Altruism Is Not a Force of Nature

On my way to Arizona a few days ago, I found myself in a conversation with a friend about life. It was one of those conversations that turns into 3 hours drive and topics that certainly don't get catagorized into small talk... and it lingers longer than you expect it to in your mind. I love conversations like this, I know that some people don't but connecting what I work on directly to life experiences is such a gift. I appreciate when I get to do it.

My friend and I were talking about the state of the world currently.... The clashes between ideologies, environmental collapse, the way humans treat animals, and the quiet brutality that seems to underlie so many of our systems. At one point, she paused exasperated, and said, “I just don’t understand why more people aren’t altruistic.” I think that her views are that different ideologies are creating this lack of appreciation for our planet and the beauty that it holds.

It’s the kind of statement that feels self-evident on the surface. Of course people should be more altruistic. Of course we should care more, give more, sacrifice more. It lands as moral common sense.

But there’s an assumption inside that sentence that I couldn’t let go of, and it's that altruism is something we should expect from humans by default. That it’s natural. That if it isn’t showing up, something has gone wrong.

I don’t think that’s true.

Not because I think humans are incapable of care. Not because I think cooperation is a myth (I actually do to a certain extent, but we will go deeper into that later). But honestly I think we’ve misunderstood and misinterpreted what altruism actually is, and where it comes from.

If you strip this back to biology, and I mean really strip it down, beneath culture and language and meaning there is no moral framework waiting for you there. Nature doesn’t operate on fairness. It doesn’t reward goodness. It doesn’t punish selfishness. There are no rights in biology, no ethical guarantees, no invisible hand guiding behavior toward what is “better.”

There is only what persists.

Behaviors that, on average, increase the likelihood of survival and reproduction tend to remain. Behaviors that consistently undermine those outcomes tend to disappear. That’s it. No intention required. No virtue necessary.

And yet, when we look at the natural world, we do see cooperation. We can see examples of animals sharing resources, protecting one another, caring for young, sometimes even helping individuals who are not their direct offspring. It’s easy to look at those behaviors and project meaning onto them.... to call them kind, or generous, or altruistic.

But the behavior and the meaning are not the same thing.

There’s actually a name for what we’re doing in that moment, it's called anthropomorphism. This is the tendency to project human traits, emotions, and moral frameworks onto non-human behavior. We see an animal share food and assume generosity. We watch one protect another and call it compassion. But what we’re really doing is translating observable behavior into a language our brains understand. However, it is built for interpreting other humans. The action itself is real. The meaning we assign to it is not inherent to the behavior. It’s constructed and based on our own experiences and belief systems.

Evolutionary biology has spent decades untangling this, and what it shows is far less romantic and far more precise. What looks like selflessness is often rooted in patterns that, over time, support survival. Helping relatives preserves shared genetic material. Repeated cooperation builds systems of exchange. Social bonding increases stability within a group. Even what looks like sacrifice can, in many contexts, enhance the long-term persistence of the organism or its lineage.

None of this requires an internal sense of moral duty. None of it requires an organism to believe that another’s well-being matters more than its own. It doesn’t even require awareness. It only requires that the behavior, across time, works.

This is why the idea of pure, cost-heavy altruism (and that is defined as behavior that consistently harms the individual with no compensatory benefit) is so difficult to locate in nature. Not because cooperation doesn’t exist, but because indiscriminate self-sacrifice is not a stable strategy. Organisms that routinely destroy their own capacity to survive don’t tend to persist.

So if altruism, as we commonly imagine it, isn’t embedded in biology, where did it come from?

This is where humans diverge in a way that matters.

We don’t just behave, we actually interpret our behavior. We give meaning to it. We build narratives around it. And somewhere along the way, we took a subset of cooperative actions and elevated them. We named them. We moralized them.

We called them altruism.

We decided that certain behaviors (especially those that involved personal cost) were not just useful, but good. Not just adaptive, but virtuous. We turned them into something to aspire to, something to measure ourselves against.

And in doing that, we quietly transformed a set of observable behaviors into a moral ideal.

Altruism isn’t something you can locate in the body. It’s not a blood type or a reflex or a fixed instinct. It’s not a force moving through nature. It’s a value judgment layered on top of behavior. It’s a story we tell about what certain actions mean.

That distinction matters, because once you see it, another question emerges almost immediately....

Why this story?

Why is self-sacrifice so heavily emphasized? Why are we taught, from the beginning, to be nice, to share, to put others first, to give even when it costs us? Why is there such a strong moral pull toward selflessness?

