Why the selfie? Because there’s a part of the brain that works a bit like your camera app: it lets you focus (your attention) on the real world, or you can flip it and take selfies. I’ll let you guess what we do with it most of the time.

A friend recently suggested that I should entitle this essay ‘the Mechanics of Justice’, and if the theory set out here is sound, that would certainly be a fit for its uncomfortably grandiose aspirations. It is what it is. Over the last few decades, I have been writing to psychology and cognitive neuroscience researchers, hoping to find agreement on both the potential of the theory, and on the urgency of research. However, I eventually faced the reality that it is not going to happen. Despite the pleasures of cognitive decline, I am now in second year (BSc Psychology) at Edinburgh University, with the ultimate goal of undertaking the research myself.

I once listened to a lecture by a philosopher who observed that, in a society of cannibals, the business of eating human flesh would be considered quite unremarkable. We are in a similar but immeasurably more grave situation, living in a period which will be looked upon by historians as almost inexplicably barbaric. In July 2024, we had a general election in the UK in which we elected the government that will dictate British foreign policy for the next five years, and yet only a very small percentage of the electorate voted in protest of the UK’s proactive logistical and intelligence support for the genocide ongoing in Gaza.

We have a riddle. Elected politicians in the USA and the UK have been colluding in the slaughter, and to the best of my knowledge, they suffer from no psychological disorder known to science. They parrot ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ as if genocide could by any stretch of the imagination be considered an act of self-defence. The stated goal was the elimination of Hamas. To kill a single Hamas commander in Jabalia, Israel dropped a 1,000-pound bomb on an apartment building killing over 100 civilian residents. That is the logic of the world’s first AI-driven genocide. In order to eliminate Hamas, there is in fact no alternative.

Were we living in the Middle Ages, we might call it evil, and of course, many activists take that view. However, another perspective, as Tony Blair once explained, is that “someone has to be strong enough to take the hard decisions”. Adolf Eichmann would have supported this view. Like Nazis, both Joe Biden and Keir Starmer can rationalise to their own satisfaction the collective punishment and genocidal slaughter of 41,000 innocent civilians, including a confirmed minimum of 16,000 children. But Psychology is yet to arrive at the point at which it can identify the pathology common to these accomplices of genocide, and their fascist forebears.

Therein, I believe, lies the urgency of this research. I will argue here that the pathology takes the form of an incomplete development of the mechanism of baseline motivation, that it is dimensional, that we are all on that spectrum, and that it is our culture itself that is pathological. From the perspective of the victims of our elected governments, we are far, far worse than a society of cannibals.

We might extend Piaget’s concept of the schema in child development to the adult personality. Individuals who have a place in the machinery of capitalism need explanations that sit comfortably with their self-image. Their world schemas are dichotomous, populated by pro and anti-Western nations, civilised and uncivilised societies, law-abiding citizens and (lower-class) criminals, and of course, terrorists. In their real-world schema, the blame lies with the anti-Western nations, the uncivilised societies, and of course, the terrorists. They reject as unthinkable that the resistance which they term ‘terrorism’, and the state terrorism that they call Israel’s right to defend itself, could be the result of their own racist foreign policy, their support (not for the first time) of apartheid, and their support of a hate-infused, brutal (now officially illegal) military occupation that has lasted 57 years, denying the indigenous people of Palestine the right to self-determination, to dignity and to life.

While Piaget’s schemas describe, they do not explain. The mindset that approves of the slaughter of 41,000 civilians requires more than a flawed schema. To speak in terms merely of cognitive dissonance and cognitive bias is to trivialise the slaughter. The process of schema accommodation has been negated. That negation requires either a wilful blindness to the reality of the scale of the suffering, or a lack of empathy on a par with psychopathy. It is not unreasonable to hypothesise the involvement of a measure of each.

narcissism: the natural motivational state of the infant personality

The pertinence of the theory to the ongoing genocide could not be greater. If sound, it identifies the psychological disorder of these politicians as a species of immaturity. The theory proposes a model for the mechanism of baseline motivation which, if sound, leads us to conclude that egoistic motivation is a thoroughly natural and healthy motivational state, but only in the infant personality. Importantly, as I have said, this is not only a pathology of the individual, it is a pathology of Western culture.

The cultural aspect was recognised in the 19th century when Auguste Comte called for a transition in French culture from that of individualism to a culture of cooperation and community: “vivre pour autrui.” His phrase gave us the term altruism, now familiar to all and understood by few. But Comte’s concept of altruism has little currency in modern science. Neither the mechanism of a motivational altruism-egoism spectrum nor its far-reaching implications are yet recognised in Psychology.

Our current understanding of altruism can be summed up in one word: surmise. It has generally proven difficult to categorically infer altruistic motivation from observing even the most selfless behaviour. However, the goal is to move from the story to the data. Let me begin with my conclusions. Egoism and altruism are emergent properties, manifestations of the fundamental components of the mechanism of baseline motivation, and a measure of both egoism and altruism are necessarily and invariably present in the normal personality. Some might tend more to one than the other. but it is a spectrum.

