How selfish is man?

Reviewing the literature on the dictator game and the ultimatum game.

Exousiology postulates three principles of mass behavior: materialism, or poor, overly concrete, consumptive, and degenerative taste (for example, preferring another Bugatti to funding exousiology, or placing little value on the sanctity of marriage, i.e. lacking proper disgust for butthole fetishists); narcissism, or egalitarianism; and hedonism, or high time preference and lack of concern for the social whole. Each of these relate to the literature on selfishness and altruism. Immaterial taste, humility, and non-hedonism are in-line with altruistic behavior.

In fact, altruism could conceivably be the general factor underlying materialism, narcissism, and hedonism. It is easy to see that as selfishness increases, taste will become more earthly, more centered around this life and less around transcendent truth and beauty; the selfish person will demand equality when below average because he is narcissistic and wishes to maximize his own possesions, at an opportunity cost to the whole (exousiology needs reparations more than 85 IQ blacks); and the selfish man will have a time-preference aligned with maximizing the utils he experiences in his awfully short life, while the altruist will have a much lower time preference due to caring for future generations.

Therefore, in this article, I review the existing literature regarding human altruism, with one eye particularly focused on that literature’s relation to the three hypothesized principles and another focused on estimating the true probability distribution of “altruism,” as it is hypothesized that high altruism is a rare, elite trait, not common to the average peasant.