Your Altruism is Selfish

Egoists, Activists, and the Intelligence of Desire

Sunny day, nice kicks, a bounce in your step. You walk past a child drowning in a shallow pond. Do you wade in to help? Obviously. So why won’t you donate the price of those shoes to save a child dying overseas? Checkmate. Peter Singer’s drowning child argument has been converting people to effective altruism for forty years. It’s clean, it’s compelling, and I’ve never been able to argue my way out of it.

But I’ve always felt that something was off. Years later, Singer is sued for apparently running a fuck-for-footnotes operation, or, more charitably, applying the hedonic calculus quite literally. Finally, it clicked: This is about desire! Singer tried to exile desire from ethics and got smacked by the textbook Freudian boomerang. But desire turns out to be the engine of ethics, not its obstacle.

Desire is the pivot point between self and other. I was surprised to find myself becoming more altruistic as I peeled back the layers of my own desires. As a properly selfish person, I can tell you how Peter Singer was doing it wrong.

Be More Selfish

I like money, status, and sex. Luckily, I’ve had enough of those that I realized that there are things that I value even more: Meaning, relationships, intimacy.

I remember coming to similar conclusions as a philosophically inclined youngster:

“I seem to want success, but why? Because it’ll make me happy. How? By getting others to like me. I could probably do that more directly. QED: I should care about others for selfish reasons.”

Unfortunately, I remained the same asshole for another decade. Turns out, my emotional system didn’t care about my reasoning. I had to fulfill the surface desires to authentically get to the deeper levels. That doesn’t mean I needed to turn my “Bad Girl Protocol” into a bucket list (God help us all). If I’m paying attention, even a taste of the surface desire is enough for an update to take place.

For example, it seemed like I wanted money. I needed to actually make some money to realize that it was never going to be enough. Underneath it was a desire for freedom. So I needed to be free a.k.a. travel, get high, and binge watch tv shows to learn that wasn’t it, either. Underneath that, meaning. Now I’m writing a blog. Sure, I’m having fun, but it’s more than that. It’s meaningful. I want to share what I’ve learned because it makes me feel connected to the world, because it resonates with and sometimes even helps readers. I found my own way of doing that by braiding together conversations, contemplations, and experiences like you’re reading now.

My desire, followed way down, reaches for contact. Hi there.

We all need to run through the sequence of Maslow’s Pyramid first and get basic needs like food, shelter, and safety met. Most of us are then interested in similar surface desires. And you can’t skip ahead, unfortunately. But the deeper reaches of desire tend to become ever more idiosyncratic. I recently found a journal note from 5 years ago that I wanted to turn “everyday actions into rituals” and smirked because I could have written it today. David said the same happened to him, but with a 40-year difference. Our longings and fixed ideas seem surprisingly persistent. This is deep desire.

A prince, a king, and an emperor - the Buddha, Solomon, and Marcus Aurelius - all got everything but found that it still wasn’t enough. The Buddha abandoned his wife and infant son in the middle of the night. Solomon worked his way through 700 wives and 300 concubines. Marcus Aurelius ran the largest empire on earth while spending his evenings journaling about how none of it mattered. They were selfish, but all the way. It turned out their deepest desire was boring stuff like sitting under trees, writing proverbs, and talking to themselves. And yet, the positive impact of their actions rippled out through the millennia.

Take Back Your Wanting

Even if you’ve never been to a protest, you probably have a voice that tells you your desires are selfish. That the world needs you to do something more important. If you actually are an activist, you might feel like you are that voice. You have probably sacrificed more than most people around you. Everyone tells you to take care of yourself, too. But you already know about burnout, and that’s not really the problem.

You are exhausted because you don’t know which of your desires are yours. You put wanting to save the world before getting what you want, because that’s obviously more important. And wanting things for yourself is kind of gross, anyway. Some symptoms of having laundered your desire with “should”: Is it hard to take a day off without feeling like a bad person? Do you pick fights in group chats about things that don’t matter strategically but feel existentially important? If so, much of what feels like fighting the good fight is simply wanting to see yourself as a good person. Which biases you toward working for visible results over actual impact. Not a great foundation for saving the world (sorry).

“First, fuck you. How dare you? And to your argument: If everybody only did what they wanted to, nothing would get fixed.”

Fair. But you’re imagining half-baked, unsorted desire. I’m describing desire after it’s been sorted. At that point, it tends to be more generous than obligation, not less. Your care will point somewhere specific rather than abstract. Every problem has plenty of people pointed at it, whose personal experience equips them with the knowledge and the fire to solve it.

Of course, you should still think about consequences, but you can’t reason your way to what’s yours to do. That’s a job for something closer to the gut.

The probiotic that makes it accurate again is what Jung called individuation: figuring out which of your wants come from you versus those you internalized.

Alysa Liu retired from competitive skating at seventeen. She came back a year later because she missed the thrill of speed on ice. The medals, the competition, and the identity of being a top athlete had been piled on top of it by others. Once she individuated her desire, she still found skating. But her attitude towards the sport was transformed. Alysa won Olympic gold as the most joyful person in Milan. The most generous thing you can do is take your own desire seriously.

