CHAPTER 5

Showing Generosity: The Altruist

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing…. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

—1 Corinthians 13:1-3, 13

The hero commits to something greater than his or her self .

What do you love enough to die for? Your child? Your spouse or partner? Your parents? Would you give your life if it would ensure world peace, or end hunger, or preserve freedom? Short of dying, what do you sacrifice to make this world a better place? Are you as interested in the effect of your work on the world as you are in how much money or status it brings you? What do you value? What do you want to give to the world? What do you want your legacy to be?

Heroes from time immemorial have lived for something greater than themselves. They may live for their country, for history, for family, for principle, for love, or for God. The motivations differ, but by definition, heroes have a transcendent function, bringing renewed life not only to themselves but to the world. We are living in a time of immense challenge and opportunity. The choices we make today as individuals collectively create the world we all will inhabit tomorrow. Progress is not automatic. Rather, it results from the aggregate decisions of individuals who consider not only their own good, but the greater good of society, humankind, and the planet.

The Altruist archetype * overlays the mammalian brain with distinctly human features, just the way the Warrior archetype does with the reptilian brain. Mammals not only suckle their young, they also like to cuddle up with each other, and they form lasting bonds. When predators attack mammalian herds, the old, the weak, and the ailing will go to the outside of the pack, sacrificing themselves for the good of the others. Our mammalian heritage gives us the capacity for love and devotion and an instinct to sacrifice ourselves when necessary. The Altruist archetype helps us to bring these virtues to consciousness, so that we can choose not only whom we love but also if and when we are willing to sacrifice ourselves for others.

When the Altruist archetype emerges in our lives, it helps us connect with the full range of our mammalian and human ancestry. As with other archetypes, the expression of the Altruist evolves from very concrete to more abstract. In primitive societies, human sacrifices were offered to curry favor with the gods. More advanced cultures revered great heroes and religious saints and martyrs who were willing to die for their country or their faith. In our own time, it is expressed in our willingness to forgo individual achievement to be a good team player, to sacrifice for our children, and to give to the less fortunate.

ALTRUISM AND ECSTASY

In ancient civilizations, not only did the deities offer models of martyrdom, their deaths and resurrection were linked with eroticism. For instance, the Greek god Dionysus was seen as irresistible to women. In the Dionysian rites, followers would crowd around him (like groupies following rock stars), grabbing whatever part they could touch. Eventually, they would reach such heights of passionate intensity that they would tear him apart in a frenzy of ecstasy, but he would always return, reborn in the new year.

The Greek Eleusinian mysteries explained the origin of the seasons through the myth of Demeter, the grain goddess, and her daughter, Persephone. Persephone was kidnapped by Hades, the lord of the underworld, who was smitten with love (or at least lust) for her. Demeter was so saddened by Persephone’s abduction that she sat crying instead of making the crops grow. As famine spread throughout the land, Zeus intervened and had Demeter’s beloved daughter returned to her. When he did so, the crops and flowers flourished once again. Yet because Persephone had eaten a pomegranate seed while in the underworld, she had to return there for a portion of each year; that portion of the year the earth experiences as winter.

Basic to every fertility religion is the knowledge that death and sacrifice are prerequisites to rebirth. This is a basic law of the natural and spiritual worlds. The mysteries of Demeter and Persephone likely originated with the development of agriculture. For thousands of years, people gathered at Eleusis and elsewhere to learn the processes of agriculture, sex, birth, and death. In agriculture, the seed is planted in the ground; for a time nothing appears to be happening, until finally it sprouts. With sex, the egg is fertilized by the sperm and planted in the womb, where it gestates for nine months until the baby is born. When we die, we are buried in the earth, and it looks like we are gone forever. However, the priestesses of Eleusis would explain that, as surely as the seed produces the grain and sex leads to babies, death is followed by rebirth and new life.

While the Orphan seeks rescue from suffering and loss, the Altruist accepts them as potentially transformational. Our major modern religions also extol the transformative quality of sacrifice. As Carol Ochs argues in Behind the Sex of God, the central stories of Judaism and Christianity—Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac and God the Father’s willingness to sacrifice Christ—dramatize the healing power of martyrdom. If one’s love for one’s child is great, offering up that child is the ultimate sacrifice, greater even than sacrificing oneself. 1 Taken metaphorically, the willingness to sacrifice one’s “child” may represent a step beyond the narcissistic egocentricity of the Orphan that requires us to learn to give and care not only when it is easy, but also when it is difficult, when it feels as if giving is at one’s own expense.

Similarly, Buddhist practice teaches us to find happiness by letting go of our desires. Paradoxically, we can find satisfaction not through getting what we want, but by sacrificing ego attachment for the greater good of transcendent bliss.

