Larissa MacFarquhar: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well you’ve met a lot of them, right? You must have an impression. Well, I have met a lot of them. I think they’re fantastic. Of course, there are annoying altruists just like there are annoying golfers and annoying dentists, but I wrote about people I 100 percent wholeheartedly admired. But I’ll say one thing: I read a lot of psychological and psychiatric articles about altruism, and nearly all of them, as I’ve suggested, pathologized altruism in some way. I became quite annoyed by this. I read one article that described altruists in terms of parentified children. The idea here is that, if you grow up in a household where at least one of your parents is not functioning as a parent, either because they are mentally ill or they’re an alcoholic or an addict — for some reason they’re not functioning as a parent — obviously, in many cases, this just messes the child up. But in some cases, the child responds by trying to fix the situation. They may take care of their parent, they may try to be a perfect student, they may take care of their younger siblings. They try to fix their family. And the idea is that this parentified child, the child who takes on the role of a parent as a young person, may grow up to have an outsized desire to fix the world, a sense of responsibility for the world in the way that they felt responsible for their family as a child. And I thought about the people I’d met who I’d interviewed for my book, and not all of them, but lots of them had that circumstance. One of their parents was either an alcoholic or was mentally ill or was an addict of some kind. So I thought, “Okay, maybe there is something to this particular theory.” However, I do want to push back on the idea that this therefore makes somebody pathological. Just because your altruistic tendencies may not be free in the sense of freely chosen, devoid of any cause from your childhood, does not mean that they are wrong. So here’s what I try to persuade people who tell me that all altruists are mentally ill. I say, think about a kid who grows up with two lovely parents who try to persuade them that taking care of other people is the right thing to do, and because of that upbringing, they also grow up to feel an outsized sense of duty and responsibility to take care of other people in the world. They are no more free than the person who came upon such a sense of duty because of their bad parents. So is one more free or worse than the other? Could the same person be both, say, a Rwandan killer in the 1990s and an extreme altruist? Or is that a contradiction?…

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