On a common-sense personal level, I imagine that most of us could relate to the idea that we are, depending upon the circumstances, capable of behaving both selfishly and selflessly. If asked where on average I might place myself on such a spectrum, I would put my own personality somewhere between the extremes of egoism and altruism. I can easily imagine that millions are more altruistic than me, and probably just as many are more egoistic. This perspective allows us to consider the extremes of an imagined frequency distribution, and to visualise it in terms of the defining features of two very familiar personalities: the extreme narcissism of Donald Trump, and the extreme altruism of Nelson Mandela.

But here we have a problem. Psychology is comfortable with only the left side of this distribution. Narcissism is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM5) as a personality disorder, not part of a spectrum extending to its logical opposite extreme. The profound and ubiquitous influence of altruism in behaviour is not recognised at all, and a disturbing number of psychologists argue that there is no such thing. Presumably, therefore, Mandela’s apparent ‘altruism’ must have another explanation: it cannot be that he was actually motivated to risk his life for his people.

This is an interesting perspective that requires either a child-like disengagement with reality or a level of religiosity equalled only by Dawkins and his dogmatic belief in his selfish genes. However, we might pull back from the absolute extremes of Trump and Mandela, and consider just one of an endless list of altruistic acts in which the empathic motivation is explicit: the case in 2006 of nine ‘ordinary’ people who risked lengthy jail sentences for trashing the Raytheon arms factory offices in Belfast. I met two of them briefly a few years ago, and although I know they would disagree, I would say that they are extraordinary people. Far from being flattery, that is a careful indictment of Western culture: the ‘Raytheon Nine’ should have been the ‘Raytheon Nine Thousand’.

Let me flip the selfie cameras of the altruism deniers just for a moment, and introduce them to a glimpse of the real world. This is just a quote from an old indymedia article but I think perhaps it helps shed some light on this zombie question of the non-existence of altruism:

Is this altruism? Might there be another explanation for their behaviour? That is a question that must always be asked. Perhaps their action was self-serving in that they will restore their self-respect, having done ‘something’. Perhaps that is true, at least to some extent, but then there is Occam’s Razor. These activists had already done far more than enough to assuage any personal desire to absolve themselves from the guilt of inaction. They had tried everything to persuade their councillors and MPs that Raytheon was profiting from war crimes. They wrote letters, organised petitions, organised countless demonstrations and pickets, presented their research to politicians. Every attempt led to inaction on the part of the politicians. Eventually, they had exhausted every avenue and, in full consciousness of the probable consequences, they opted for the direct action which ultimately succeeded in expelling Raytheon from Belfast. And their motivation? The Shaloub and Hasheem families of Qana: “their unimaginable loss was foremost in our minds when we took the action we did on 9 August.”

I will address the connection between empathy and altruism later in the theory section, but at this point, I only wish to stress that the list of altruistic actions taken by ‘ordinary people’ like the Derry Anti-War Coalition, or more recently, by such as the ever-inspiring Palestine Action, is endless. Altruism has nothing to do with aspiring to become Mother Theresa, it is the predominant motivation of the mature adult personality. And, to be brutally frank, a lack of personal experience of one’s own atruistic (and egoistic) behaviour is something that might be expected of only the very young and life inexperienced. Any argument against the existence of altruistic motivation, however much it might masquerade as scientific scepticism, could only come from individuals who themselves still have some distance to travel to reach maturity. I’m afraid it has to be said. The time has come to move beyond the ‘question’. A strong enough case has not been made (and could not possibly be made) to argue against the immense potential of research into the mechanics of an egoism-altruism spectrum. Unless I am profoundly mistaken, altruism and egoism, as manifestations of baseline motivation, exercise a continual and profound influence on all human behaviour.

the role of committment

The level of altruistic motivation is dependent upon the degree of personal commitment to the welfare of the other person (or people). The ‘terrorist’, Nelson Mandela was an exemplar of committed altruistic motivation in the struggle for racial equality — and let us not forget as we read this that he was on the US terrorist list until 2008. The final paragraph of his statement addressing the court in the Rivonia Trial helped raise his profile to mythical status on the international stage. Here are Mandela’s own words:

The extremes of the spectrum help reveal the dimensional nature of egoism-altruism. Mandela and other ANC ‘terrorists’, are distinguished from the rest of humanity not by their altruism – for that is easily demonstrated to be a motivation that we all possess – but by its degree: they were willing to give their lives. They were completely committed to the welfare of some ‘others’. Mandela’s raison d’être was to achieve the ideal of justice, and again, not justice for himself but for his people. Altruism is nothing more and nothing less than the motivation to act for the benefit of someone other than oneself.

When a parent gets up at three o’clock in the morning to attend to a child, that is altruism. It does not call for the courage of Mandela but it is altruism: motivation to act for the benefit of another. The moral dimension is a separate issue; our concern here is the mechanics of this most fundamental and ubiquitous motivation. Should the parent, feeling too tired to attend to the child, simply shut the bedroom door to keep the noise down, that would be egoism. The moral aspect is a discussion for people who find morality of interest. It might be a legitimate value judgment, but for the purposes of understanding, it is a red herring obscuring the salient issue of motivational directionality and dimensionality. What is at issue here is simply the nature of motivation and its relevance for Western culture.

