The Knell of Altruism

 The lowing herd winding slowly o’er the lea, illustration from an old edition of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751)

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

Note: This paper was presented on June 7, 2025 at the annual conference of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, in Atlantic City, NJ

Among the sources I used for this paper are some oldies in sociobiology: “A Naturalistic View of Man” (1969) by George Crile, Jr, “Biological Roots of Human Behavior” (1991) by Timothy Goldsmith, and “The Imperial Animal” (1971) by Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox.  We mustn’t let these go out of style. They are gems.

I attended the first conference of HBES 36 years ago at Evanston Illinois. In the audience for my paper — on “The Evolution of Morality” — were (I kid you not): Richard Alexander, d 2018, Bill Hamilton, d 2000, Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, d 2018, George Williams, d 2010, my buddy EO Wilson, d 2021, and Richard Dawkins, happily still with us, a young 83.

Photo of Richard Alexander on cover of book edited by Kyle Summers and Bernard Crespi

The title of today’s paper is sort of the opposite of my 1989 offering.  It is “The Knell of Altruism.” That’s ‘knell’, as in the bells that are rung at a funeral. Yes, I mean to suggest that altruism is on the way out. But how is that possible? Altruism is an instinct. So how can it go out?

Charles Darwin wrote, in his 1861 book, The Descent of Man, that each act of altruism “pays” for the individual. If it’s done between two persons, the giver of the favor can happily expect it to be reciprocated later. If it’s done to help the whole society, even sacrificing one’s life, it still pays, insofar as it raises the prospects of his family and thus his genes — although Darwin did not know the concept of genes.

I am here to say that this doesn’t work anymore because society today is no longer a natural entity. The state runs society and the state’s interests are not your interests.  In many areas, the state’s interest seems distinctly opposed to the interest of the citizen. How about the state that performs geo-engineering for the alleged purpose of blocking out the sun? How about states that bring in AI, artificial intelligence, without any public debate.

Nature has produced many social species, from insects to mammals, but none of those have an autonomous state government, much less do any take orders from outside.

Consider the wolf.  Wolves hunt in a pack. The individual is not free to drop out even if he sees a better chance of food-getting for himself. The altruism of the wolf is involuntary, it has been genetically programmed. The wolves’ ancestors apparently survived by having the gene for cooperating as a pack.

War

Human society, too, evolved from several genetic adaptations to social life. At an early stage, that society consisted only of the family, then the clan, then the tribe. As with wolverine society, human society includes preying on other species, sometimes in packs. But humans also treat a rival human group in a predatory way by raiding it for resources, or by making war which sometimes eliminates the competitor altogether.

The soldier is expected to overcome even his instinct for self-preservation if the very survival of his group is in danger.  In modern times, however, it appears that the instinct related to self-sacrifice got subtly shifted over to encompass the general instinct for obedience, rather than for altruism. (I have not researched this, I am hypothesizing.)

A human child is genetically equipped to obey its parents. This gets extended to obeying all authority figures. When an army recruit arrives for his first night at bootcamp, his penchant for altruism is not engaged, and fear of the enemy might not even get a mention. The entire focus is on the boss, and on how the recruit should obey him.

Now reflect for a moment on the Russian revolution of 1917.  Maybe some of the violent Bolsheviks believed the phony story that they were helping their fellow man escape the tyranny of the Czar to create a people’s government. But they didn’t bother to persuade the people about this. Obedience to the new regime was the focus. Give up your wealth or die.

For a behavior to qualify as altruistic, must it be voluntary? I said that in wolves it is not voluntary; it is programmed.  In humans, it is well-established that kin altruism is programmed – I’ve known young mothers who were startled by their own eagerness to do the 2am feedings. Reciprocal altruism, too, is programmed. There is an innate emotional package that contains both the giving and the waiting for the return favor.

OK, that’s kin altruism and reciprocal altruism. But what about the giving up of one’s life for the sake of one’s society – which many men have gladly done?  As an American I have never experienced a foreign army attacking us. Yet our soldiers often go abroad for a cause and many die. For example there were 58,000 deaths of US personnel in Vietnam from 1963 to 1975.

In my America of the 20^th century, soldiers were falsely given an enemy to fight, by the creation of a “Red threat.” We actually had a slogan “Better dead than Red” I think it is now proven that the Cold War was run from above. Globalists manipulated the so-called democratic leaders of the US to create proxy wars everywhere against a purported Soviet threat. Very few noticed that, at Yalta, FDR and Churchill had handed east Europe to Stalin, on a platter.