Contextual Desire and Rolling the DICE

My inner activist just pointed out that Liu entertaining the male gaze while the world burns is exactly the problem. But nobody could have predicted the Buddha’s impact either.

Why does just giving cash to poor people consistently outperform development aid programs designed by smart and caring people? Billions spent on food programs, skills training, and micro-finance schemes with carefully designed incentive structures; consistently beaten by just handing people money and letting them figure it out.

That’s because the person living the problem has context that no outsider can replicate. The knowledge that the roof is a more urgent issue than the business plan, and which of their neighbours sells building materials at a discount.

You have the same kind of knowledge about your life. You know which friendships are load-bearing, which cities you feel at home in, and what problems won’t leave you alone. Your desire arises in your life, embedded in its specific problems, textures, and relationships. This is contextual desire.

Egoists and activists arrive at the same place if they stay close to their experience. There never really was a trade-off between caring for oneself and caring for others. Follow your desire deep down to hit rock, whether you call it “core personality”, “true will”, or “soul”. Individuation, sorting out what’s not yours, clarifies desire from the outside in. The context of your life points desire somewhere specific. I wanted a more technical definition than “clarified desire”. The Greeks understood desire in its fullest expression as a creative and connective force: Eros.

So the term of art is Deep, Individuated, Contextual Eros.

Which spells DICE (yes, I know).

You can only throw the dice. You don’t control where they land. Neither Alysa nor the Buddha knew. It seems like a terrible way to make life decisions, and I haven’t found a better one. However, I do have a mad theory about why it works.

The Invisible Hand of Eros

If you’re grinding from obligation, you are taking someone’s spot. Somewhere, there is a person whose deep desire and specific context would make them the exact right human for the work you are forcing yourself through. They would Alysa Liu the shit out of it. And you are denying the world whatever would come from you daring to follow your own weird pull instead.

Can you see the pastel-coloured poster with “follow your bliss” on it yet?

But I have arguments. Clarified desire is trustworthy because your unconscious is an expert system. Kahneman showed that expert intuition is real, but only in domains with regular structure and enough practice. As chaotic as you think your life can get, it has plenty of real patterns. And you have been practicing being-you-in-your-context since birth. The hours you logged are unbeatable. Your unconscious has been running pattern recognition on the whole dataset: the weird social dynamics in your friend group, how ideas move from the internet into your local world, the injustice that makes you stupid with anger. All of it is synthesized into your DICE, a vector that points exactly at what is yours to do.

Your deep patterns and experiences carry the information about how you flourish, and the context of your life about where you can be of most use. DICE does the matchmaking and compresses it into a silent, persistent pull. If you trust its intelligence, you don’t need to understand why the urge to start gardening won’t leave you alone.

Flourishing is the ultimate comparative advantage, and I mean that as a mechanism, not a metaphor. Adam Smith’s invisible hand says that self-interested actors in functioning markets produce collective benefit.

The invisible hand of Eros says that actors following their DICE produce collective benefit through emergent pathways.

Just like the market throws up garbage if Smith’s conditions of competition, symmetric information, and rule of law are not met, desire is only intelligent if it is deep, individuated, and contextual. Without those conditions, “following your bliss” produces the predictable mess that makes activists nervous. But if the conditions for DICE are met, people end up where they are needed most.

Honestly, it’s gotten creepily accurate. More than once, I’ve felt a surprising pull toward someone I had no business being drawn to on paper, and found that they carried exactly the piece I was missing. A wound that mirrored mine from the opposite angle, or somebody using their body as an instrument for divination in a way I didn’t know I wanted for myself.

Epistemic status? Pick your comfort level. Bayesian inference running on a lifetime of data explains most of it (and the rest is surely confirmation bias). Or maybe it’s enactive cognition and participatory knowing. Or you can crack the door open into woo and call it your Daimon, as Socrates referred to the inner voice that knows. The door is open, go nuts.

These arguments probably won’t convince you, and maybe they shouldn’t. But I hope that you’ll consider running an experiment. Can you peek underneath a desire? Run the Bad Girl Protocol. And then maybe follow one of these silent, persistent pulls (just a little bit).

Even more important than following your DICE is developing the discernment to recognize it.

Here are the signs: Deep desire recurs; it won’t leave you alone. Individuated desire is weird and doesn’t track with what your friends or your feed would predict for you. Contextual desire triggers synchronicities: the world seems to arrange itself around the pull in surprising ways. When all three are present, throw.

Your Pond, Your Problem

To my few remaining EA friends who are still reading this: I can hear the utilitarian gears turning in your head and the objection that if everybody followed their DICE, they would only act locally.

Most people feeling pulled to act locally is a feature, not a bug. That’s the whole point of context. And some lovely nerds like you feel a genuine pull toward systematic optimization. That’s your DICE, but not everybody else’s.

Maximising hedons from a sense of obligation is a shitty alternative. Sam Bankman-Fried tried that.

So why do you ruin your shoes to save a child drowning in a shallow pond? Singer says you did it because of a moral obligation that extends to every child everywhere. I think you did it because you were right there, and something in you moved. That pull is the most trustworthy ethical information you have. Your altruism is selfish, and it works better that way.

Thanks to Exa for arguing with me until this made more sense