A galaxy of pro-social or anti-social behaviours might be shown to derive from socially constructed norms. However, that does not provide a complete picture. Egoism and altruism, as vectors of baseline motivation, operate at a profound level to influence individual life choices, and importantly, to influence the time and energy that an individual will invest in these choices. It should be possible to take a dim view of Positivism while recognising that Comte had identified a degree of commitment to the welfare of others as an important component of the social fabric. And commitment is the operative word. It was for a society-wide shift in the degree of commitment to the welfare of others that I believe Comte was arguing. In this context, altruism, properly understood, is almost a synonym for socialism, properly understood. A society of individuals devoid of any degree of care for the welfare of others is an oxymoron. And most importantly, individual levels of commitment to the welfare of others are not fixed; they are fluid; they can change.

I will take Palestine as an example. It is arguably the most extreme case of racial inequality in the world: half of the population under the control of the Israeli government has the right to self-determination, to security and to life, while the other half, because it is not considered to be of the same ‘race’, has the right to none of these. Unfortunately, these bare facts have no impact upon motivation. We need to look closer.

The story is not about them. It is about us: what kind of people are we?

The current full-blown genocide is a grotesque escalation of a pattern of mass murder and ethnic cleansing that has been ongoing since the birth in blood and terrorism of the settler colonial state of Israel in 1948. My own awakening to the realities of Palestine came at the end of 2008. During the 2008/9 Gaza massacre, a defenceless and trapped civilian population were under attack. Residential apartment blocks were being obliterated by missiles. In Zaytoun, forty people were herded into a single house. 21 of them died when the army then shelled the house. Ambulances, also targeted, were denied access, and wounded children were left for days in the rubble beside their dead relatives. The dehumanisation, the sadistic cruelty, the suffering and the terror, and the sheer sickening scale of it was in itself almost a life-changing experience. Then came the words of one young mother whose terrified children could not sleep. An Al Jazeera reporter, Sharine Tadros, looking for the ‘human story’ was asking how she was managing. The young woman’s feeling of helplessness was palpable, not knowing if she or her children would still be alive the next day. At one point, she turned to the reporter and asked, ‘how can the world stand by and let this happen?’ In that instant, it is personal. This is no longer a televised story about the plight of some Arabs in the Middle East. Her words cut through the illusion of disconnection. “How can the world stand by and let this happen?” With these words, it hits home, viscerally. The story is not about them. It is about us: what kind of people are we?

A sociologist might ask why some people are out demonstrating while ‘normal’ people are at home watching TV, and the answer is that it is their having been exposed at some point to the human story that fuels activists’ commitment to the welfare of these ‘others’. We live in a culture that diminishes our humanity. The schema which situates us, here, and them, there, is a toxic fiction, a representation of a world outside of our own, one that does not exist. But when we see a young mother who loves her children, who is living in the middle of a war zone — a surreal war, a settler-colonial war of elimination, with an army on one side and civilians on the other — and when it sinks in that she has been robbed of any reason to believe that her beloved children will still be alive when the sun rises tomorrow, the fiction evaporates, and in its place comes a cold anger, a commitment, a solidarity rooted in the reality that her humanity and mine are one and the same. When she asked how we can stand by and let this happen, I believe that she asked possibly the most important question that science has the power to answer. And yet this pathology of culture that separates the British people from the victims of British capitalism — their fellow human beings in Palestine — is not so complex as to defy analysis.

Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that the theory is sound, that extreme egoism and altruism are verifiable extremes of the baseline motivational spectrum. A simple statistical mind experiment now confronts us with the vision of a population distribution approaching normality, with egoistic Trump and his like at one tail, most of the population piled up near the middle, and altruistic Mandela at the other tail. If that is the case in the real world – and answering that question is the purpose of the research I’ve been arguing for – then an extraordinary perspective emerges from the bizarre world of statistics and probability.

Firstly, it is clearly impossible to be more than 100% committed to one’s own welfare or to that of others. No-one can be more than 100% egoistic or altruistic, and most of us must fall between these two extremes. Altruism-egoism, if it exists at all, is a spectrum. If we admit that the distribution of such a spectrum in any society is likely to approach normality, then that finite distribution must follow the laws of statistics. Even a slight shift in the distribution in either direction will exponentially affect the tails where the proportions of highly motivated individuals – the highly egoistic or highly altruistic – are inversely related.

This proposition, with respect to the laws of probability, is uncontroversial. It leads to a deeply counter-intuitive conclusion: that it is not the elites who determine the fate of societies but the location of the mean of a frequency distribution. Put another way, the idea that we get the representatives that we deserve may have a ruthless mathematical basis in the law of large numbers. A population that tends to be slightly more egoistic than altruistic will, by the unyielding laws of statistics, tend disproportionately to produce and to be led by a proliferation of egoistic personalities, career politicians serving corporate interests. As Hannah Arendt expressed it, “Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.”

