TED Talk: How To Let Altruism Be Your Guide

So,

We humans have an extraordinary potential for goodness,

But also an immense power to do harm.

Any tool can be used to build or to destroy.

That all depends on our motivation.

Therefore,

It is all the more important to foster an altruistic motivation rather than a selfish one.

So now,

We indeed are facing many challenges in our times.

Those could be personal challenges.

Our own mind can be our best friend or our worst enemy.

There are also societal challenges,

Poverty in the midst of plenty,

Inequalities,

Conflict,

Injustice.

And then there are new challenges which we don't expect.

Ten thousand years ago,

There were about five million human beings on earth.

Whatever they could do,

The earth's resilience will soon heal human activities.

After the industrial and technological revolution,

That's not the same anymore.

We are now the major agent of impact on our earth.

We enter the Anthropocene,

The era of human beings.

So in a way,

If we were to say we need to continue this endless growth,

Endless use of material resources,

It's like saying if this man was saying,

And I heard a former head of state,

I won't mention who,

Saying five years ago,

We were at the edge of the precipice.

Today,

We made a big step forward.

So this edge is the same which has been defined by scientists as the planetary boundaries.

And with these,

Those boundaries taking care of a number of factors,

We can still prosper.

Humanity can still prosper for 150,

000 years if we keep the same stability of climate as in the Holocene for the last 10,

000 years.

But this depends on choosing a voluntary simplicity,

Growing qualitatively,

Not quantitatively.

So in 1900,

As you can see,

We were well within the limits of safety.

Now in 1950 came the great acceleration.

Now hold your breath,

Not too long,

To imagine what comes next.

Now,

We have vastly overrun some of the planetary boundaries.

Just to take biodiversity at the current rate,

In 2050,

30% of all species on earth will have disappeared.

Even we keep their DNA in some fridge that's not going to be reversible.

So here I am sitting in front of a 7,

000 meters high,

21,

000 feet glacier in Bhutan.

The third pole,

2,

000 glaciers are melting fast,

Faster than the Arctic.

So what can we do in that situation?

Well,

However complex politically,

Economically,

Scientifically the question of the environment is,

It simply boils down to a question of altruism versus selfishness.

I'm a Marxist of the Groucho tendency.

Groucho Marx said,

Why should I care for future generation?

What did they do for me?

Unfortunately,

I heard the billionaire Stephen Forbes on Fox News saying exactly the same thing but seriously.

He was told about the race of the ocean and he said,

I find absurd to change my behavior today for something that will happen in 100 years.

So if you don't care for future generation,

Just go for it.

So one of the main challenges of our times is to reconcile three times scale.

The short term of the economy,

The ups and downs of the stock market,

The end of the year accounts.

The midterm of the quality of life.

What is the quality every moment of our life and over 10 years and 20 years?

And the long term of the environment.

When environmentalists speak with economists,

It's like a schizophrenic dialogue,

Completely incoherent.

They don't speak the same language.

Now for the last 10 years,

I went around the world meeting economists,

Scientists,

Neuroscientists,

Environmentalists,

Philosophers,

Thinkers in the Himalayas,

All over the place.

This seems to me there's only one concept that can reconcile those three times scale.

It is simply having more consideration for others.

If you are more consideration for others,

You will have a caring economics where finances are the service of society and not society as the service of finances.

You will not play at the casino with the resources that people haven't trusted you with.

If you are more consideration for others,

You will make sure that you remedy to inequality,

That you bring some kind of well-being within society,

In education,

At the workplace.

Otherwise,

A nation that is the most powerful and the richest,

Everyone is miserable,

What's the point?

And if you are more consideration for others,

You are not going to rank-sack that planet that we have.

And at current rate,

We don't have three planets to continue that way.

So the question is,

Okay,

Altruism is the answer.

It's not just a noble ideal,

But can it be a real pragmatic solution?

And first of all,

Does it exist?

True altruism,

Or are we so selfish?

So some philosopher thought that we were irremediably selfish,

You know,

But are we really all just like rascals?

That's good news,

Isn't it?

Many philosopher like Hobbes have said so.

Well,

Not everyone just looks like a rascal,

Or is man a wolf for man?

But this guy doesn't seem too bad.

He's one of my friends in Tibet.

He's very kind.

So now,

We love cooperation.

There's no greater joy than work together,

Isn't it?

And then not only humans.

Then of course there's the struggle for life,

The survival of the fittest,

Social Darwinisms.

But in evolution,

Cooperation,

Though competition exists,

Of course,

Cooperation has to be much more creative to go to increased level of complexity.

We are super cooperators,

And we should even go further.

So now,

On top of that,

The quality of human relationship,

You know,

The OCD did a survey among ten factors,

Including income,

Everything.

The first one that people said,

That's the main thing for my happiness,

Is quality of social relationship.

Not only in humans.

And look at those great grandmothers.

So now,

This idea that if you go deep within,

We are irremediably selfish.

This is harm-chair science.

There is not a single social-surgical study,

Psychological study,

That ever shown that.

Why not the opposite?

My friend Daniel Batson spent her whole life putting people in the lab in very complex situations,

And of course we have sometimes selfish and some people more than others.

But he found that systematically,

No matter what,

There's a significant number of people who do behave altruistically no matter what.

Now,

If you see someone deeply wounded,

Great suffering,

You might just help out of empathic distress.

You can't stand it,

So it's better to help than keep on looking at that person.

