Starvation the Best Cure for Poverty - So Says Heartless Bastard

Here today, a friend sends me a story that reads like something crafted directly from the center of "the collective".

"Because of our very vulnerable offspring, the fundamental task for human survival and gene replication is to take care of others," said Keltner, co-director of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. "Human beings have survived as a species because we have evolved the capacities to care for those in need and to cooperate. As Darwin long ago surmised, sympathy is our strongest instinct."

No, Mr. Keltner, the fundamental task for human survival and gene replication is to take care of YOURSELF. Taking care of others is one of the tools that a human can selectively use to do this, like for example, when our ancestral cave-man (or woman) would rescue THEIR child from a saber-toothed tiger (so as to save their little worker-unit without which they would have a harder time surviving(;  or when you rescue YOUR child from a burning building (and in so doing protect yourself from a sense of YOUR loss and also protect yourself from doing without a caregiver for your old age).

So then, however hard and unpalatable to accept the truth of the matter is that, whenever that (helping others) is done, the underlying basis for all of it is that the fundamental task for survival is to take care of ones self. In doing that, we may take care of others, and we may cooperate (like when we cooperate to kill others in war?), but those are tools directed and selectively used to achieve the end - survival of ourselves (and our spawn). [See my other articles regarding selfishness and altruism  - and how they are EXACTLY the same.]

Contrary to the disingenuous nature of this article, meant, I suppose, to influence the masses into committing suicide for the "need" of others, the real truth is that we have survived to this point is exactly because our ancestors and antecedent cultures operated from a foundation of helping ourselves (NOT others). The underlying theme, therefore, of survival is service to ones self, NOT service to others.

It is so sad that in today's Politically Correct climate brought about by the hot putrid off-gassing of a culture gone soft and lazy, children though are being taught a different thing - a thing that if left unchecked will result in the extinction of our culture, and later our species. For we are raising a generation that see nothing wrong with spreading the wealth; that goes to bed every night dreaming about how they should sacrifice themselves at the altar of another; and dream dreams of how their social responsibility is to become do-gooders instead of doers. To bad for our future society that in so thinking and dreaming they evolve having no concept of property, or property rights, and thinking that people are entitled simply because they have "need"  - and that the yardstick of "need" is "Does the other guy have "more".

As Ben Franklin said, "....the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it." Hey that is Math 101, but certainly not in today's classroom. Unfortunately, there, today's youth are being taught that the proper thing to do is to "give back", and being taught to think that people like your dear correspondent are  oh, so cold and heartless when they rail, fulminate, declaim, and inveigh against the cancerous malignancy of the "giving back" philosophy.

And another BTW - That part about taking care of our "vulnerable offspring" which Keltner conflates into evolving based on taking care of others, . No Mr Keltner, we take care of OUR vulnerable offspring.We want OUR DNA to survive, not the DNA of others.

And BTW #2 ...... Sympathy is NOT our strongest instinct.