Should this proposition strike you as preposterous, I can only agree wholeheartedly that it seems so, but if, as I believe, such a spectrum does exist in the real world, if altruism and narcissism are qualities more or less normally distributed throughout society, then that would be the statistical reality of our culture, the cause and the consequence of the pathology of a consumer society.

To Bauman’s ‘collateral casualties’ of consumerism must be added that the ‘invisible hand’ of the market has shifted my imaginary curve in the wrong direction. Relentless marketing and social media manipulation to idealize celebrity lifestyles and thus maximise desire for goods and services may have normalised the habit of a seemingly innocuous but statistically consequential degree of egoism, while diminishing the value of community. Meanwhile, there are still millions of altruistic-leaning individuals in every walk of life, but especially since Thatcher, the idea of the selfish gene is never far from the zeitgeist, just as in its day, the self-justifying appeal of social Darwinism was seized upon and disseminated by racist European elites profiting from the plunder and exploitation of the so-called ‘uncivilised world’.

Meaningful change requires societies that insist upon it. Science has been misused since the days of Empire to justify the cults of nationalism and individualism, but it also has the potential to expose the pathologies of capitalism, neo-imperialism and militarism as being not only afflictions but also products of our own societies, our own marginally egoistic cultures. The first hurdle, therefore, if these arguments are reasonable, is to create testable hypotheses based upon the theory following that, as I have said, proposes a model for the mechanism of baseline motivation which, if valid, leads us to conclude that egoistic motivation is a thoroughly natural and healthy motivational state, but only in the infant personality.

Psychologists sometimes speak of the normal personality as distinct from the dysfunctional personality, but in a society of cannibals, ‘normal’ is far from desirable. A slightly egoistical culture is a pathological culture, a dangerously pathological culture, and in a Western consumer society, the normal personality enjoys a level of motivation far, far below the potential within every individual. The attributes that Trump has made so familiar are consistent with a pronounced arrested development of the system of baseline motivation as described in the theory that follows here. It is tempting to believe it possible that that understanding alone might help reverse the cultural shift that Reagan and Thatcher effected, and perhaps ultimately help reverse the trajectory that I believe we have been on since Europeans first started trading in tea, sugar, tobacco, and black people.

The biology of narcissism and the case for research

I am a man and that means I am a combination of two very different animals: I am at once the father of my son, and the child of my parents. One of these two will have been in charge for most of the day.

Baseline motivation can be the most defining quality of personality, the most enfeebling or the most empowering. An example might be in the energised behaviour of the parent bird feeding her chicks, where a consistently high baseline level of global motivation modulates each instance of instrumental motivation involved in the task of leaving the nest, finding food and returning — a demanding business repeated throughout most of the day with undiminished vigour. In contrast, abnormally low levels of baseline motivation are typically associated with chronic depression.

In the laboratory, manipulation of approach/avoidance motivation necessarily assumes goal-directed motivation over the time window of the experiment. The hierarchical nature of motivation, however, requires the presence of a baseline level of motivation independent of the instrumental motivation under study, and persisting over an extended timeframe. Research at the biological level has proposed tonic dopamine release as being implicated in maintaining baseline levels of motivation. The persistence of the common-sense ‘goal-directed’ assumption, however, has contributed to precluding a conceptualisation of the mechanism of baseline motivation, thus eliminating an avenue of research into a non-trivial factor in human behaviour. Whereas instrumental motivation is necessarily goal directed, I will argue that the same is not the case for baseline motivation, that the mechanism of baseline motivation is distinct from the ‘reward circuit’, and that it comprises rather a corticothalamic dopaminergic system coding for a variable representing the urgency of action.

the central concept: the conflict of active and passive motivation in the normal personality

The word ‘motivation’ carries the implicit assumption that it refers to something that drives our own behaviour – we might say that an athlete’s success was due to her motivation. However, that is to overlook the most crucial component of the mechanism: directionality. Motivation can be either active or passive. We are equally (and habitually) capable of being motivated to elicit or influence the behaviour of others for our benefit. This concept of a mechanism for ‘passive motivation’ is central to the model. In the following, I propose firstly the co-existence, in the normal personality, of both active and passive motivation, and secondly, that passive motivation (i.e., motivation to elicit or influence the behaviour of others) serves a distinct neurological function, having its roots in the infant personality.

At the most basic level, we might consider baseline motivation to be subserving homeostasis: the need to find food, shelter and to be alert to danger. Unlike the adult which is capable of serving these needs by its own action, the infant’s motivation is passive, referencing not its own action but the action of the carer. This model rests upon the proposition that the ‘passive’ system modulating motivation to elicit the action of the carer is necessarily distinct from that of the mature personality where baseline motivation drives the individual’s own behaviour: the healthy adult baseline system situates the individual as the subject, the originator of action, whereas the infant personality is situated as the object, the recipient or beneficiary of the actions of its carers.

