those who have harmed you, even those who are harming humanity in general. That does not mean that you want them to succeed in their malevolent undertakings; you simply form the wish that they give up their hatred, greed, cruelty or indifference, and that they become kind and concerned for the well-being of others.

We should fully and sincerely rejoice in their accomplishments and wish that their qualities never diminish, but on the contrary persist and increase.

For me, jealousy made me want to be like others, to emulate them. It was a large motivator for improving my career and learning. Perhaps this is different because I didn't wish for others to fail but felt great inadequacy towards myself.

I get the 'there is no self' idea but this sounds like Freudian crazy-talk and is going off into the territory of psychology.

We take it for granted that we perceive things as they are. We attribute permanence to what is ephemeral and perceive as autonomous entities what is actually a vast network of constantly changing relationships.

the ego is nothing but a mental designation affixed to a dynamic process, a useful concept that allows us to connect an ensemble of interdependent and ever-changing factors that incorporate perceptions of the environment, sensations, mental images, emotions, and thoughts.

Reality isn't anything we can succintly define either. Rather approximated and simplified using models. Ego seems to be just another model, albiet built in to our brain.

people suffering from psychic disorders are regarded as beings who have a fragmented, fragile, deficient self.

But that is confusing ego with self-confidence.

How can there be self confidence if there is no self? What are you being confident in?

It encourages independence and self-reliance. It demands that the individual has the right to promote his own interests, without having to take the interests of society into consideration.

To be fair, many societies (governments and culture) made unfair and unreasonable demands on people. Valuing indidviduals was a response to that.

It could be argued that someone who does not care for others, cannot expect, much less demand, that others care for him.

Yes but that's an argument for mutual altruism (exchange/trade)

It first designates a perfectly legitimate way of thinking that commands respect for the individual, and insists that the individual should not be used as a simple instrument in the service of society.

I noted this earlier

“the belief that the needs of each person are more important than the needs of the whole society or group.”

This is Captain Kirk's argument in Star Trek 6 contrasting with Spock's approach. Though to be fair, he was referring to preferential treatment and loyalty to friends.

[Today] the balance has tilted too far towards the individual pursuit of private interest and success.

I think that if you had to have the good and bad of either, that individualism is progress compared to socialism but perhaps further progress can be made to get the best of both worlds. I don't agree with the "good old gays" arguments.

To want to do everything that occurs to us is to have a strange concept of freedom, since in that way we become the slave of all the thoughts that agitate our minds.

But the fact that they are *our* thoughts that we are slave to is progress.

Rousseau’s idea that the first humans were without any social bonds and lived freely and independently.

Rousseau is the one who developed the idea of the "Noble Savage"

in Western Europe and North America, 40% of the elderly live alone, as opposed to only 3% in Hong Kong,

I tend to agree with this idea of caring for and living close to family. Though I live far from my own parents.

“Since human life in the strict sense is untransferable, it is essentially solitude, radical solitude.”14

Entre Nous

Instead of an interdependent ensemble that functions as such, we have become a “heap” of individualities that make do, each on his own.

I think the idea is that we each act individually but according to the rule of law/policy etc. so it's not that we don't cooperate but that we do so in a very reciprocal manner.

He has little regard for others, who are for him only instruments useful to enhance his own image.

We as Americans are getting a healthy dose of this with Trump.

Donald Trump,

Here he is!

university buildings,

This is being generous calling them "university buildings"

According to a survey carried out in 2006, becoming famous is the main ambition for young people in the United States

I can't say I'm immune to this. My main goal was to be popular when I was younger. Not that I wanted to engage with more friends but more that I wanted people to fawn over me and think I was cool. Even now my current job comes with a necessary and hopefully healthy helping of narcissism.

An ad on NBC proclaims, “You may not realize it, but everyone is born with their one true love—themselves. If you like you, everyone else will, too.”

During the 80s (and maybe the 90s) in the US there was this obsession with self-confidence and making sure kids had it.