Sacrifice and martyrdom may be unfashionable in a pleasure-seeking world, but hardly a soul does not believe in them in some form. At their base is a recognition that “I am not the only person in the world.” Sometimes we choose to do something not so much because we want to, but because it will be good for someone else or because we believe it to be right. Some sacrifice is necessary if we wish to interact lovingly with other people. And, although it may not make us feel ecstatic, we all know the sense of joy and self-esteem that results when we act to help others. Scientific research even suggests that doing so strengthens our immune systems. 2

ACCEPTANCE OF MORTALITY

Understanding that death is basic to nature also is part of accepting the sacrificial aspect of life. The leaves fall off the tree every autumn, making spring blossoms possible. All animal life, including humans, lives by eating other life forms. As much as we try to deny it, humans are part of the food chain. We eat plants and animals and excrete substances that fertilize the soil so that more plants can grow. Every life breath depends upon our symbiotic relationship with plants, with whom we exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide. In death, our bodies decay and fertilize the soil. This is the wisdom that fertility religions teach us.

Our lives are our contribution to the universe. We can give this gift freely and lovingly, or we can hold back as if it were possible by refusing life to avoid death. But no one can. How much worse to die never having lived! The final lesson of the Altruist is to choose to give the gift of one’s life for the giving’s sake, knowing that life is its own reward and remembering that all the little deaths, the losses in our lives always bring with them transformation and new life, that actual deaths are not final but merely a more dramatic passage into the unknown.

Until we are willing to give ourselves over to life, we always will be possessed by death. We may reject sacrifice philosophically, but we will find inevitably that we martyr ourselves to our wandering, our warrioring, even our magic making. I believe that human beings have an innate need to sacrifice for something beyond themselves. As I write, my twenty-one-year-old daughter is cooped up in an editing room, working inhumanly long hours to finish an educational video designed to help young drug users stay alive. She could never work that hard out of ambition, but she can out of love.

In organizational settings, I meet so many people whose work is motivated by an incredible sense of wanting to make a difference to the world; these people could be making much more money and/or having more recreational time, but instead are committed to work they think matters. Because they know what they do helps people, they endure interminably boring meetings, brain-numbing paperwork, and long hours.

In his management classic Deep Change, Robert Quinn argues that today’s heroic organizational leaders must care more about contributing to the world than about their own climb up the corporate ladder. What the world needs now, he says, is visionary leadership. Working with a management team in the process of developing a vision statement, he asks them if they would be willing to die for this vision. (Of course, he does not mean literally die. He means lose their jobs.) Success, in this new paradigm, is not based on how much money you make, but on your ability to contribute to the world. His point is that the paradigm shift occurring in our economic and social life requires leadership that puts the good of the organization and the wider community ahead of personal gain. 3

Most of us know that in our private lives, the establishment of a healthy family requires a willingness to put your immediate desires aside for the sake of others. Any parent who stays up all night with a sick child knows that however exhausted they feel the next day, they would not have failed to be there for that child. Anyone involved in a serious, committed love relationship knows that you just have to let go of the need to always get your own way for that relationship to work. Most couples go through a Warrior period, in which both parties, in a battle of wills, try to remake the other in their own image. When this Pygmalion project fails, as it almost always does, it becomes possible to stop being two warring individuals and to establish a sense of “us” as a couple. When this happens, we make choices not necessarily because they are best for “me,” but because they are good for “us.”

Many self-destructive and addictive tendencies in our “me-first” world can be traced to our failure to honor in ourselves the human need to sacrifice for something greater than ourselves. If we do not sacrifice consciously for something we believe in, we will be possessed by the martyr’s shadow—behaviors that threaten to take our lives but bring no redemption.

Sacrifice can be fulfilling when it is fueled by genuine passion. For example, chivalric literature extols the suffering of the knight who does whatever is necessary to prove his love for his mistress. Eventually, his efforts pay off, not only in winning her favor, but also in developing discipline, courage, and honor. Such knights also find fulfillment in swearing absolute loyalty to the king, dying, if need be, for their country.

Many people take jobs that do not pay well and offer little chance for promotion. They may work in day-care facilities, in homes for the aged, in community organizations, or in other places that make a great difference in the lives of those they serve. Few of us may know who they are, but they daily make the world a better place. Although the rewards may not translate into material wealth or power, if they know they truly are helping others, they rightly feel that their lives have meaning and value.

The resonance of the Altruist archetype in today’s world was demonstrated by the outpouring of grief after the death of England’s Princess Diana. Diana could have spent all of her time being a playgirl. Instead, she spent countless hours at what she considered “her work,” publicly lending support to those organizations caring for people in need. And people loved her for it. In particular, they responded to her early concern for AIDS patients and her personal campaign to publicize the ongoing harm to civilians, many of them children, caused by land mines.