The model rejects the assumption, valid in the case of instrumental motivation, that the degree of baseline motivation is a matter of its intensity. It proposes that baseline motivation is the output of a cognitive variable derived from the processing of the urgency of action. It further proposes the co-existence of passive and active baseline motivation in the normal personality as a mechanism having a direct bearing upon the individual’s propensity for narcissistic and manipulative behaviour.

In speaking of ‘passive motivation’, the meaning here is literal, no more than that. As reflected in English grammar, the nature of action is two-fold:

Active: the police push the activists back
Passive: the activists are pushed back by the police

Passively motivated behaviour is a commonplace phenomenon such that, on one level, it is a matter of putting a name to something with which we are all familiar. Put at its simplest, passive motivation works to produce or influence, for your benefit, someone else’s behaviour, rather than your own. It might lead merely to bragging, seeking to impress, or some might tend to ingratiate themselves with a superior at work, but it is a matter of degree. Abusive, manipulative relationships, though complex in their psychological origins, are manifestations of passive motivation. We tend to focus on the details – the gaslighting, guilt-tripping, deception, transference of blame etc. – and yet a common thread lies in the underlying motivation to influence or control the behaviour of the victim for the benefit of the manipulator.

It might be tempting to argue that manipulating others is simply another way of achieving one’s goals, but this suggestion fails in the parsimony it strives for; it attributes a degree of sophistication to the infant personality that would be quite inexplicable.

The central question is this: am I invariably the subject in my motivation or might I sometimes be the object, the intended recipient and beneficiary of someone else’s action? Is my motivation, at this moment, active, or do I, with this behaviour, really just intend to promote the odds of nice things happening to me? The significance of this question lies in the proposition that some largely grow out of the habit of passively motivated behaviour while others do not. It is not only dimensional; it is developmental.

For those who would prefer to follow the chronology of an idea as it developed, the section below on ‘intellect type’ sets out the ideas that led eventually to the main theory, i.e., the conflict of active and passive baseline motivation in the normal personality. It also adds a layer of complexity that only muddies the waters at this stage. In brief, I believe it can be shown that, in the context of motivation, two intellect types – root intellect and branch intellect – are evident. As I have said, at this point, I think it is a distraction to go into this in any depth. The past-oriented, root intellect type tends to interpret events and motives in terms of their causes, while the future-oriented branch intellect tends to rationalise these events in terms of their intended goal. That, I think, is enough said for the moment. The theory has its origins in but is not wholly premised upon this typology and I think, at least for some, it is best introduced without this de facto layer of potential confusion.

the age of narcissism and entitlement

Why does a baby cry? It is, of course, because it is incapable of satisfying its needs by its own action. It has an instinctive and subsequently-reinforced sense of entitlement to have its needs satisfied by the action of the carer: “feed me – comfort me – reassure me of my security.” The cognitive process underlying the infant’s motivation blurs the distinction between the internal and external world, with the satisfaction of needs requiring and assuming the agency of the carer. This is passive motivation in its purest and most natural form, but thirty years later, that same degree of narcissism, manipulation and entitlement persisting in the adult personality would be considered pathological.

If the model is valid, however, the system mediating passive motivation does persist to some degree in the adult personality – the active and passive systems co-exist. Baseline motivation is hypothesised to be not simply a matter of gain or intensity, but the net output of these two conflicting systems.

The obvious question as to why I should propose two coexisting systems of motivation when one would seem to suffice to explain behaviour was almost answered many years ago by Abraham Maslow when he stressed the importance of research focusing upon what he termed the self-actualising personality. When we restrict research to the study of the normal personality, the typically low levels of baseline motivation that we can infer might seem to suggest that baseline motivation has a minimal impact upon behaviour. This is true only of the normal personality. The motivational conflict of the normal personality renders motivation levels comparatively weak and indistinct. It is an enfeebling, ‘vector’ conflict ensuring that, for the normal personality, the immense motivational potential of the individual is never remotely reached or even imagined.

the empowerment of commitment

We instinctively venerate some individuals, not just for their talent or their intellects but for their actions and their level of drive and focus, their commitment to serving needs external to their own. An abnormal degree of active baseline motivation is the distinguishing feature of exceptional personalities like Nelson Mandela, Leila Khaled, Malcolm X, Fanny Lou Hamer, Frederick Douglass and Che Guevara, aptly described by Franz Fanon as “the world symbol of the possibilities of one man”. Rather than probe the confusion of the conflicted, relatively weak and thus relatively obscure baseline motivation of the normal personality, we should look, firstly, at those individuals – Maslow’s self-actualising personalities – whose unusually high levels of active and correspondingly low levels of passive motivation would place them at the far reaches of the normal distribution.