The epidemic of narcissism is quickly spreading through China and Russia among the nouveaux riches who have emerged in the last dozen years.

Narcissism among rich people is likely a cause of inequality

i.e. your level of self-confidence does not fit the facts.

forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline.”

Electronic conversations are terse, fast, and sometimes brutal.

In the past thirty years, Japan has experienced an explosion of cults and a great diversity of religious trends. According to the governmental Agency for Cultural Affairs, 182,000 different religious associations are registered in the country, and at least 500 new religions are represented by these associations.

I didn't know evangelical churches were like that but it makes sense.

the narcissistic exaggeration of the self, closes the door to all personal progress, since in order to learn, you must first realize that you don’t know.

Or be open to the possibility that tou don't know. Being open to the possibility that tou are wrong or that your knowledge is incomplete is related.

to seem instead of be.

It's true that it is a waste for others to not recognize goodness fully when it occurs but often the part about doing good in the first place is forgotten.

Impostor syndrome is almost a phenomenon made up to excuse lackluster performance. In reality it should have nothing to do with performance and just about belonging.

Humble people are not beautiful, intelligent people who take pride in convincing themselves they’re ugly and stupid;

“Few are sufficiently wise to prefer censure, which is useful, to praise, which is treacherous,”

it’s when the tree is loaded with fruit that the branches bend to the ground,

What is a person like me who is harsh on himself if not humble or narcississtic?

truly altruistic actions are abundant on a daily basis, disproving the thesis that human motivation is systematically selfish by nature.

This doesn't prove that motivation is selfish by nature. What if humans learned to be less selfish? What if it is part of culture? Testing children doesn't help either because people get morevselfish as we get older. And children aren't as altruistic as it seems at first blush. They compete with siblings fpr the attention and resources of their siblings.

he should not depart from the good if he can hold to it, but he should be ready to enter on evil if he has to.”

This just means that leaders must weigh the costs and benefits in each situation and remain flexible and open minded. I don't think morality factors into it much.

That would be imposing on individuals the unacceptable obligation to share resources they earned from the sweat of their brows with people they don’t even know, without any advantage in return.

This is obviously a fallicious argument because no accomplishment made by a person was made soely by them.

Rand clumsily sets in place the cornerstone of her intellectual building: man’s basic desire is to remain alive and to be happy; therefore he must be selfish.

Lost in the sphere of mental constructs, Rand ignored the fact that in reality—that reality she claimed to love above everything—altruism is neither sacrificial nor a cause of frustration, but constitutes one of the main sources of happiness and fulfillment among humans.

I suppose this is because humans are complex and not "logical"; we evolved in a complex illogical system. Though I do question "logic" in the sense that it is normally defined. I think it's plausible that many, or most, things about humans could be understood to be much more logical if only they were understood better.

Egoism is an arbitrary doctrine in the same way that racism is arbitrary.

We should care for the interest of other people for the same reason we care for our own interests; for their needs and desires are comparable to our own.

While I don't disagree with this sentiment the very fact that we *are* different and that resources are finite gives ourselves a slight priority.

The theses of Freud and of the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, according to which the tendency to aggression is a primary and autonomous impulse among humans and animals, have been invalidated by many research studies.

Maybe not *primary* but certainly it's an important human phenomenon. We don't *learn* to be violent.

For Freud, morality and prosocial behavior are born solely from a feeling of guilt and from defense mechanisms used by the ego to handle the restrictions that society imposes on the innate aggressive impulses of the individual, as well as the irrational demands of the superego.

I disagree with this but to think that humans wpuld be peaceful etc. if it wasn't for nasty culture or society is naive and ignores our (pre-)history.

As for Darwin, he was, on the contrary, convinced that moral sense was innate and acquired over the course of evolution.

It is precisely this moral sense that causes us to be violent in many cases.

True freedom, however, does not consist in doing whatever comes to mind, but in being master of oneself.