Pathological Altruism
The immigration and multiculturalism policies of Western societies are often described as “pathological altruism”. The implication of the phrase is that you can have too much of a good thing: that altruism is generally good, but it becomes pathological when it goes too far. Exactly when altruism becomes pathological is not specified, but the current policies are going too far.
I reject this view. Altruism is always pathological. People are selfish, so individual altruism cannot explain social altruism. The challenge is not to explain why people or societies are too altruistic. The challenge is to explain how individual selfishness causes social altruism.
Altruism is the basic moral value of the modern West. We have discarded most traditional moral values, such as chastity, honesty, bravery, loyalty, etc, and replaced them with a single principle: be nice to others. This principle is vague and incomplete. To whom should you be nice? How nice should you be? What exactly does “be nice” mean? In practice, it doesn’t matter, because altruism is just a pretense.
Morality is a delusion/deception. See What is Morality? and Morality and Bad Faith.
Most people are conformists. They believe what those around them believe, or they pretend to believe what those around them pretend to believe. By itself, conformity would create cultural uniformity and inertia. However, people also compete for status within society. This pushes beliefs in a direction that confers status.
Everyone wants to be perceived as altruistic by others, but no one wants to pay the costs of real altruism. So, people display a pretense of altruism, rather than being altruistic. They signal their virtue to others.
It is risky and costly to allow a homeless person to live your home. It is costly to donate time or money to charity. By contrast, it costs very little to demand that your society house the homeless, allow migrants to enter the country, or provide charity to poor people. Those signaling actions have no direct cost to the signaler, and they confer moral status.
Virtue signaling creates a divergence between public and private values. The competition for moral status pushes public values toward a moral extreme, by a purity spiral. People must agree with the moral extreme, or be labeled “evil”.
Each individual has an incentive to signal his goodness by promoting altruistic social policies. The benefit of virtue signaling goes to the individual. The cost is distributed to all members of society, regardless of their stated political values, and regardless of how they vote in elections. Thus, each individual has an incentive to virtue-signal at the expense of the collective.
It is a tragedy of the commons. The individual has a selfish reason to act in a way that is harmful to society.
See Game Theory and Cooperation and Democracy is a Tragedy of the Commons.
The pathological altruism of the West is a tragedy of the commons, caused by a selfish competition for moral status. It is a type of social irrationality.