The heroes with whom people identify today are not larger than life. They are struggling with the same ordinary dilemmas we all face. People loved Princess Diana because she let them in, sharing with the world her struggles with bulimia and her disappointment in what seemed like every girl’s fantasy (to marry the prince). In this way, she was appreciated as a fellow human, with sorrows as well as strengths. Heroes do not wait to help the world until they have it all together. The hero brings life to a dying culture, in part, by being both caring and real. All of us can do this by living our lives fully. Our capacity to do so is related psychologically to our willingness to give what it requires of us: to love as fully as we can, even though we know that doing so opens us up to pain and sorrow; to live our vocational purpose, to do our work, even though we risk failure, poverty, or receiving little or no appreciation; and ultimately to die, for that is the price we pay for having lived.

WHY SACRIFICE HAS A BAD NAME

Although widely practiced in both its positive and negative variations, sacrifice has gotten a bad name because in the past it has too often been prescribed, not chosen. If you have been socialized by your parents, by the church/synagogue, or by your schooling to sacrifice the essence of your individuality to be “good,” there is no way you can give freely. Before learning to give appropriately, it is necessary to say no to gratuitous, role-defined sacrifice.

Sacrifice cannot be redemptive if it is required! Men have been expected to compete in a marketplace metaphorically envisioned as a “jungle” and to fight when necessary to protect home and hearth. Women were taught to create a home environment marked by care and gentleness. The existence of such a private sanctuary from the storm was dependent upon women’s sacrifices—not only the necessary sacrifices required by raising children, but more than that. Because men had opted out of the world of care for the world of conquest, women were expected to supply the care for both parties. In practice, this meant that women had to sacrifice their creative expression and their achievement urge in order to care for others. This arrangement has been crippling to women because, instead of sacrifice being just one developmental task, it has defined their lives. Furthermore, the mythos of love and sacrifice has been used to keep women in traditional and limited roles.

While men have not been expected to forego personal achievement for care, the culture has assigned them the role of the provider, which means they have had to take on dangerous or tedious work, if it was required to put food on the table. Furthermore, the Warrior archetype, in which the masculine role has been cast, also feeds into the Altruist archetype, with its demand that individuals be willing not only to fight to win, but if necessary to die for their cause. Moreover, stoic Warriors sacrifice everything else to become performance machines. I sometimes think that men who die from heart attacks induced by work-related stress can be seen as dying from hearts broken by believing that no one cares how they feel as long as they make money for the company and the family.

If you think about the stereotypes of the American mom or the Jewish mother, you can see how the traditional selfless female role can distort a woman’s full humanity rather than bringing out her innate nobility. Its results are bitterness, manipulation, and guilt-inducing behavior. You also can see that when men are forced into the provider role with no permission to consider their own deeper desires or concerns, they can develop a macho sense of entitlement, which comes down to wanting tribute to make up for not quite having a real life. When people are forced by role expectations to give up their lives for someone else, they inevitably will require that the other person pay. We see this with bitter wives who berate their husbands; mothers and fathers who lay guilt trips on their children; and men in demeaning jobs who come home and order their families around.

More often than not, sacrifice is not rewarded. The wife may sacrifice career (or career advancement) or simply doing what she loves to help her husband or children, yet find she is taken increasingly for granted. She also may internalize this negative self-valuation, introducing herself socially as “I’m just a housewife.” A husband may work as a trash collector to support his family and find they are ashamed of what he does, even though he is doing it entirely for them. An employee may give up his weekends and evenings to the company and be downsized anyway. People in caregiving professions like teaching or nursing pay a price in income (unless they invoke the Warrior and form a union). Indeed, often people watching others sacrifice themselves to do for others assume they have no self-esteem and treat them accordingly.

Good-hearted people organize government and charitable programs to help those in poverty. Most beneficiaries use such programs appropriately to get back on their feet. In doing so, they honor the sacrifices made on their behalf. Of course, some always find a way to use the system for personal profit, seeing the “bleeding hearts” who support these programs as chumps. Others misuse their subsidies to underwrite addictive and self-destructive behaviors. To the degree that the altruistic intent in establishing such programs is not balanced by realism and tough-mindedness, individuals and whole societies may turn away from giving entirely or so carefully monitor recipients that their dignity is undermined. Pseudo-Altruists use the inevitable chiselers as an excuse to retreat from social responsibility, while more high-minded individuals employ their intelligence to fine-tune their ability to make a “tough-love” difference for those in need.

GRATUITOUS SACRIFICE STOPS HERE

The decision to care, even at the cost of self-sacrifice, is a choice for life and against despair. It also is the dominant spiritual lesson people have been working on for thousands of years and, as we have seen, it is the essence of Christianity and Judaism, modern existential thought, as well as much of progressive politics. Heroes in all times and places always have been those individuals who lived for something beyond themselves.

