You have undoubtedly seen the TV ad campaign — though now it seems to have run its course.
Some corporation (a financial institution?) shows little random acts of kindness involving an actor — the person doing the kindness — a beneficiary, and a witness. Next we see the witness from Scene 1 doing a random act of kindness, which is itself witnessed, and so on around the park until the witness of the penultimate act turns out to be the actor in the first scene, as the witness from that scene (and actor from Scene 2) looks on.
A lot of things always bothered me about that campaign, not least of which was the apparent amnesia that afflicted the beneficiary and witness of Scene 1 when the exact same thing happened in Scene Last.
The beneficiaries of the kindness had no role in any scene but to be helped. They weren’t people, they were props. And the theme of the ad was that when you help somebody you’re also setting a good example and therefore, indirectly, helping somebody else.
You weren’t supposed to simply help somebody, you had to be seen helping somebody.
This came to mind tonight because I had just performed an act of kindness for a stranger — but I did it because it was something I would have wanted someone to do for me if I were in the other guy’s spot. In a line of traffic slowing behind somebody waiting to make a left turn, the driver behind me suddenly began signaling for a right turn. A deceleration lane was just ahead of me that, if I had held to my usual practice (especially in a 3-ton Bronco with Bronco brakes) of closing the distance ahead of me very slowly, would have left the other guy stranded while we all waited for the guy making his left turn. So I eased off the brake, coasted ahead a little faster than I’d normally prefer, and the other guy got to make his turn a few seconds sooner.
I’ve been caught in that situation a lot. I’ve been caught in a lot of stupid situations in traffic where I knew exactly what somebody could have done, at no trouble at all, to help me. To be fair, I’ve also had other drivers do exactly what I needed them to do, and believe me, I notice.
Now, what I’m doing is what I would have others do for me, which is in one sense kind of selfish because I’m pretending, for the moment, that I’m the guy back there that could use a hand. <shrug> The TV ad I described above shows people doing things without offering any examination of why they thought they were good things to do; in fact the primary motivator brought to bear in the ad isn’t the benefit to the person being helped or even any good feeling the doer might gain from helping them — it’s that you want to be seen doing good things by other people. Yes, the intent is that they’ll be inspired to do good things too, but it’s still social pressure. The act of kindness is a plot device; the beneficiary, a prop. At least in my little drama I imagined the person I helped as a person, even if only as a carbon copy of the author.
I’ve been seeing all kinds of articles over the years where behavioralists are unraveling the function of altruism in animals more primitive than (most of) us, and finding that cooperation for mutual benefit improves survival of individuals in a species and that benefits the species as a whole. I can’t help thinking that the farther down the evolutionary ladder they chase the altruism missing link, the more selfish and less virtuous all acts of kindness ultimately become. You help in order to instill gratitude in the beneficiary and approval in onlookers, who conclude you’re worth helping if you ever need it. In a tribal setting you would always know whom you helped and they would know who helped them. In our crowded societies it only makes sense to use social pressure to ramp that impulse up to the benefit of complete strangers.
But it’s still a social impulse and the beneficiaries are still strangers whom you have no particular reason to see as anything but a faceless passing figure who could use a casual kindness to smooth out his or her day.
And this comes around to something else I deal with in traffic around here that drives me up a wall: the unwanted, unhelpful random act of kindness. The straggling driver who is the last obstacle between me and the left turn I’ve been waiting to make, whose passing and departure I am trying to time so I can get out of the way of all those make-believe me’s behind me who just want to get where they’re going, as quickly as possible. The straggling driver who slowly decelerates as he approaches, because he wants to let me make my left turn ahead of him — a left turn I could have made sooner if he had just gone on about his business at the highway speed he was already doing.
He didn’t stop to think whether this was really what I (or any of the people behind me) wanted him to do. He didn’t ask himself whether he, in my position, would rather turn in front of him or behind him or whether it would make any difference to me at all. No, he saw some stupid TV ad for some financial institution and decided he liked that idea.
It is not virtuous to do something for somebody else just to make you feel better, or to be seen as a nice person. If you are not in a position to ask the person you want to help what would actually help, at least try putting yourself in that person’s position and ask yourself.
Seems to me there’s a fairly popular book — been out for more than 100 years, even — that has a few things to say about that.
