When I was a kid, I always hated the expression that cropped up for about a month every year. Is that so? Great, then give me my presents, you can thank me later. Wise Men come bearing gifts, and children get fewer and fewer every Christmas until their output matches their input and we start to wonder why we didn’t just buy all this garbage for ourselves.
I’ll admit, once you get the whole prefrontal cortex thing figured out, the concept seems to pass the sniff test, but I was always at a loss to explain why without just falling back on circular parent-logic—because it’s the right thing to do and I said so. It’s only taken me a little over three decades, but I think I may have found an explanation in terms of systems theory and an ecology of mind that doesn’t rest on the proclamation of a lazy authority.
Generosity
What our parents were trying so hard to pound into our skulls was the virtue of generosity. If a virtue is a class of actions that benefits a community, what class are we talking about here? A bunch of things that fall under the heading of “giving”. Not just anything, though. No one calls you generous for giving out parking tickets. So what are people generous with? Money, toys, soup, kind words, volunteer hours, unearned mercy. Things people want. It’s more specific than that, though. Name anything that earns you the “generous” label, and it can fall into two categories: time, and energy. Really, just energy, as no one can donate three hours from the end of their life to a friend who was just forced to sit through another Marvel movie. When people give “time,” what they are really giving is work over time, coincidentally the formula for power.
What we give is energy. Sometimes literally, in the case of food. Sometimes, an act or a good that saves the recipient their own energy. There’s a case to be made that money is a fiat for energy. The Cliff Notes version is that we can build a house with our own two hands, or buy one. We work all day at one boring job to receive fiat energy that we can use to acquire goods and services we opted not to spend our energy on (but someone else did). Acts of kindness with nothing exchanged may or may not involve literal energy, but they do seem to give what feels like a boost of mental or emotional energy.
Notice that the gifts we exchange under this virtue heading cannot be created or destroyed. Time, as we have it, is finite. It cannot be extended or shortened. Energy can be concentrated, transferred, or diffused. I’m going to stick with energy as the thing given or spared in all cases. Time gets to hang around because it’s always a component. In some cases, giving lots of time at a low energy output (sitting in a chair visiting elders all day to keep them company and hear the same stories you heard last time) might be more generous than spending 30 minutes using a ton of caloric energy to move grandma’s furniture around. That’s because it prevents you from spending the same amount of time concentrating or directing energy towards yourself, making it a sacrifice. In the short-term, the giver always experiences a net loss, and the recipient a net gain.
Mind the Flows
Successful generosity means setting up and maintaining flows of energy. It might be helpful to think of your energy in tiers.
Tier 1 – Basic Metabolic. This is the energy you need to do things like not-die. Essential caloric gasoline that gets you from A to B.
Tier 2 – Reserve. Energy in excess of that spent on maintaining basic health needs. This is a buffer that keeps you off of constant life support and fuels most nonessential activities. A good portion of life is spent moving in this range in between dips into a shortage of basic metabolic (very hungry, exhausted) and spikes into the next tier.
Tier 3 – Surplus. Energy in excess of basic needs and a reasonable buffer. You can use it for whatever you want. Exercise, hanging with friends, shouting at a streetlamp, playing video games, or gaining weight. Someone who feels excited or moves around a lot is probably burning off surplus energy.
Tier 4 – Unstorable – Pooped out or never collected. All energy in the universe in excess of your surplus capacity. We can leave this one to the wolves.
I’ll carve out four states of energy flow. Imagine a pipe network running between people, all of whom can regulate their outflow, and what flows through the pipe is energy.
Lack – Nothing flowing in or out. This person is probably dying, or at least pretty lonesome. These terms don’t account for rate of flow, but you could also imagine a pittance of metabolic inflow and outflow, roughly equal. No one gives them anything, nor do they give. They just eat, sleep, repeat, probably in a cardboard box or a cabin in the woods.
Accumulation – More flowing in than out. The energy tanks are being filled, from basic metabolic, to reserve, to surplus. The classic present-opener who forgot to buy anyone so much as a gift card.
Stasis – In this case, stagnation might be more appropriate. The pipe is full, but the faucet is shut, so nothing moves through it. In the case of something like energy, we have entropy. You can imagine what energy that person has slowly venting off, rotting away. This is someone who has plenty, and can probably get more, but never gives, and to whom no one is very inclined to give.
Drain – More flowing out than in. This person is the bleeding heart, overextended, giving from their reserve, and often from their basic metabolic tank, working to the point of burnout. While the static state leads to waste as more or less heat loss, this one leads to waste in the form of misdirected flows and the feeding of parasites.