I was talking recently with a friend about this book, and he said that to him the hero is someone who has endured life’s trials and tribulations. When pressed, he explained that he actually meant something more than that. Heroes, he continued, not only endure hardships, they maintain their love of life, their courage, and their capacity to care for others. No matter how much suffering they experience, they do not pass it on. They absorb it and declare: “Suffering stops here!”

In the primitive Altruist’s morality, it is appropriate for mothers to sacrifice personal growth and fulfillment for their children. Their daughters will sacrifice for their children in turn. Fathers and sons are expected to give their lives willingly, if called, for their country. Everyone sacrifices themselves to God or, more precisely, they sacrifice in the service of good those parts of themselves that they regard as wrong or sinful. Nothing much is going on but sacrifice. It has become an end in itself; hence, it does nothing to improve the world. Indeed, it usually adds to the world’s cumulative pain.

At a higher level, consciousness kicks in, and with it the transformative power of personal choice. In Joseph Heller’s novel Catch–22, Yossarian, the central character, recognizes that the social system in which he lives (the army during World War II) is defined entirely by suffering, with every victim victimizing someone else: “Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.” 4 Although he has been told he is flying bombing missions to save home and country, he discovers his covert mission was simply to preserve international business. So he stops flying. Yossarian knows that he cannot necessarily be free, since the army can court-martial him. However, instead of the meaningless affliction of flying more missions, his refusal can have some positive effect. At the very least, he is living by his own values and has regained his integrity. At most, his example may prompt others to refuse to fly more bombing missions, too. Then the chain of suffering may be broken.

Yossarian comes to understand that the sacrifices he has been forced to make are actively destructive to himself and others. As long as he keeps flying bombing missions, he complies with the forces on both sides that are killing people needlessly. The choice to say no also requires sacrifice—perhaps he will have to give up an honorable discharge and hence lose respect and career opportunities back home; yet, this sacrifice is transformative because it is an appropriate and courageous response to the actual needs of his specific situation.

How can you tell whether you are giving appropriately? When you are, it feels compatible with your identity, an outgrowth of who you are. Ultimately, we know who we are by what we would die for. Great martyrs like Martin Luther King Jr. and Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, so believed in themselves and their cause that they knowingly risked death rather than endure the soul-harming living death of being less than they could be. So, too, for Mother Teresa. She worked with the homeless and dying because that was her calling. For many of us, making decisions about when and how much to sacrifice helps us learn who we are.

THE DIGNITY OF RECEIVING

Giving cannot be transformative unless it is received. If someone gives to us and we refuse the gift, no harm necessarily is done, but no great good is accomplished either. If someone gives to us and we use what they give to enable our addictions or other bad behavior, actual harm results. If we develop an attitude of entitlement, we may receive an enormous amount, but never notice. The result may be that others stop giving to us because their gifts seem so invisible and devalued.

Once we define ourselves as the giver in a particular situation or relationship, we may not notice how much we also receive. This is particularly true for parents. I remember once when my daughter, Shanna, was only about four or five. I came home from a particularly intense day at work, made her a quick bite to eat, and rushed to get her and her friend to their gymnastics class. The class was too far from home to come back, so I waited, hungry and tired, for an hour and a half, bit my tongue while she fooled around after practice, rushed us home, got her bathed and dressed for bed, and read a story. I still had not had time to eat or change out of my business clothes.

When she then asked me to sing her to sleep, I said rather crossly, “I’m tired. You have to think of me sometimes, too.” As she turned over to go to sleep, she reached out, touched my cheek with her little hand, and said, “Mom, I always think of you.” There was such love in her voice that I felt fully seen and loved by her. At her touch, my energy returned. Certainly that was as great a gift as my making her dinner and taking her to her lesson. But had I been attached to the idea of being the all-giving mother, I could not have let in her love in the simple, honest way she gave it to me. How great it feels when a child throws open her arms to greet you, jumping up and down with happiness, shouting “Mommy’s home!” or “Daddy’s home!”

Raising Shanna, I have reconnected with the girl in me, learned to play again, and experienced daily delight and love. When I fully let that in, I know that she has brought at least as much to me as I have shared with her. Very few of our relationships really have to be one way. Therapists learn from their clients; teachers learn from their students; ministers learn from their congregations. When the energy is not flowing both ways, something is wrong. If the giving and receiving happen with no blocking, then both receive more than they give—because the process intensifies and enriches the energy exchanged. Learning to give or to sacrifice appropriately surely is as hard as learning to play baseball. Our first attempts always are very clumsy. People may misinterpret our giving and think we want something in return. Or, like the mother who abandons her career or the father who works in a field he hates in order to support his family, we overdo it. But with practice comes improvement; our giving and receiving take on the effortlessness shown by real pros playing catch. It all seems easy—throwing and catching and letting go again.