So we tested all that,

And in the end he said,

Clearly people can be altruistic.

So that's good news.

And even further,

We should look at the banality of goodness.

Now look at here.

When we come out,

We're not going to say,

That's so nice.

There was no feast fight while those monks were speaking about altruism.

No,

We expect that,

Isn't it?

If there was a feast fight,

We will speak of that for months.

So the banality of goodness is something that doesn't attract your attention,

But it exists.

Look at this.

Okay.

So some psychologists said,

When I tell them I run 140 humanitarian projects in the Himalayas,

That gives me so much joy.

They say,

Oh,

I see.

You work for the warm glow.

That is not altruistic.

You just feel good.

You think this guy,

When he jumped in front of the train,

He thought,

I'm going to feel so good when this is over.

But that's not the end of it.

They say,

Well,

But when you interviewed him,

He said,

I had no choice.

I had to jump,

Of course.

He said,

Oh,

He had no choice.

Automatic behavior is neither selfish nor altruistic.

No choice.

Well,

Of course,

This guy's not going to think for half an hour,

Should I give my hand,

Not give my hand.

He does it.

There is a choice,

But it's obvious it's immediate.

And then also,

He had a choice.

So now there are people who had choice,

Like Pastor Andre Tromey and his wife,

And the whole village of Chambon-Soligno in France.

For the whole Second World War,

They saved 3,

500 Jews,

Gave them shelter,

Brought them to Switzerland against all odds at the risk of their life and that of their family.

So altruism does exist.

So what is altruism?

It's the wish,

May others be happy,

And find the cause of happiness.

Now,

Empathy is the affective resonance or cognitive resonance that tells you,

This person is joyful,

This person suffers.

But empathy enough is not sufficient.

If you keep on being confronted with suffering,

You might have empathic distress,

Burnout.

So you need the greater sphere of loving kindness.

With Tanya Singer at the Max Planck Institute of Leipzig,

We showed that the brain network for empathy and loving kindness are different.

Now that's all well done,

So we got that from evolution to maternal care,

Parental love,

But we need to extend that.

It can be extended even to other species.

Now if we want a more altruistic society,

We need two things,

Individual change and societal change.

So is individual change possible?

Two thousand years of contemplative studies said yes,

It is.

Now fifteen years of collaboration with neuroscience and epigenetics said yes,

Our brain changes when you train in altruism.

So I spent 120 hours in MRI machine,

This is the first time I went after two and a half hours,

And then the result has been published in many scientific papers.

It shows without ambiguity that there are structural change and functional change in the brain when you train in altruistic love.

Just to give you an idea,

This is the meditators at rest on the left,

Meditation in compassion meditation,

You see all the activity,

And then the control group at rest,

Nothing happened,

In meditation nothing happened,

They have not been trained.

So do you need 50,

000 hours of meditation?

No you don't.

Four weeks,

20 minutes a day of caring mindfulness meditation already brings a structural change in the brain compared to a control group.

That's only 20 minutes a day for four weeks.

Even with preschoolers,

Richard Davidson did that in Madison,

Eight weeks program gratitude,

Loving kindness,

Cooperation,

Mindful breathing,

You would say oh there's just preschoolers,

Look after eight weeks.

The pro-social behavior,

That's the blue line,

And then come the ultimate scientific test,

The stickers test.

Before you determine for each child who is their best friend in the class,

Their least favorite child,

An unknown child,

And the sick child,

And they have to give stickers away.

So before the intervention they give most of it to their best friend.

Four,

Five years old,

20 minutes three times a week.

After the intervention,

No more discrimination.

The same amount of stickers to their best friend and their least favorite child.

That's something we should do in all the schools in the world.

Now where do we go from there?

Well when the Dalai Lama heard that he told Richard Davidson you go 10 schools,

100 schools,

The UN,

The whole world.

So now where do we go from there?

Individual change is possible.

Now do we have to wait for an altruistic gene to be in the human race?

That will take 50,

000 years,

Too much for the environment.

Fortunately there is the evolution of culture.

Cultures,

As specialists have shown,

Change faster than genes.

That's the good news.

Look at the attitude towards war has dramatically changed over the years.

So now individual change and cultural change mutually fashion each other and yes we can achieve a more altruistic society.

So where do we go from there?

Myself I'll go back to the East.

Now we treat 100,

000 patients a year in our projects.

We have 25,

000 kids in school,

4% overhead.

Some people say well your staff works in practice but does it work in theory?

So they call us a positive deviance.

So I also go back to my hemitage to find the inner resources to better serve others.

But on a more global level what can we do?

We need treatings,

Enhancing cooperation,

Cooperative learning in the school instead of competitive learning.

Unconditional cooperation within cooperation.

There can be some competition between corporations but not within.

We need sustainable harmony.

I love this term.

Not sustainable growth anymore.

Sustainable harmony means now we reduce inequality in the future.

We do more with less and we continue to grow qualitatively not quantitatively.

We need a caring economics.

The homo economicus cannot deal with poverty in the midst of plenty,

Cannot deal with the problem of the common goods of the atmosphere of the ocean.

We need a caring economics.

If you say economics should be compassionate this is not our job.

But if you say they don't care that looks bad.

We need local commitment,

Global responsibility.

We need to extend altruism to the other 1.

6 other species.

The sentient beings are co-citizens in this world.

And we need to dare altruism.

So long life to the altruistic revolution.

Viva la revolution d'altruismo.