Right before you take off and just after you tune out the flight attendant until snack service, all passengers are advised in the event of cabin depressurization to put on their own oxygen mask first before putting on their child’s. That’s because if you pass out fumbling and failing to get your kid’s on, they die anyway. In extended care situations, medical first-responders are trained to exercise self-care. They’ll pause to eat, drink, pee, even sleep. And they won’t take any unnecessary risks that might transform them from caregiver to patient. That would jeopardize the patient and place a greater burden on the next responders. Better to maintain a position from which you can give indefinitely.
Luckily, there’s a fifth state.
Flow – Energy moves in and out at roughly the same rate. In a state of flow, the generous person gives from their surplus energy rather than hoarding it, and takes time to replenish the tanks.
A Bible Quiz
Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents.
Mark 12: 41-42
Question: Who was more generous? Most people probably know the rest of the parable and Jesus’ verdict, but what if you look at it in the terms I’m laying out here? Does that change the answer? How about the reason?
Tis Better to Give so That You Receive
My failure to understand why giving is better than receiving stemmed from an ignorance of context, of orders of magnitude. A gift doesn’t just pass from one individual to another. It passes from an individual to a community, the one to which the recipient belongs. What does it look like from a systems perspective?
Energy is concentrated by one agent in a large, complex system. The excess is either shared with other agents, or used by the original one to save others from having to use their own. If I chop a cord of firewood for you, you don’t have to do it, and you get heat—a double-whammy. The receiving agents now have more surplus than they would have otherwise, which they can in turn spread throughout the system in various ways. All systems run on energy and nothing else, so getting more of it and using it more efficiently uplifts the system as a whole, which benefits all members at least indirectly, even if they were not a part of the initial exchanges.
The best generosity circles back to the giver, allowing them to give more, to achieve a state of flow in terms of energy. Recall that I defined “intelligent” as people whose actions benefit both themselves and others. Generosity isn’t all that selfless, but it is mutually supportive. The exception is in heroism, when one gives literally all of their life energy to spare others in a way that wouldn’t have been possible with any less of a sacrifice.
Some people may be thinking, “Yeah, I’d love to give and all, but I’m surrounded by people who would happily take it and never pass it on, so it would be a waste.” If that’s true, maybe it’s time to find a new community. Let’s go back to those flows, though. An agent can’t send much out if they aren’t getting much in. Systems like equilibrium. Subject one to a greater inflow than it expected or knows how to handle, and the easiest way for it to find a homeostasis is to send a lot of it right back out. If a pipe is clogged, sometimes forcing more through at high pressure can knock it loose and get it flowing again.
As a bonus, a stasis becomes a flow by letting things pass through. While it may have enough, giving off something allows more fresh material to continue flowing through the pipe, rather than going stagnant over time. Giving begets more giving on the part of the recipient, and a greater capacity to receive and give more on the part of the giver.
Another example. Someone who has never lifted weights will have a low capacity to express power. Their first workout will be pathetic. They’ll go home, eat, sleep, and the next time, it will be slightly less pathetic, since a greater than normal energy expenditure caused the body to store and use food differently, giving a greater capacity to express power (work over time). Repeat this process intelligently for years, and someone who started squatting an empty bar maybe find himself crushing 405. Lifting weights is a metaphor, but even in literal terms a strong person is more useful than the same person as a weakling.
Mental Energy
What about something like kindness—saying hello and smiling, for example? Giving a compliment? Telling a joke? How is that an energy exchange, and how would it result in you getting more energy as well?
Like the title of this essay, it just kind of feels right, people tend to experience it as a good thing, but that doesn’t explain how it works. According to Gregory Bateson’s criteria for mind, a few things are going on. First, it’s not a simple thermodynamic exchange. Minds involve collateral energy, or energy that isn’t just pool balls striking each other, the kettle heating up, etc. We’ll define it as a reserve of energy, summoned into use by a small input, whose output can far-exceed that of the force that triggered it to action.
People, most of whom qualify as minds, respond to generosity of all kinds with collateral energy. A small thing can elicit a disproportionately large response, inexplicable in terms of simple kinematics. The caloric energy it took you to be nice might be spent many times over by the recipient as they bounce through the rest of their day inflicting their good mood on others.
What’s been exchanged is not just energy, but information (differences that make a difference). The person notices the difference and is inspired to tap into their own stores and pass it on to other agents in the system. That information is a transform—a coded message—that signals genuine virtue, in this case, generosity. A virtue is whatever actions a community believes benefit it. It tells them that you’re on the same team, you’re valuable, you value them, all of you are part of something larger, and good things are flowing through the system. What’s more, the unusual inflow makes you want to equilibrate with an outflow, especially now with the knowledge that these flows exist and you might reasonably expect more in the future.
So does being kind actually give both parties more energy? Maybe it just encourages them to tap into their own supplies, to better direct energy already present, with the confidence that it will be replenished. Maybe it makes them better at spotting a surplus. Or it spikes hormones that allow you to use more, or lessens waste lost to tension and sour moods. I don’t claim to know, but it does seem to result in the recipient spending more of their energy and not less.