For some people, giving is painful because they feel they have to control or manipulate everything if the ball is ever to come back to them. And if they think that—after having thrown the ball to first base, they have to get it back from first base—they may be sorely disappointed. But sooner or later—from third base or left field—the ball returns.

The more we give in this kind of free way, the more we get, because nature abhors a vacuum; it fills us up. That is, it does so unless we have misunderstood sacrifice and see the state of emptying out as a static good rather than only a stage in the process. Then we get what we asked for—emptiness, depletion.

When we learn both to take and to give, we can move into a flow of giving and receiving that is love’s essence—reciprocity. In this way, the flow of energy does not go just one way, but both. I give to you and you to me and we both receive the energy fully. Christ said to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Sacrifice, however, has been misinterpreted as loving your neighbor instead of yourself.

For love to be transformative, it must be let in. That is why Christ asked his disciples at the Last Supper to eat the bread and drink the wine “in remembrance of me.” It also is why the Hebrews were enjoined to eat special Passover foods to celebrate the Exodus from Egypt. Eating is a powerful symbol for taking a gift in, for nothing is truly a gift until it is received. Conscious receiving raises the difficult issue of choice and of taking responsibility for having chosen to let in one thing and not another. Yes, I will marry you, but not you. Yes, I will work with you, but not you.

Sometimes we are unable to receive gifts because we are afraid that in receiving them, we will obligate ourselves to pay the giver back. This kind of contractual giving may be a form of manipulation. We can use our intuition and turn down gifts that have inappropriate strings attached, but we also should be aware that sometimes we simply project our fears onto the giver.

Communication in relationships vastly improves when we make our expectations explicit to our loved ones. Almost everyone gives what they would like to receive, without realizing that the other person may want something very different. I once was in a relationship with a man who felt I did not really love him because I did not do little things for him like sew buttons on his shirt. When he told me this, I got angry because I thought he was being a male chauvinist. Later, I realized that it was not so much that he wanted me to be conventionally female, but that his idea of how you show love was doing little things like that for one another. Because my idea of how to show love is to say, “I love you” and share the secrets of your heart, I felt unloved by him—not recognizing that he showed his love for me by returning my overdue library books! To stay together, we would have had to learn each other’s giving vocabulary. The same is true at work.

COMMITMENT, BALANCE, AND THE ENNOBLED LIFE

For many, even the thought of making a major commitment to someone else raises major fears. For example, it might be nice to marry this person, but what if I find someone later whom I like better? Or what if he leaves me? What if he is unsuccessful? What if she turns out like her mother? What if she gets cancer and I have to take care of her? To commit is to risk the unknown, but even more than that it requires sacrificing the idea of the perfect mate to love a real, flawed human being. When we do so honestly and freely, out of clear preference, the result can be transformative. If the commitment is reciprocal, it can make for a magic relationship of closeness and joy. If it is not, it still can be personally transformative, because through it we learn the skill of loving fully and not holding back from that experience. And we learn we can survive the loss of what we love most.

So, too, with life. Commitment to living this life means giving up rigid ideas about what the world should be and loving what it is. That, of course, does not mean that we do not work to make the world a better place or to improve our relationships. It means that we can give up the pose of being disappointed idealists and let ourselves know what a blessing it is to be alive. We allow ourselves to let it all in. It also means giving up the notion of scarcity—that there is not enough to go around and that I am not enough, you are not enough, and the world is not enough. In accepting life, we can believe that plenty of love, goods, and room are available to make us happy.

In our technological age, we can have cell phones, car phones, fax machines, and electronic mail wherever we go. As a result, we can continue working long after we theoretically “go home.” People of conscience also want to spend quality time with their spouses or partners, children, parents, and friends, and they commit time to self-improvement, introspection, worship, and values clarification—not to mention getting requisite exercise and doing community service.

Many of us today are afflicted by “life greed.” In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, it was fashionable to learn the Warrior skill of envisioning what you want and going for it. This was good, in part, because many of us discovered we could have and be more than we thought possible. However, during this same period, the gap between the haves and have-nots grew exponentially. Some people realized their wildest dreams, while others lost their homes and were living on the streets. The Altruist calls on us to care not only for our own families, but for our communities, not just for those who look and act like us, but for those who do not.

Life for the relatively advantaged has became more and more hectic, even as it seemed possible to have and be anything. Today, the Altruist archetype helps us to sacrifice our perfectionism, recognizing that we are unlikely to have perfect children, keep an immaculate home, write the great American novel, and climb the corporate ladder, at least not all at once. It can also help us spend less time on achievement and more time caring for others, less effort on keeping up with the Joneses and more on visiting with them to create real community or working with them to solve social problems.

