Altruism

My favourite example of altruism comes from an unlikely source.

In the animation movie "Aladdin", at one point Aladdin steals a bread and goes through a lot of trouble because of it but, finally, he arrives in a safe place and prepares to eat. At that moment, he sees two children searching through trash for something to eat. He gives his bread to those children, even though he is hungry.

I think that most people wouldn't have done that. It's difficult to be truly altruistic in the real world. When people have everything they need they can afford to be altruistic. When people lack some basic things, altruism becomes more difficult.

In this world, a truly altruistic person is a dead person because there are lots of people dying of hunger. For example, if there were hungry people around you, at what point would you stop giving them your food and begin to eat it yourself? At what point would you think: "my life is more important than another human life"?

Luckily, we don't have to take those decisions every time we eat because hungry people are mostly in underdeveloped countries (out of sight, out of mind).

As I showed before (in my post about overpopulation), giving them food is not the solution because that would only increase the demographic explosion and there would be more mouths to feed.

So what do we do?