It is almost a redundant statement but it is the degree of personal commitment to the cause or goal which determines the level of baseline motivation, the outcome, in the rare case of complete commitment, being virtually unconflicted motivation, an exceptional level of drive, focus and consciousness. The significant difference between Mandela and the rest of humanity was, of course, his complete commitment to the cause: “I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people… it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

That degree of commitment is sufficiently rare as to lie entirely outside of the experience of most psychologists (Maslow being the obvious exception) but it is recognition of the absence of motivational conflict characterising the completely-committed personality that provides the first hint of the enfeebling nature of the highly-conflicted motivation of the normal personality in the infantilizing milieu of an individualistic Western consumer culture.

In contrast to those highly motivated altruistic personalities, we can also consider their opposites: the highly motivated narcissists. Donald Trump is an exemplar. At every turn, Donald Trump betrays a disturbingly unremarkable intellect. It is his motivation, his focused self-obsession and his relentless egoistic drive that mark him out as head and shoulders above all those around him. His entire history speaks of a degree of manipulative egoistic motivation that is mercifully extremely rare. His lack of conflicting motivation could hardly be more obvious. That is his ‘strength’. He is conspicuous in the strength of his weakness: unreservedly and ruthlessly committed to the welfare of Donald Trump – a paragon of a fully-grown adult with the passive, manipulative motivational vector of an infant.

And like an infant, he is almost devoid of empathy. Any measure of empathic motivation is, for the highly narcissistic personality, seen as weakness. And this is a thoroughly valid assessment on their part: their ‘strength’ lies in their lack of exactly such conflicting motivation. Judging always by their own standards, their Hobbesian view of the state of nature, red in tooth and claw — “a war of all against all” — is no place for bleeding heart liberals.

romantic love – a transformative and empowering motivational state

But I have said that altruism is a universal and ubiquitous driver of human behaviour. A much more familiar form of altruistic commitment is romantic love. This model provides an alternative and much more explanatory rationale for romantic love as being a highly empowering baseline motivational state, an instinctive active baseline motivation simply and literally to care for and be committed to the welfare of the other person. However much affection we might feel for them, we love our children to the extent that we are committed to their welfare. This is, I believe, the very essence and origin of the systems of active and passive baseline motivation.

As a pair-bonding species with offspring that are slow to mature, we evolved the capacity to love because survival required that we are committed to caring for each other and for our children. We tend to discuss (and even research)! love from an experiential perspective or in terms of attachment, but much more pertinent and explanatory is the underlying radical motivational transformation: the infantile, passive, self-focused vector is effectively reversed, giving way to a personal commitment to the welfare of the other person. Naturally, we romanticise it, but love, as distinct from the most visceral lust and the deepest affection, can be defined as a transformative motivational state arising from an instinctive personal commitment to the welfare of another person, and anyone who has been in love has had a taste of the life-changing phenomenon of relatively unconflicted active motivation.

Survival of the family and of the community places certain obligations upon its members. The healthy parent is intuitively aware that the needs of the family must take precedence over the desires of the individual. Weakness, however, breeds weakness. The unhealthy parent tends to impede motivational development in the child by placing insufficient emphasis upon encouraging empathy and considerate, unselfish behaviour both by instruction and, more importantly, by example. The selfishness of the individual in one situation emerges as an equivalent weakness or inadequacy in another. The exception proves the rule, but the child which is exposed to the extreme selfishness of its parents can generally be expected to follow in their footsteps and, perhaps, eventually treat us to the joys of his so-called ‘narcissistic personality disorder’. Depending on the depth of his pain, he may achieve some local notoriety as a sociopath. As long as we fail to recognize the simplicity – the direct relationship between selfishness and motivational immaturity – we lack sufficient understanding to tackle the underlying sickness at source.

global motivation: a variable

Assuming the existence of active and passive motivation, the challenge is to make sense of it as a neurological mechanism. And I believe we can now do exactly that. It is recognised that tonic dopamine release can modulate the gain of instrumental motivation, but the underlying cognitive systems regulating baseline extracellular dopamine levels in the infant and adult personalities remain to be elucidated.

However, the model tells us that we are discussing a mechanism that has evolved over millennia, suggesting that the key to understanding baseline motivation as a neural function may lie in the evolution of ‘action’ itself, and we already know more than enough about that to trace its development with some confidence, even if armed with no more than a nebulous notion of the evolution of some imaginary creature in our Devonian ancestry.

Apologies if the following comes across as a series of just-so stories. I think it is worth taking the time to move through and beyond the traditional accounts of primitive life in order, hopefully, to demonstrate that there is almost an element of inevitability in the evolution of motivation and consciousness.

evolution of locomotion

We might consider, firstly, the development of regulated locomotion, allowing a minimal expenditure of energy during foraging, and a maximum release of energy in reserve for escapes. Locomotion is thus capable of serving as a stimulus response to, for example, olfactory cues indicating the proximity of a predator. However, while survival will tend to favour the creature that has evolved that threat response, it is still a grossly inefficient behaviour: it means bursts of release of unattenuated energy and yet, of course, at this level of existence, conservation of energy is everything.

motion detection and time

We now approach the point at which the origins of the inextricable relationship between baseline motivation and time become clear. Consider the emergence of the facility of responding not only to proximity but to perception of movement. This in itself represented a significant qualitative change. However, it heralded a seismic shift in survival advantage, when perception of movement was ultimately superceded by an evaluation, however imperfect, of the approach velocity of the predator. This novel information is highly adaptive in that it translates into an evaluation not of the spatial proximity of the predator but of the temporal imminence of the attack. This is obviously a quantum leap forward in sophistication, but it is still a stimulus-response. And we know it happened: it is a capability common to almost all vertebrates.