In a Warrior culture, personal achievement can seem to mean, and be, everything in life. However, what do we gain if some of us have more and more gadgets while others go hungry? Mindfulness and conscious choice help immeasurably in finding an appropriate balance between personal ambition and generosity. Ultimately, we know more about who we are by the choices we make. For example, a parent who decides to pull back from career advancement to attend to a troubled teenager may feel some envy years later when colleagues have surpassed him in achievement. Yet, if he remembers that he made that decision himself and takes a moment to celebrate the benefit to the child, he can end up feeling ennobled, rather than cheated by life.

LOVE THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF

After slaying the dragon, the archetypal hero generally finds and falls in love with the woman (or man) of his (her) dreams. Genuine altruism results from love. Our first great loves are our parents, then relatives and friends. At some time, we may develop a crush on a teacher or other older adult. Later, as we grow up, we experience romantic love. Then we may have children of our own. When we really love someone, giving to that person is a great pleasure. It does not necessarily feel like a sacrifice. Notice how pleased little children are when they do anything that makes their parents happy. Notice also how pleased parents are if they can help their children thrive and grow. When making love with someone very special, we get as much delight in bringing our partner pleasure as in experiencing our own.

You may become part of a work team in which you all strongly believe in your mission. Perhaps the team goes through a difficult time. Instead of fighting, you hang tough together. A bond is created that can last forever. If you need to work late or pitch in to do something that really is not your job, you do not care. You are happy to help out.

During natural disasters, people usually put competitiveness aside and simply help one another, as people of the same nation often do in time of war. They are aware of a common bond and a need for one another, and also a sense of the fragility of human life. Typically, when people are asked what they would do if a nuclear bomb was about to be dropped on their city, they reply that they would call someone to tell them that they love them. Moreover, when we share difficult experiences with people, it is natural to let down our defenses and get more intimate, even telling things about ourselves that ordinarily would be too private to share.

The most authentic expression of altruism comes from love. And when we really love someone, we do not feel separate. In a Warrior culture, the emphasis is on proving ourselves; therefore, how much money, approval, and attention we get depends on how we measure up in comparison with others. In an Altruist culture, people merit money, approval, and attention simply because we care about them. They do not have to be specially gifted or work terribly hard. They just have to be themselves.

In her pioneering sociological study The Female World, Jessie Bernard described the difference between the historically private world of women and the public world of men. The private world operates in keeping with the Altruist archetype and the public world by the standards of the Warrior archetype. So Bernard and others maintain that our economic theories are based solely on the male experience in the male world. Therefore, we assume that people make economic and career decisions out of self-interest; working hard to make more money and gain greater status and power. It is not that this analysis is wrong, only that it is incomplete.

Women, Bernard notes, have lived by very different rules. In the home and in communities, women’s work was not paid and held no possibility of advancement. Even if women worked in the wage economy, their earnings were low and opportunities to increase their pay and status minimal. Therefore, women worked for love and duty, rather than for personal advantage. In this female world, you gave to people not to achieve more, but because you loved them or could see that they needed your help. 5

In The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler traces the origin of these two coexisting worlds to the time when warrior bands conquered agrarian, goddess-worshiping peoples. She calls them partnership and dominance societies, noting the relatively egalitarian nature of one and the hierarchical nature of the other. 6

The legacy of the female has been undervalued and generally ignored by scholars and theorists until recently. Sometimes it is hard to notice what is happening when it is not studied in school or covered by the media. Yet many women (and some men) still live by the precepts of an Altruist culture. I am thinking of two women, both of whom have been very important to me and to my understanding of the Altruist approach to life. One enormously talented woman spent many years traveling with her husband, forgoing the opportunity to develop her own career. Yet, everywhere she went, she simply did what people needed—she counseled them, gave them massages and nutritional advice, decorated their houses, painted murals on their walls, and made them meals. She just gave what she could as a way to contribute to the hosts she visited on her rounds. Sometimes she got paid, and sometimes she did not. But she always had what she needed. This way of living seemed natural to her. The only problem arose when others saw her as less accomplished than some of her contemporaries because she was not following an identifiable career track.

The other woman works tirelessly to help people of color, women, and individuals with disabilities. Whenever anyone needs help, she is there. In her case, she often works for rather low-paying nonprofit organizations, and she volunteers on the side and enjoys (in her free time) doing favors for people and buying them presents (which almost always are handmade, so she also is supporting struggling artists). She is not codependent, and she is not doing all this out of some deep-seated neurosis. She does it freely, out of love.

