Cannot Help It? Being Altruistic?

We are psychological altruists more than we are psychological egoists. This is how God made us, and we cannot help but be and act according to these determining psychological tendencies. We always have some free will, and can choose to be motivated by altruism or by self-interest, but these motives are cultivated in us artificially (building on innate, involuntary impulses) as conscious, freely willed motives, as brought up ethically by community, society, family and under the tutelage our our faith and its pastors.

That we are born psychological altruists, and society raises us to be trained altruists (selfless and community oriented) as nonindividuators and group-livers, whatever free will that we wield as unenlightened group-livers, will incline us to choose behaviors that are engaged in for the sake of the individual self as a member of the community, and for the sake of the general good or general will of the community. This is the hope and aim of traditional ethicists, but they are doomed mostly to fail, and make people more wicked, more unhappy, farther from God and heaven, sicker, more self-loathing and poorer and more enslaved than they otherwise would need to end up being.

To escape our animalistic, bestial, nonindividuating level of base existence (an unfulfilling, inescapable, relatively miserable existence), we humans must acknowledge our sinful natures, our primary deterministic state of being--our wills and souls are automatons ruled internally by instinct, nature and Bad Spirits--and elect a life of nurturing those better, superior parts of our natures and souls, to individualize, maverize and individual-live as a self-actualizing future angel of God, growing in love, excellence, freedom, freedom of the will, heightened consciousness and developed, displayed genius and demonstrated artistic brilliance.

This preferable, alternative, higher level of existing is developing our biological and spiritual potential into complete actuality. The motives grow with proportionate growth in freedom of the will. We grow in elected coursing after enlightened self-interest, and secondarily in enlightened other-interest. These are the moral motives of the living saint.