Gift Cards to Africa
If generosity is the virtue of exchanging and conserving energy for the benefit of others, and we want to maximize benefits shared when they make their way through the system, how should we give?
Local First
That means both geographically, and to the closest community in terms of order of magnitude, e.g. family is a group nested within city, which is within country, etc. There are several reasons for this.
First, an individual has a limited amount of energy to give. The real magic of generosity happens as that gift creates a domino effect of more giving. You’ve saved someone else energy, so they can spread a newfound surplus to others, who will spread to others still. When it gets back to the original energy exchangers, we have a feedback loop which can now repeat itself, uplifting all members each time. The effects aren’t as great if it peters out somewhere. Sending gift cards to Africa is very kind, but it likely has limited value even to the poor African children. They won’t be swimming in excess energy that they can share even with the gift, and there’s very little chance of setting up a strong feedback loop across such a vast system as the “human species” if it isn’t present at lower systems.
Being generous with those who live in your house and the houses nearby is much more likely to set up a loop, which after a few repetitions may strengthen your situation to the point that you can begin extending generosity to the next highest order, maybe people in your town, or even your county, instead of leeching it across the globe.
Giving to far away abstractions also presupposes that all the needs in your immediate area are met. No one nearby has any need for any small gesture of help, whatsoever. I doubt that’s been the case very often in human history. The mistake is misidentifying the communities to which you belong—skipping ahead several orders. If the giver sends resources abroad when the local system is crumbling, soon he won’t have anything left to give anyone because he failed to practice self-care, and the inflows he depended on dried up. For the same reason, buildings are usually built starting with the foundation, not the skylight.
Then there’s the question of virtue, which I argued is always subjective. A community decides what it values, and those actions become virtues. If all of your value goes elsewhere, you are no longer virtuous in any community smaller than the global community. Anyone who identifies with the smaller orders—family, Wednesday game night group, city, state, country—will not see it as virtuous because it has no value within those communities, and if anything acts as a drain. Energy received locally is airmailed far away.
One exception off the top of my head might be in the event of disaster relief. People with the skills and tools to respond to a tsunami in Indonesia might easily justify it if there are no disasters for them to deal with at home. I would argue it’s an organizational response, not individual, and it ceases as soon as the disaster is curtailed or a more immediate one strikes back home. The habit of throwing money at TV commercials after such a disaster wouldn’t qualify, as it could be used locally, whereas the search and rescue teams were twiddling their thumbs and would enjoy practicing skills and being useful.
Intelligently
Just as not all assets are equally good investments, not all acts of generosity have the same return on investment for the system. “Intelligent” means “benefits self and community.” There are acts that share or spare energy (e.g. volunteering to clean up litter, the original unorganized Cajun Navy), acts that concentrate, hoard, and waste energy (e.g. panhandling for a living, the Red Cross), and acts that don’t have much of a net effect (e.g. playing video games all day). Intelligent generosity spreads energy and keeps it moving in effective ways. While I do think there’s value in being generous to those you know won’t pass it on and perhaps don’t even know enough to be grateful, there’s a clear advantage in prioritizing other givers.
It rewards them, possibly closing a loop they began, and if not, it’s more likely to spread in an intelligent fashion. Those who gave in the past might do it again. A lady who always volunteers at her church’s community outreach would be a better target for the extra bell peppers from your garden than the aforementioned panhandler, even though the latter has a greater need as an individual.
From an organizational leadership standpoint, it would make the most sense to reward those who always volunteer for things with cooler assignments, promotions, or an extra vacation day.
Renewables and Surplus (or Unstorable*)
Dipping into metabolic energy damages net generosity in the long run. Giving from the surplus tank means you can repeat the effort indefinitely. Either there’s a lot of it, or a flow with a high chance of frequent renewal. Do you happen to like bell peppers? On the other hand, we’re less likely to give things in short supply, and it’s considered more virtuous when we do.
*Birds who come across a large meal will ring the dinner bell for competitors. They can’t eat it all anyway, and the presence of a flock provides increased security when feeding.
Non-renewables
While it’s usually seen as more virtuous to give the last slice of pizza away than a grocery bag full of vegetables you didn’t want, you’re putting less energy into the system. The reason this can still work is that it’s seen as a greater sacrifice. People respond with collateral energy, not the kinetic energy of pool balls, and the pizza slice could have a disproportional effect on all present, not just the recipient. This is the stuff heroes are made of. Just remember that the best heroes only get to give once.
Anonymously
Public giving with giant checks and cameras is impossible to distinguish from virtue signaling, because the giver is gaining a tremendous boost to their reputation. It may be a genuine effort, but fake generosity signaling is rampant, especially among the wealthy who have no real use for what they give, carefully calculated not to exceed the tax write-off or infringe upon their lifestyle. There is nothing risked, nothing sacrificed, no skin in the game. At that point, it’s a business transaction.