Both of these women live by the rules of the female world. Of course, men always have been a part of this more altruistic realm, even while participating in the public world of the Warrior. Men have been active in charity work, have helped out people down the block, and have been involved in church, synagogue, or ashram committees. Just as women brought casseroles to the neighbors, men would help build or fix whatever was needed. In the American West, community barn raisings were as much a part of frontier life as the quilting bee. One very successful consultant I know confided in me that his success comes from never worrying overly much about money. When he sees something that needs doing, he does it. Sometimes he is paid very well. Other times he contributes his services. The result is that he is not only affluent, but very respected.

Over the final two decades of the twentieth century, women have entered the public world in greater numbers. At the same time, communication skills and interpersonal intelligence have become essential for leadership and teamwork, rather than the top-down authoritarian approach that used to be the norm. Government programs have been instituted to help the needy. And even though President Lyndon Johnson used Warrior language to launch his “war on poverty,” the intent came from the Altruist, not the Warrior, spirit in our country. Increasingly, our soldiers are as likely to be delivering food to starving people as they are to be engaged in mortal combat with an enemy.

It may well be that because of the threat of nuclear annihilation, people in ever greater numbers have realized that, in the poet W. H. Auden’s words, “We must love each other or die.” In the new global economy, and with our increasingly diverse workforce, learning to care for people who seem very different from us—whatever our background might be—is today’s challenge. The picture taken from outer space of our beautiful globe—glowing like a jewel in the sky, but with no sign of national boundaries—is a powerful symbol of how interconnected all our journeys are and have been.

Those in whom the Altruist archetype is expressed fully care about others throughout the world, not simply as a virtuous act of charity but because they really believe that we are family. Coming face to face with a person with a different color skin, dressed in unfamiliar clothes, expressing ideas that seem strange or even uncomfortable, the Altruist sees the brother or sister underneath.

For the Altruist, the challenge of our time is to take the love, the care, the sharing, and the cooperative spirit that always have characterized the private sphere (at least within homogeneous groups) and express those traits in our pluralistic public and business life as well. At the same time, today’s Altruists recognize that the imbalance between the Warrior and Altruist archetypes has led to a breakdown in the social fabric of our neighborhoods. While more women have joined the workforce (and adopted more Warrior characteristics), we have not seen an equivalent shift in the amount of male energy refocused on care.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urbanologist Jane Jacobs explains that neighborhoods were much safer when older women sat on the front stoop or at their windows and kept an eye on things. 7 Yet, even without reverting to earlier sex roles, our neighborhoods can be safe again. We can make them so when our cultural value for care catches up with our respect for competition and achievement—in short, when the values of the traditional female realm are as respected as those of the male world. When this happens, the core of our families and communities will seem as important as the workplace to men as well as women.

In the past, the psychological development required of people was simplified greatly by assigning different groups roles that used only part of their potential ability as human beings. The increased complexity of life today and the breakdown of traditional sex roles force us to become more psychologically complex and balanced.

However, when the sexes are socialized very differently, there is an inherent limit to the intimacy that couples can achieve. Men and women today can reach greater closeness than in prior times precisely because we are learning to share more experiences and perspectives. Men do not have to feel as though women are an alien species and vice versa. Both men and women have access to the Warrior and the Altruist within.

As women and men balance the demands of “proving oneself” with “living generously,” our communities, businesses, and societies can function more harmoniously together. The Warrior takes us part of the way to prosperity by teaching us discipline, skill, and a focus on quality of achievement. The Altruist moves us into abundance by encouraging us to share the wealth.

GIVING AND PROSPERITY

The Warrior lives in a context of scarcity. The Altruist archetype helps us make the transition into abundance. When we learn to give and receive appropriately and skillfully, the result is truly miraculous. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a giveaway ceremony patterned on those practiced by several Native American peoples. It showed me how letting go of what you no longer need and giving to others what they need can come together magically and painlessly. We had been told before-hand to bring something that was very valuable to us (though not necessarily of monetary value), something that we also were ready psychologically to give up and move beyond. We placed this item on an altar. Then we all walked by and took whatever item beckoned to us. The miracle, we discovered as we discussed it later, was that everyone received just the right gift. What I learned from this experience was that miracles of synchronicity (meaningful coincidences) do occur—regularly!

We all can have enough if we do not hoard. Our job is to appreciate thoroughly and treasure whatever we truly want that we already have and at the same time give up anything we no longer need. Our capacity to give away speaks to the universe of our willingness to receive . We do not have to hold on to things, protecting ourselves against a rainy day. If we freely give away, we also will receive freely just what we need.