The other kind of helping, the kind that renders the recipient a prop with no say in the matter? That’s not really helping.
Update: I confess I’m a little disappointed that no one’s made the connection between this post and ObamaCare. Anyway, a clarification from a comment I made last night:
…if you don’t find a way to care — in a real way — about what happens to that other person, then you’re just effin’ things up for them.
I only hinted at the Golden Rule in my post, but that really is the key — and I do it by imagining myself in that position and asking, “What would I want?”
What I would want is a little less casual inconvenience, a little more freedom and dignity, and a whole lot less trying to turn me into livestock.
Anyone see the connection yet?
McGehee, how old school of you..treating driving like a team sport, instead of the usual “It’s all about me” type of driving that seems to be standard practice these days.
the unwanted, unhelpful random act of kindness.
me too.
It’s not just driving, Blake. It is for me because it’s nearly all of my interaction with all those random strangers, but it permeates life these days. We are being turned into livestock, and most of the cattle are all for it.
Common courtesy really has gone out the window. I’m always on my boys to hold doors for me and for other women, to watch where they are standing in places that have a lot of foot traffic so they aren’t standing there blocking someone else, and from the time they learned to talk to say “please” and “thank you”. I really chaps my hide to tell some clerk “thanks” after making a purchase and have them say “no problem.” Well, no shit. It’s your job. How about “you’re welcome” or “thanks for shopping with us?
Yeah, McGehee, all of those cattle revel in their “individuality” without realizing just how much they’re part of the herd.
I freely admit I’m a misanthrope, but I do my best to be polite to everyone I encounter. Still doesn’t mean I like them, though.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Especially when you’re being so damned nice that the driver you’re trying to “help” has no expectation that you’re trying to do so and therefore takes a while to figure it out while you’ve got traffic stacking up behind you and you’re pissing everyone off. Just fucking go already. Get out of the damn way.
I find it a little bit hard not to play with reconfiguring the quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns from the tussle in a Library to one giant passage of men on a multi-laned, dual directional highway, one set going in one direction and the other set going in the other direction, each having come from their respective setting out points, which happen to be the destinations of the others. But bugger all if I’d know how to explain it.
But bugger all if I’d know how to explain it.
fall back position: it is bush’s fault.
The Ancients, of course, would be driving slow in the fast lane, their turn signals still blinking since their last turn four miles back.
heh
And the Moderns, wrapping their Mercedes and Ferraris around the various trees and light-poles anent the roadside, only happening to take the odd 6 millions Jews, 20 million Soviets or 60 million Chinese along with them at a happenstance.
sdferr h8tes cambodians
Actually, I haven’t eaten one of those yet. But they can be on the list.
ot
August 8, 2012
DC Trawler
August 8, 2012
And now, a recap of all the news about National Starbucks Appreciation Day
use the lemon-pepper marinade
Treacher’s vid maker suffers from species confusion.
~~Robert Heinlein
I guess I never thought of that ad series in the same light as you McGehee. In fact, I thought it was more a little wakeup call to the lack of common courtesy in modern society as leigh talks about above.
If one has a religious upbringing and attends church or temple fairly regularly, then virtue and duty, instilled then supported by parents, becomes ingrained. We don’t think twice about giving up a bus seat to a pregnant woman or the elderly. It’s part of the Golden Rule and becomes as “natural” as brushing one’s teeth twice a day.
However, in the bubbles many of us create for ourselves, some figure if they see someone else in need that’s someone else’s problem (or even Big Gov will take care of that!). Hence comes stuff like elderly people dying in hospitals in France while family members left for vacation.
My person POV on the ad campaign was kind of a “knock knock anyone in there — look what you’ve been ignoring” kind of thing.
I don’t consider the Golden Rule “altruism”. I’m paying forward any kindness I’ve received in the past with the hope that the person I’m helping will also pay forward.
It is in my self-interest that I do such kindness because of what I want the society I live in to look like.
It is in my self-interest that I do such kindness because of what I want the society I live in to look like.
mindless kindness is just a proggtard thing: “i’ll be kind by voting to raise your taxes.” common courtesy is what i think you are suggesting.
I don’t either, Dar. The behavioralists tell us even grease ants practice altruism. If the word includes that, the ants can have it.