It also funnels energy into the most reputation-increasing activities, which leaves out quite a range of excellent opportunities to be generous. Individuals are almost always ignored in favor of organizations with name recognition, who may or may not be effective at passing on the benefits, but will make sure your picture appears in the paper. The steps to success become: 1) gain bad reputation making lots of money, 2) buy back reputation with whatever you don’t need. Children and whales may or may not be saved in the process.
Complete anonymity and reputational asceticism is impossible. Besides, a lot of the benefit is derived from society being able to recognize who is useful and laud it. But they should have to figure it out on their own from the individual’s actions. The more private they are, the more likely they are to be genuine. We tend to realize who our most generous acquaintances are, even though they never remind us.
Creatively
That could also read, “Not Money.” It’s entirely possible to exhibit true generosity with money, and I’m not denying that it helps a lot. It’s just…unoriginal. Money is a fiat for energy, not intrinsically valuable the way food, or lifting the other side of the dresser, is valuable. It has to be exchanged for those things, and can be exchanged for a wide variety of things, which makes it a target for parasites and con artists. Few gifts can be wasted or even turned into a source of harm. Give a hungry man a Chik-Fil-A sandwich, and you’ve fed him. Give him five bucks to buy whatever he wants to eat, and it might be a liquid meal in a 40 oz volume.
Monetary gifts are often poorly executed because we want to be helpful, but it’s hard-going-on-impossible to know how it’ll be used, whereas other kinds of generosity can only operate in one way, and can’t be taken in such gargantuan amounts. More immediate forms of energy, and time, are finite and self-limiting. No, fiat money is not finite. It isn’t backed by energy in any form, only confidence. It can be printed at will.
Let’s make up a billionaire and say he has 60 billion dollars, but people realize he’s been kind of a jerk his whole life. We can call him Phil Schmates. Lucky for Mr. Schmates, he can give away 59 billion dollars to any number of purposes that may or may not be useful, and recover his good reputation without losing his billionaire status, which means not a thing was lost. It may have even been a less-useful way of getting that energy back into circulation than just spending it in economy, as large charities are known to be wasteful, and there’s no guarantee their initiatives will have a positive effect.
But the best reason to avoid throwing away Benjamin Franklin is that it’s too easy to overdo it and violate the self-care principle. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pick up the lunch tab now and then, only that there are much more creative ways to give that leave you in a strong position to continue doing so, and that don’t attract parasites like moths to the flame.
Consensually
If someone doesn’t want help, go away!
Examples in Nature
Not all species are generous, but social animals have to be. We rely on the group for survival. Sharing within the group ensures that the group sticks around to help me stick around, and it also highlights the absurdity of giving non-locally. No chimp or wolf would trek long distances to advertise food to another group when its own troop or pack was hungry.
We see it cross-species, in symbiotic relationships such as birds who enjoy food, security, and rides from water buffalo in exchange for removing pests. We even see it cross-kingdom, when flowers feed bees in exchange for pollination, and oaks feed squirrels in exchange for spreading acorns well beyond the canopy. These are simple two-part loops, but there are certainly larger ones involving energy exchanges to the benefit of all involved. A local ecosystem in equilibrium will always be an example of such an exchange.
Generosity in nature tends to fall into one of two categories:
1) Giving a useful resource – in excess, to spread, as with the acorns, or to save energy that can be used for other things.
2) Giving a waste product that’s useful to another – which prevents waste from piling up and helps the larger system in the process.
It may never be selfless, but it doesn’t have to be.
A Bible Quiz Revisited
It’s not enough to just know the answer. The reason is important. Even without reading the ensuing verses where Jesus praises the widow over the rich men, we get the sense that her gift was more generous. She gave a much higher portion of her available resources, thus she sacrificed more. But there’s an argument to be made that the church could spread far more good with one rich man’s money than a roomful of widows and their pennies. That’s true. The rich gave far more stored energy that could be distributed throughout the system.
The problem is that it’s impossible to tell if they were being virtuous, or just virtue signaling. The question wasn’t who gave more energy, it was who is more generous? Generosity is a virtue, subjective to the observers. Those watching knew the woman was virtuous, and she was praised because doing so signals to everyone else what genuine virtue looks like, and that it should be practiced. Though she didn’t seek attention, her act didn’t go unnoticed. It may have inspired other folks with limited means to give, whereas seeing a rich man fill the collection plate could be dismissed with, “Yeah, I would too if I were rich, but I’m not so I’ll keep my money.”
In fact, whether true or parable, it made it into the New Testament, where it was read by untold millions and may just have ignited the use of a little collateral energy for generosity on the part of a few of those readers.