In the 1970s, the United States experienced a series of energy “crises.” We believed that gasoline was scarce, even though we still had an adequate supply. People stocked up out of fear. Ironically, this fear that we would not have enough became a self-fulfilling prophecy. When people believe they have enough and share freely, there is enough. What Franklin Roosevelt said in 1933 remains true: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

When we get frightened, we hoard. One dollar, kept locked up, is worth only one dollar—for however long we have it. If that dollar is spent, invested, or given away, it might change hands ten times that day and hence be worth ten dollars. Over the course of the year, even if some days were less active, that dollar might be used for more than three thousand dollars’ worth of transactions. Very literally, wealth happens when we keep money circulating. The same is true with goods. If all of us hoard goods we have no need for in our attics and basements, many people go without. If we all pass on what we no longer need, there is more for everyone to share. In addition, we have reached such a state of international interdependence that a financial collapse anywhere in the world has an impact on us. We all benefit if every society is doing at least minimally well. The more affluent the people of all nations are, the more they have to lose by going to war. Good trading partners are less likely to become enemies.

Many churches teach people to tithe, telling them that tithing will bring them prosperity. For this truth to kick in, we need not necessarily tithe to churches. The same principle can work equally well if we give money to philanthropic or political causes. Over the years, two people have sent me money with a card explaining that they tithed each week to someone who had nurtured them spiritually. Tithing works because it triggers the sense of prosperity. If I have enough to give away a percentage of my income, I feel psychologically abundant and hence become open to receiving the abundance of the universe.

We all are expected to tithe to the government—in fact, for most of us the tax bill comes to significantly more than ten percent. When the Wanderer archetype is active in our lives, this tends to seem like a great imposition. The Warrior supports taxes for the military and other government functions that help the country maintain a competitive advantage. The Altruist, however, is perfectly willing to pay a reasonable amount in taxes, believing that we have as much collective responsibility as we do personal rights. The Altruist knows that societies do not work unless affluence is shared. If the strong keep winning and the weak keep losing, the eventual result is a world full of crime, poverty, disease, environmental disaster, and the continual threat of rebellion caused by increased political repression. Rather than complain about taxes, the Altruist simply wants them used for the collective benefit, to provide roads, schools, and help for those who cannot help themselves.

When all have what they need to develop their full potential, the combined resources of the society are astoundingly high. When money is available for investment, innovation increases and productivity soars. Making certain that everyone has an opportunity to make a real contribution to the world pays off in universal prosperity.

Although people complain about the commercialism of the Christmas season, it is still a time to give and share. We watch movies like It’s a Wonderful Life or read Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and the message is clear: when we hold on to wealth tightly, our lives dry up. When we spend our lives giving to others, we will be surrounded by loving community. All this focus on love and care, it is true, causes people to buy gifts for their loved ones. The truth is, all this spending does boost the economy. However much some might wish for a more authentic spiritual observance of the season, it does teach us about the relationship between caring and prosperity.

While Warriors think of money as a way to keep score in a competitive game with winners and losers, the Altruist sees money as a thank-you note from a person or from society for a job well done. This money then can be spent or contributed to thank others for what they are giving to the world or what they mean to us personally. The money paid is completing the cycle of giving and receiving that helps our self-esteem and our relationships grow. Thus, in the Altruist’s worldview, we do not need the threat of poverty to keep people productive. Have you ever had the experience of believing that your contribution to an enterprise mattered greatly? If so, you know how motivated and how productive you can be. The more freely and fearlessly we give, the less it feels like sacrifice and the more it seems like a way to generate incredible abundance for us all.

GETTING ACQUAINTED WITH THE ALTRUIST ARCHETYPE

To familiarize yourself with the Altruist archetype, make a collage out of Altruist-like pictures from magazines; make lists of songs, movies, and books that express the Altruist; collect pictures of yourself, relatives, colleagues, and friends in an Altruist mode. Practice noticing when you are thinking or acting like an Altruist.

Altruist Exercises

Step One : Look for opportunities to be kind and caring to others. Every day, try to help someone. Make it a point continually to open your heart to give not only to those you love, but also to strangers. In every situation, think what the most loving thing you can do in this encounter is. Be particularly attuned to people who depend on you: a spouse or partner, parents, children, friends, and employees. Be attentive to what they need from you.

Step Two : Pay attention to all the people, activities, and places you love. Notice especially when love simply lights you up or gives you energy. Take time to be grateful for these experiences. Notice how just paying attention increases the satisfaction you receive from them (as you stop simply taking them for granted). Begin increasing the time you choose to spend doing things and being with people you value.

Step Three : Think of yourself as a philanthropist. Pay attention to how you can contribute your time, money, and expertise to benefit the larger society. Pay attention to what issues, causes, and organizations tug at your heartstrings. Decide what percentage of your time and money you are ready to give away. Consider how your own talents and abilities can be used to benefit society. Act on this to the best of your ability.

Step Four : Remember with all these efforts to begin by loving and nurturing yourself. Notice how giving to others, in a way that comes from your genuine altruism, enhances your self-esteem and quality of life. Discontinue any ways that currently are giving you no satisfaction. Replace them with more authentic modes of giving.