The arms-race nature of prey/predator evolution leads inexorably to selection pressure not only for spatial proximity and motion-detection responses but ultimately for the supreme efficiency of attack-imminence response. This, however, involves a completely novel type of perception and processing: in order to provide an input that can evaluate to attack imminence, the approach of the predator has to be perceived and processed over time. And that is what is most salient about this processing: the calculation requires the processing of a data-stream of perception against a measurement of time. But this represents a massive leap forward in survival advantage.

Crucially, initiation of escape has become contingent upon time. It is the temporal imminence of the threat, rather than its spatial proximity, that has now become the dominant survival-critical issue: a predator closing in at speed represents imminent danger. The spatial proximity of the predator is a crude and inefficient trigger in comparison.

evolution of the urgency variable

The game-changing significance of this perception/time data-stream processing is that, because it is evaluating the temporal imminence of the threat, the creature is now triggering escape contingent upon the urgency of action. The prototype of what we describe as ‘motivation’ has effectively come into being in the form of a data-stream-derived variable: urgency. There may be no trace of it in the fossil record but this facility to initiate and regulate locomotion in response to the urgency of action can only have conferred a major step change in survival advantage both in terms of escape outcomes and in terms of conservation of energy. It is, I think, also a major ommission in orthodox accounts of the evolution of action.

The data-stream-based urgency variable is also the optimum moderator of the energy released to locomotion. Not too far down the line, we are discussing a creature (an ancestor) that can conserve energy and life by modifying its own speed and direction in a pursuit context in response to a data-stream-based perception of a dynamic threat. Locomotion is initiated and regulated according to an ongoing assessment of the imminence of the threat and therefore the varying urgency of action. This is a highly complex sequence of data-stream-based calculations and of note should be the fact that we are now discussing a plausible ancestor of consciousness, one having a definition not far removed from the more concise of modern attempts: the ongoing processing of time and perception to initiate and moderate action.

In short, I believe I am on solid ground in proposing that the progenitor of animal motivation and consciousness was this facility to calculate and be continually responsive to the varying urgency of action.

Evolution rarely just casts something away if it is still doing its job well; it builds upon it, integrates it with new structures, finds new uses for it. Conscious agency requires that effort be quantified globally – a level of baseline motivation is typically sustained over an extended, complex series of instrumental motivations and actions. The probability, throughout our subsequent evolution, of the persistence of that single variable, urgency, continually (in consciousness) and globally moderating effort and awareness, is far from being an untenable inference.

Human motivation, the urge to act, is sometimes described subjectively as having an ‘intensity’ but, programmatically, neurologically, it is, I submit, the ongoing calculation of the urgency of action that globally modulates instrumental motivation and effort. Obviously, many tasks involve cognitive, conscious control over effort but, upstream of that, effort, whether physical or intellectual, is regulated unconsciously, globally, and that global ‘baseline motivation’ variable is, I submit, urgency. The ancient Chinese philosophers called it ‘Chi’. Jung and Freud called it libido or psychic energy. Bowlby called it nonsense.

baseline motivation – the candidate neural substrates

So, how might we approach the search for the neural substrates of baseline motivation? Where in the brain should we expect to find the system coding for an urgency variable? Much of the research into motivation at the biological level investigates instrumental approach/avoidance motivation. It is more difficult to find work that sheds light on the system coding for baseline motivation, and I’m afraid the following effort at homing in on candidate anatomy is liable to undergo revision; it represents my current understanding. (Like an infant learning to speak, hopefully the babbling stage will pass).

If the evolutionary tale is feasible, it points to a primitive structure capable of initiating and modulating action in response to crude visual and auditory signalling, thus probably implicating both the superior colliculus and the basal ganglia. Correlating with a state of elevated urgency, we might expect to see an increase in activation at a functionally-central locus where there is early access to the visual datastream and where the highly-distributed nature of the proposed role of modulation at a global level is feasible. The model also suggests that manipulation of extrinsic urgency may result in modulation of signalling detectable in multiple cortical regions. I suspect that such a characterisation may point to a dopaminergic system that involves the thalamus.