Part of the answer is simple. Societies require a certain level of cooperation to function. Without restraint, without some degree of predictability in behavior, things fracture quickly. Encouraging people to consider others, to share resources, to limit harm.... these are stabilizing forces. External stabilizing forces.

But there’s another layer here that we don’t talk about as openly.

Moral systems don’t just emerge to guide behavior. They also arise to shape it. They reinforce certain patterns, discourage others, and over time, they become internalized. You don’t need constant external enforcement if people are regulating themselves.

Voltaire famously suggested that even if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Not because of theology, but because of what belief systems do. They organize behavior. They create internal boundaries. They influence how people act when no one is watching.

The same can be said, in a quieter way, about the moral elevation of altruism.

If you can get people to believe that giving more makes them better, that prioritizing themselves makes them selfish, that enduring cost is inherently virtuous, you don’t just encourage cooperation. You create a system where individuals monitor their own behavior in alignment with those values.

Sometimes that’s adaptive. Sometimes it allows for large-scale coordination and care.

And sometimes, it becomes something else.

Because when self-sacrifice is idealized without nuance, it can drift. It can move from voluntary care into expectation. From expectation into pressure. From pressure into identity.

You start to see it in the small, everyday ways people move through the world. The inability to say no. The reflex to overextend. The quiet belief that worth is tied to usefulness. The sense that taking care of yourself is somehow indulgent, while taking care of everyone else is virtuous.

This is where the conversation intersects with physiology, whether people realize it or not.

Because not all “altruistic” behavior is coming from a place of abundance or conscious choice. A lot of it is emerging from the nervous system.

When someone is operating from a regulated state (when their system perceives enough safety) they have access to a wider range of responses. They can consider others without losing themselves. They can give without collapsing. They can cooperate in ways that are flexible and responsive.

But when the nervous system is organized around threat, the picture changes.

Under the framework of Socio-Physiological Dysregulation Theory, behavior is always shaped by state. A system that feels unsafe narrows its options. It prioritizes survival. It becomes more reactive, more guarded, more focused on immediate outcomes.

And in some cases, that doesn’t look like aggression or withdrawal. It looks like compliance.

It looks like fawning. Appeasing. Over-giving. Trying to maintain connection at any cost.

From the outside, that can be mistaken for altruism. It can even be praised as such. But internally, it’s not about generosity. It’s about safety. A system that doesn’t feel safe setting boundaries will give, and give, and give. A system that equates connection with survival will prioritize others. A system that fears disconnection will overextend.

That’s not a philosophical commitment to selflessness. It’s an adaptive response to perceived threat.

Once you start to see this, the original question (why aren’t people more altruistic) begins to shift.

Because it’s no longer just about values. It’s about conditions.

Humans absolutely have the capacity to act in ways that prioritize others, even at a cost. We can help strangers. We can protect people we don’t know. We can choose to extend ourselves beyond immediate self-interest.

But that capacity isn’t evenly accessible at all times.

It’s shaped by biology, by environment, by culture, by nervous system state, by resource availability. It’s influenced by the stories we’ve been told and the systems we’re embedded in.

Altruism, in that sense, is not a default setting.

It’s a decision.

And like any decision, it’s constrained by what’s available to the system making it.

There’s a parallel here that feels worth naming. Peace is often talked about as if it’s something you find, something you arrive at. But in practice, peace is a decision. It’s something you choose, repeatedly, often under conditions that don’t make it easy.

Altruism is similar.

It’s not something that exists out in the world, waiting to be tapped into. It’s a way of orienting behavior. A choice to extend beyond immediate self-interest. And that choice is not neutral. It carries cost. It requires capacity.

Which brings us back to where the conversation started.

It’s easy to look at the world and ask why people aren’t better. Why they don’t give more, care more, sacrifice more.

But that question assumes that altruism is the baseline.... and that it’s what should naturally happen if nothing interferes.

What if that’s backwards?

What if the more honest question is "what conditions make altruism possible in the first place?"

Because behavior doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. It emerges from systems (biological, social, environmental) that shape what is available in any given moment.

If we want to understand why people behave the way they do, moralizing them is the least effective place to start.

You have to look at the structure underneath.

Altruism isn’t a force of nature. It isn’t guaranteed. It isn’t evenly distributed. And it isn’t inherently virtuous simply because it involves sacrifice.

It’s something humans can choose.

But that choice is shaped deeply by the world we’ve built, the stories we tell, and the states our bodies are moving through.

If we actually want more care, more cooperation, more behavior that supports life, the answer isn’t to demand more altruism.

It’s to understand what makes it possible.

And to start there.