[For the record, there is a helicopter flying low over my house right now 10:35am June 9, 2025, as I am typing this.]

Comparing Two Situations: the A and the B

The title of this talk – “The Knell of Altruism” – is meant to contrast the state of affairs that Darwin saw in 1871 with subsequent developments in the human species. Let me contrast an ‘A’ and a ‘B.’  “A” is the genetic evolution by which we became altruists, giving up some of our natural selfishness to be unselfishness helper’s our group’s survival and prosperity. If a majority of people had held back and not done the altruism thing, their group died off.

Today we live in a new situation, I’m calling it “B,” in which there does not appear to be a way to help our society, no matter how willing we may be. As I stated above: “Human society today is no longer a natural entity. The state runs society and the state’s interests are not your interests.  In many areas, the state’s interest seems distinctly opposed to the interest of the citizen.”

One factor that especially confuses us is that we were all taught that the United States of America more or less invented itself. It came down to pen and paper. John Locke in England had made some suggestions for controlling our rulers, such as by using checks and balances. In 1787 while penning the US Constitution, James Madison et al did conjure up a steady approach to protecting people from bad rulers. Note: there is no other species that can do this.

According to the British law that America inherited, the punishment of wrongdoers in official positions would be the same as, or sharper than, that for ordinary criminals. In fact, a few years before the Declaration of Independence of 1776, Sir William Blackstone’s book was very popular in the colonies. Title: “Commentary on the Laws of England.” (1769). Hanging a bad judge was quite all right. King Charles I had been beheaded in 1649 for treason. “A society’s got to do what a society’s got to do.”

By now, bad judges and even a president have been offered immunity. If you see one of them embezzling funds or committing murder by poisoning, you will not then see them do the perp walk. No mug shot, no strip search, no nothing. This is Situation B. The thing has become unstuck.

Generally speaking, there’s a Fifth Column.  Per the Cambridge Dictionary, a “Fifth Column” is “A group of people who support the enemies of the country they live in and secretly help them.”

I cannot, in this paper, go into a description of this as my only purpose is to develop an awareness of the fact that group loyalty is instinctive. We lack an instinctive way to handle this new arrangement in which many members of our government are working for a cause other than the betterment of, or the protection of the nation. And/or are taking orders from foreigners. I have written extensively about this in my 2011 book “Prosecution for Treason,” and more recently in “Society Is the Authority.”

What about Kindness?

Once again, I say altruism is on the way out. But now I am not referring to the problem of sacrificing oneself for one’s country, but of individual acts of kindness. Humans clearly have an instinct to do things for their neighbors and also for people who are in urgent need. Here I refer to a story told by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of “The Gulag Archipelago.” He did not witness this but was told of it:

A Gulag prisoner had finished his sentence and was allowed to go home. He was taken as far as the train station.  But someone at the prison had not filled out exactly the right papers with which he could get a train ticket. No one was helping him and he was shirtless, lying in the snow. A woman came along and offered him a piece of bread.  The guard said “No, Auntie, you may not do that.” Just think, all the normal interactions of people had changed under Soviet rule, for no good reason!

Darwin might have thought that the instinct for altruism would somehow assert itself, but I am arguing that it’s not going to happen. At the top of this paper, I said: “Yes, I mean to suggest that altruism is on the way out. But how is that possible? Altruism is an instinct. So how can it go out?”

Clearly our altruistic instinct is being thwarted. At least those who have eyes to see can see this. (Many are in denial.) I have heard that, in China, disobedience to the government’s rules causes you to lose points on your “social credit score.” Moreover, when you get to the grocery store you may find that your too-low credit score prevents the grocer from selling you any food.  “Ah, no worries,” I hear you say, “a relative will share some food.” Well, if he does, that will cause his social credit score, too, to tumble.

I have no doubt that my own dear American government has got my (well-earned) low score all ready to go.  Think about this ‘logic’: I try, per my altruistic instinct (and my 7 decades of training) to help my society – such as by pointing out false flags and psy-ops — and for this I deserve to be punished.

I’m like “Huh?”

Are you like “Huh?”

If you’re like “Huh?”, let’s get together and see if we can hash something out.

I can’t stand absurdities.