Motivation and altruism

In our minds we, as individuals, don’t see that we have any direct power to slow today’s destruction and we don’t know how to acquire the resources to directly repair the damage that’s been done already. We can’t see past our present society whose structures seem so set in concrete. Nor can we feel excited by the promises given by our leaders, because of their obvious self interest. Cynicism and pessimism block our way forward. And yet without a hopeful, realistic future-vision nothing much can happen. Without some sort of blueprint we can neither repair nor rebuild the structures that need changing. To jolt us out of our black dog view of the world, we need to transform the way we think.

To be altruistic and forward-looking, without being evangelistic about it, we don’t need to keep the moral baggage. The optimistic component of altruism comes with a different kind of motivation; reward is the driver and motivator. Ideally the reward is coming from actually wanting to do things for others. It doesn’t have to be particularly special to attract us, it just has to be creative enough to allow for the unexpected. Reward is that much richer because of the surprise of it.
Perhaps we have to re-examine what motivates us. By helping human nature turn around for the better, our pessimism automatically weakens. By thinking optimistically we weaken our focus on personal safety and security, putting greater faith in altruism. The more we dare to trust in it the more we’ll see what it can do; just by putting ourselves at the service of others and being graceful enough about it, we might then be able to accept any positivity someone else might be directing towards us. If the world were a more altruistic place, we wouldn’t be so much thrilled by the notion of being altruistic, we’d be thrilled instead by the climate of unselfconscious altruism around us and the little need we’d have for any sense of an expected reciprocation. But we have a long way to go. In our present world things aren’t like that. So at first we have to stir some conscious motivation into the mix, to get altruism up and moving.