And I like to pretend the occasional instances of common courtesy I see in the wild that resemble what I practice, might be the descendant of a time when I did that thing and somebody noticed.
But it’s not why I do it. I do it because that other driver is me and I don’t to be responsible for inconveniencing myself.
I do such kindness because of what I want the society I live in to look like.
i do it because “common courtesy” is a lubricant on social interaction. i have no interest in making society in my own vision.
I am still trying to conceptualize this fantasyland you are describing where drivers actually consider that there are other drivers on the road…
Nope. Can’t do it.
nw
I’m spreading the lubricant. I don’t want to make society in my image, I want to live in a society where most people hold my principles.
I enjoyed visiting France for the sights, I would not want to live there. Our principles would grind raw against each other.
Nope. Can’t do it.
small town america
I live in a very small town and trust me, there is about as much courtesy of the road as in Los Angeles. Stop signs? Optional.
I want to live in a society where most people hold my principles.
i think mcgehee’s point: is folks who go out of their way to do “kindness” only that they are really just effin’ things up for the intended benefactor.
I live in a very small town and trust me, there is about as much courtesy of the road as in Los Angeles. Stop signs? Optional.
si senoir?
We have our share of seniors, that’s for sure. Not too many Senors yet.
If I may, I belive McGehee’s original point was that these people are only doing nice things when other people are watching. I mean, who spills coffee in the breakroom and doesn’t wipe it up? And the guy who was wiping it up was looking at a girl who was drinking a coffee. It looked like office politics to me.
No. It’s that if you don’t find a way to care — in a real way — about what happens to that other person, then you’re just effin’ things up for them.
I only hinted at the Golden Rule in my post, but that really is the key — and I do it by imagining myself in that position and asking, “What would I want?”
What I would want is a little less casual inconvenience, a little more freedom and dignity, and a whole lot less trying to turn me into livestock.
Maybe there really aren’t all that many people out there who would want what I would want.
Tough. That’s what you’ll get from me. I’m not imaginative enough to picture you any other way.
We have our share of seniors
here too
What everybody said.
here too
Stop fatfingers.
I lived in Pittsburgh for years. There are loads of seniors there.
Oh, and I might want some diversity of the skin-deep kind.
In my harem. Did I not mention wanting a harem?
“Did I not mention wanting a harem?”
To your wife?
Mrs. McGehee might be tough on the other wives. Her having seniority and all.
If you people would just behind high speed rail we wouldn’t have all these problems.
/ some clever tag that shows I’m joking
A new Gallup poll confirms what we already suspected at Via Meadia: despite incessant insinuations in the MSM that life among the Latter Day Saints could be anything other than a hell on earth, Mormon Utah is the most pleasant state in the union to live in. More than half a million Americans were asked to assess the states using a range of metrics from availability of good jobs to workplace relations to standard of living to optimism about the future, health, and education quality:
Utah does best in part because it is among the top two best-performing states for low smoking habits, ease of finding clean and safe water, having supervisors who treat workers like a partner rather than a boss, learning something new or interesting on any given day, and perceptions that your city or area are “getting better” rather than “getting worse.”
Contrary to what we’ve seen in the NYT, the tolerant, hard-working Mormons in Utah seem to be doing just fine, judging by many Americans’ standards. Perhaps Mitt Romney shouldn’t hide his Mormonism but confidently own it and be proud of his religion’s focus on values, strong communities, public service, and compassion for the poor and sick.
Something tells me we won’t be reading much in the press about the utopia in Utah, but that just means the increasing number of Americans moving there will be pleasantly surprised when they get to experience it firsthand.
link
One seemingly strange thing about some of the forms of what appears to be human altruism, in contradistinction to what biologists call altruism among lower species like ants, is the very concern humans sometimes will show for other species. Those efforts are never reciprocated, so far as I can see.
the monorail will bring us together
You need to watch more Disney movies, sdferr. They are chockful of compassionate critters saving the lives of hapless humans. See: “Old Yeller” for Proof! And Flipper! A rapist-of-the-sea was always helping those kids out of a jam.
That alleged road altruism, wherein people think they’re being “nice” by deciding their own selves to give you the right-of-way, aren’t just annoying, they’re being pretty damned dangerous.
