An Introduction to 'Toxic Selflessness'

A framework for understanding our divided society

As a former/recovering academic, I am always on the lookout for novel theoretical frameworks in which to understand the world around us. The framework for my thesis was ‘resilience theory’. I’m certainly not going to explain it in full here (because few people who have made it pass the verbosity to this point would make it to the actual point of this post) but there are some key concepts that are somewhat useful at the moment.

Resilience describes the ability to withstand acute or chronic adversity and continue to operate in a healthy and positive mode of being. It is not simply the ability to ‘bounce back’ from such adversity and continue on as before, persistently and stubbornly — this ignores the fact that much (but not all) of the hardship we experience is brought on in some way by our own actions and choices. What resilience requires is the prioritisation of virtuous attributes such as learning, adaptation and transformation — to acknowledge that every hardship, whether we ‘deserved’ it or not, is an opportunity for personal growth and soul evolution. 

In short: if we have tried an approach that doesn’t seem to be working, and is only making things worse… perhaps some collective reflection and bold humility to admit we got things wrong might be preferable to doubling down on it and ridiculing those who might suggest otherwise.

Resilience is also fundamentally a shift from short to long term thinking: to accept some degree of initial harm or setback for the trade-off of a more sustainable and robust trajectory into the future. If I could identify one key failure of our current approach to jibby jabbing, it would be this: a relentless need to deem successful the goal of immediate harm reduction, without any critical thought towards how this ‘success’ might lead to long term problems. 

But resilience doesn’t really do enough right now. There is a fundamental element that is lacking in order to explain the heightened state of moral warfare that appears to be going on around us: are you being a good person — acting for the sake of the Greater Good; a selfless person? And if not, why not? And why do you not therefore deserve your rightful place as being shunned by those doing the right thing? 

So here’s a theoretical framework that might prove useful (and probably quite controversial): Toxic Selflessness.

Toxic selflessness you say? How can operating within a framework of mutual care and collective solidarity, of service to others — which, if I had to choose, would be my overarching framework for approaching life as well — manifest in a toxic way?

Some people would probably say it can’t. That any act done with noble intentions, with the thought of others in mind, is ultimately a moral and correct one. 

Now, strictly speaking, such a person might be correct. I am fairly sure that there are people who have incarnated on Earth with the specific life lesson of acting selflessly. For those people, they could not have incarnated at a better time: because right now, the actions we have determined to be selfless — a notion that is often complex and requiring great consideration and introspection — have never been so clear and unambiguous. 

So, for many people, if acting selflessly means accepting societal conditions that they are aware are unlikely to be in their best interests — be it wearing a mask when they don’t actually need to, or taking an experimental medicine that may place them at unnecessary risk of harm or death — then this is simply part of the deal they signed up for. 

But for others, this isn’t their path. For others, it is not to simply do the ‘right’ thing, as collectively defined in the present moment by our society. This might be one of the best ways to understand the current split in society occurring in this moment: the collective awakening of a group of people who no longer believe that acting strictly ‘selflessly’ is their purpose for being here, and who are now purposefully disambiguating themselves from the aforementioned group. 

Then what is their purpose, then? Perhaps it is to distinguish themselves as individuals — to break away from the selfless self they had previously associated with, and to create a new one. Creating a new self, it goes without saying, ultimately requires a fair degree of selfishness, and will undoubtably lead them to be judged as selfish by the individuals who are complying with the societal selflessness contract. To quote both Ned Kelly and Ben Cousins: such is life.

To fully understand our social situation, we need to add another dimension of toxic selflessness to the discussion: that the actions we have been conditioned to believe and accept as being in the best interest of society might not actually be so. Rather, they might be actions that lead to both self and societal harm (hence defeating the whole point of selflessness in the first place, at least in a practical sense). 

Why do I think this? Because right now, it seems to me that there are people who are deliberately hijacking and manipulating our inherent tendency towards selflessness in order to feed their own selfish agendas (this is getting convoluted I know, stick with me). 

This shouldn’t really be a controversial opinion, as our good intentions are constantly being abused. In the most obvious (and potentially triggering) example: how do you break out of a literal abusive relationship? It sure as hell isn’t simply by being selfless. In fact, this is likely the reason why someone has stayed in such a relationship for so long. Toxic selflessness might even be the best way to describe the mindset of someone who finds themselves unable to leave such a self-destructive situation.

The only way out is thus by doing the opposite and acting entirely within your own self interest: putting your own health and wellbeing unashamedly front and centre in your decision making, often to an extent that makes you slightly uncomfortable. 

Not everyone will be forced into making this decision in their lives. Perhaps, for some people, pure and straightforward selflessness is enough — and this is why refraining from judgement of others for choices we may not agree with or understand is so important, perhaps the most important virtue to have displayed right now. 

But what we also need to keep in mind is that selflessness is not unconditional. There are people in the world who will abuse your good intentions — in fact they have gotten to where they are by doing exactly that. Will simply doing the right thing get us out of the societal mess that we find ourselves in? Perhaps… although to me — gauging by what is occurring in the rest of the Western world — such hope is looking increasingly naive and self-defeating. 

But, in the end, who knows. In the meantime, let us all be extra vigilant to ensure that our noble and pure orientation towards being selfless beings is being channeled towards the right societal causes… even if, for you, that might mean being the ‘selfish’ one for now.