I don’t know how many times I’ve had some old geezer stop to let me turn left in front of him—across two lanes of traffic! He can’t control what happens in the other lane, so if I take his “courtesy” stop, I risk being rammed by the guy in the other lane who has no idea why that stupid car is just sitting there.
Try as I might to wave them on—angrily, I might add, because they’re damned fools—they just sit there, proud of how polite they are and utterly oblivious to how they’ve put me at risk of being T-boned.
Because I can wait for the other lane to clear, but won’t somebody in the geezer’s lane come up behind him, figure he’s broken down (or a moron), whip out around him, and smash into me?
If it weren’t equally dangerous for me to get out of the car and yell at these idiot do-gooders, I’d do it.
The only time “being nice” is called for is when traffic is at a near standstill and people need to merge into your lane. So you let them, provided you can control all the traffic flow relevant to the transaction.
Otherwise, follow the blasted rules, ya knuckleheads. You’ll get someone kilt.
I suspect this bit of trite trype lies behind the commercial under discussion.
I once worked at a place of business just off a busy interection where that kind of “courtesy” caused at least one accident a week.
I mean, who spills coffee in the breakroom and doesn’t wipe it up?
Oh please…do you want to get me started?
Its the same kind of person who helps him/herself to someone else’s lunch in the breakroom fridge.
Its the same kind of person who helps him/herself to someone else’s lunch in the breakroom fridge.
little debbies are like that
It is not virtuous to do something for somebody else just to make you feel better, or to be seen as a nice person. If you are not in a position to ask the person you want to help what would actually help, at least try putting yourself in that person’s position and ask yourself.
Having been the unhappy beneficiary of thoughtless acts of “kindness,” I can testify to this. The Mormon community is famous for being very service-minded, which is usually good, but I had the bad luck to move into a neighborhood of the most clueless Mormons in the state (a high bar to clear, believe you me).
You’re all familiar with how I’ve been battling fatigue. Well, when I first had to quit my job back in ought-three because the thryroiditis and sleep apnea had knocked me on my keister, the folks in the congregation were all eager to lend a hand.
So they’d bring over food (or keep asking if I needed meals brought over), or they’d pester me to let them serve! because when one renders service one reaps blessings!
But I didn’t need meals brought over. I wasn’t bedridden like a woman with pre-eclampsia or someone just out of surgery. And I didn’t need little jobs performed for me. (I had already learned the hard way not to let them weed my flowerbeds if I wanted to actually keep my flowers.)
So I politely refused their offers because I frankly didn’t need what they were offering. All well and good, and yet it never occurred to them that someone living alone, no work, nothing to do and too tired to do it, might need a little company.
But that was the one thing I couldn’t ask for. I was already feeling depressed and worthless, so if I had asked and nobody came? I couldn’t have handled it.
And because they were so clueless about my being utterly alone (to the point that I now understand why solitary confinement is a punishment—it ain’t the confinement part!), I couldn’t bear to have them do little chores around the house, because it would be as if I were lying there, disemboweled, and they would be asking if I had a headache or nattering on about the weather.
It would be as if the Good Samaritan had come along and set a loaf of bread and a plate of cookies alongside the battered man. Such an act of cluelessness is apt to instill despair rather than gratitude, hope, or anything approaching a warm fuzzy.
The hardest part was that I knew they weren’t trying to look good to others or to feel good about themselves—helping someone who’s down and out is all part of the Mormon routine. They were just staggeringly clueless.
(Later, I had to admit that I hadn’t made very many friends at church, or that the ones I had made had moved away, so there really wasn’t anyone there who would have felt comfortable coming over to chat. And besides, they’d all have assumed that someone else was taking care of that. Hazards of living in Utah, I guess.)
Anyway, I’ve become vividly aware that when you want to help someone out, it really has to be something they need—not what you want to give them. If you have a hard time putting yourself in that person’s shoes, try asking. Or at least talk with them a bit to see if you can read figure out what they need. Or ask someone else.
Sometimes, that act of clueless service can really, really hurt.
I really chaps my hide to tell some clerk “thanks” after making a purchase and have them say “no problem.” Well, no shit. It’s your job. How about “you’re welcome” or “thanks for shopping with us?
I wouldn’t sweat that particular idiom. “No problem” has now acquired the same meaning as “you’re welcome” or “sure thing” or any standard response after receiving thanks.
It’s only been in the past month, in fact, that I’ve run into complaints about “no problem.” It never struck me as inappropriate.
despite incessant insinuations in the MSM that life among the Latter Day Saints could be anything other than a hell on earth,
For the MSM types and other coastal-elites who move here, Utah is hell on earth. Just ask them. Those poor dears are forced to keep close quarters with thousands and thousands of Sarah Palins.
They’re embarrassed to tears at having to endure the extreme tackiness of people who give standing ovations at every live performance or who say “sun-dee, mun-dee, tooz-dee” or who insert a glottal stop in the middle of “mountain” and “Layton.”
They also have to endure people who trick-or-treat on Saturday night when Halloween falls on a Sunday, whose high-school kids attend one religious class a day (“release time”) in a little building next to the school, and who actually say “oh my heck” in public—without being ironic.
Yes, Utah is a living hell for the sophisticates. Toss them a dime for a cuppa coffee when you see them, and they’ll launch into a delightful screed about how the Starbucks density is less than Seattle’s.
Why tell her? She doesn’t need to know.
<glances nervously over shoulder>
Good stuff, McGhee. One of those said it better than I ever could kind of truths.
We wonder how to summarize what’s happened to society just as we wonder why some old dead folks had so much figured out so long ago. And wrote it down. It’s almost like they had tapped some kind of transcendence.
Said no leftist ever.
I do nice things for others (not not the driving thing you were talking about- I mean real nice things*) because it makes me feel good.
I’m selfish like that.
*like helping an older person load their groceries at the store, or giving blood.
Heh.
I’ll let some guy take my unloaded shopping cart to the door since he’s headed that way, just so he’ll feel like he did a good deed. I’m a giver.
And see what he got in the end?
I like opening doors for the angry reactions – that makes me feel good.
And see what he got in the end?
No good deed goes unpunished, Crawford.
Connection with ObamaCare, eh.
The writer of the original ad also saw that the helped person is just a prop. They wanted to incorporate the helped person in the loop of help/helped but it became too intricate, like a braid, the earlier drafts were too complicated. The writer ended up drawing Nancy cartoon dot lines to depict someone observing an altruistic act like the cartoonist drew dots depicting Nancy observing a flower pot.
They wanted to show the helped person is affected too and goes off altruistically helping people because they’ve been helped. The others because they observed.
There is another version where the helped person helps another and so on back to the first but it not clever at all. It sole advantage is it didn’t need any Nancy cartoon dots.
Of course it wasn’t about altruism (instead, with human excellence as human excellence), but Homer too could do it without cartoon dots: all he had to do was have Priam visit Achilles in his tent to ask that Hector’s corpse be returned to him.
In my last area it was the 4-way stops. Baker area. Still is that way. The person already at the stop can go but must wait to make sure that you really are going to actually stop, lest you fail to stop and they roll out straight into an accident, so they patiently wait even though you are obviously stopping. Obviously stopping. Totally stopping. Yes, you will be totally stopping. There. You have now totally stopped and all life on Earth has momentarily arrested. No movement anywhere. You may proceed. Slowly.
Indeed. My favorite are the idiots who see me standing on the corner waiting to cross a busy 4-lane street who stop and motion me out into traffic. You gonna make the other three lanes of traffic stop? No you’re not ya idjit so just get on down the road!
Saw someone driving a van do this to an old fella in Tucson several years ago and he bit, on Campbell St., a busy 4-lane 45 mph through street. A kid in a little POS coming up behind the stopped van swerved into the left lane just in time to boost the old boy into the second story windows of one of the businesses across the street. Some random act of kindness that was.
Turn signals are opitional here. The driver knows where he’s going, why shouldn’t you? If I happen to be at a stop waiting to turn left and someone is signalling a right turn, I wait them out to see if they’re really going to turn. I’ve seen too many people get T-boned by assuming the other car really was signalling a turn.
But back to the subject.. Does altruism even exist? No lesser a personage than Abraham Lincoln argued that it didn’t:
Which might explain why so many do-gooders do so little actual good. They weren’t trying to do good for you so much as feel good about themselves. If they should inconvenience you in the process, well that’s just too bad. Which might explain too much about your average liberal….
Pigs that grow up to be bacon donors are always better than pigs that drown before they’re old enough.