The thalamus has traditionally been viewed as a ‘hub’ or relay station. It has also been proposed as the mediator of ‘temporal coherence‘ (Llinás, Ribary, Contreras and Pedroarena, 1998) thus providing a plausible basis for coherent consciousness, but it seems not unreasonable to speculate that part of its role may be that of regulation of baseline motivation. The hypothesised processing of urgency requires a system capable of ongoing evaluation of a datastream of perception against a measurement of time at short scales. The thalamus is anatomically and functionally well-placed to process both perception and time: the oscillatory activity of thalamocortical neurons provide a plausible mechanism for short-scale time measurement, and of course, both the visual and auditory datastreams are routed through the thalamus. Interestingly, the one system that does not seem to pass through the ‘hub’ is the olfactory system, and if you recall my just-so story of the evolution of the variable, it is only the visual and auditory data streams that can carry the information necessary to facilitate encoding of temporal imminence. The olfactory signal synapses instead on the olfactory bulb and goes straight to the amygdala, hippocampus and hypothalamus where it can trigger the more primitive spatial-proximity-based threat response.

Another potentially interesting area of research is the thalamic role of the neuromodulator dopamine. Research has traditionally focused on the role of dopamine in predictive-error learning, i.e., in reward-directed behaviour with, for example, drugs that block dopamine receptors reducing an animal’s motivation to engage in reward-generating behaviour. Regulation of motivation is a component of the reward system but, even within the confines of the behaviourist paradigm which still informs so many research methodologies, dopamine has also been shown to be a component of aversive behaviour. A 1998 paper (Berridge and Robinson) posits the role of dopamine in some contexts as a component of the reward system but modulating motivational value “in a manner separable from hedonia and reward learning”. They employ the term ‘incentive salience’ and this, if not quite a synonym, is a much better fit for the potential role of a corticothalamic dopaminergic system in coding for the urgency of action.

Both the Freudian and Jungian concepts of libido were based upon the recognition of the ubiquitous phenomena associated with urgency. The early psychologists, however, and naturally enough, described it as ‘psychic energy’ and that mistake, combined with Bowlby’s discovery of a more apt metaphor for mental activity in the static logic circuits of early electronic control systems, was enough to lead him and others subsequently to discard Freud’s and Jung’s psychodynamic theories as worthless. Bowlby might have taken a different tack had his electronic switchgear control systems been capable, like modern computers, of processing a data stream. But the dogma of static-logic functionality took root, and from that departure, going forward, any meaningful study of the mechanism of motivation based upon its manifestly dynamic nature was rendered next to impossible.

Freud had speculated counter-intuitively that a drive to death and destruction is an element of the normal personality and he saw that drive as being unaccountably in conflict with a healthy drive to life. I believe the time-based construct of the urgency variable reveals the mechanism, and in this regard, the crucial aspect of the human psyche is that we are born helpless. The infant human, dog, bird or elephant instinctively expects to be cared for. Instinctively, it rightly assumes that it is entitled to have its needs satisfied by the actions of those around it. The role of urgency is revealing, therefore, because the infant’s urgency is of a very special nature in that it does not reference its own action; it is manipulative, referencing the action of the carer.

the conflict of active and passive urgency in the normal personality

Identifying the passive nature of infant motivation is, I believe, key to understanding adult narcissism and the mechanics of baseline motivation in the adult personality. If the model is valid, there coexists, in the normal personality, a silent conflict of active and passive urgency subsequently expressed cognitively in motive and choice. What’s going to happen to me? What will I get out of this? What do people think of me? The logic of these considerations might seem beyond question, but the reality is that while for one individual, “what will I get out of this?” might be the first consideration, for another, in just the same circumstance, it might be the last. The construct of the conflict of active and passive urgency rejects the behaviourist and frankly schoolboy-like assumption of the universality of self-gratifying motives.

the cognitive basis of empathy

The model frames empathy as a survival-critical cognitive facility of parenthood, the facility to ‘feel’ some representation of the infant’s urgency. It is, at least in part, because of the (healthy) parent’s capacity for empathic motivation that the infant’s communication of its own egoistic urgency can trigger, on the part of the parent, an appropriate measure of motivation to attend to the infant’s needs. Parenthood is, I believe, the root psychological basis of empathy, compassion and altruism.

narcissism and the egoism-altruism spectrum

The infant’s de facto lack of responsibility, its characteristic narcissism, its lack of empathy, its instinctive and valid sense of entitlement, and its passively motivated manipulative behaviour are all natural, healthy and essential for survival. It is only unhealthy and detrimental to society when these characteristics persist and prevail in adulthood.

This model proposes that:

• the data-stream-derived urgency variable lies at the core of the neurological mechanisms of motivation and consciousness
• consciousness, in its minimal form, can be defined as: the ongoing processing of time, perception and introception to initiate and regulate action
• the normal personality lies on an egoism-altruism spectrum: urgency can sustain simultaneously both a passive and an active component
• and the reason being that life has two-stages: childhood and parenthood.

I think I can now repeat the statement made in the introduction and, hopefully, it now carries more meaning:

I am a man and that means I am a combination of two very different animals: I am at once the father of my son, and the child of my parents. One of these two will have been in charge for most of the day.

Through whose eyes do I see the world? With whose mind do I understand – the child or the man? I keep coming back in my mind to the Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ (a disgustingly inappropriate term for indigenous resistance to settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, dehumanisation, decades of full-spectrum brutality, sadistic military occupation, oppression, land expropriation, water and resource expropriation, sporadic tantrum-like frenzies of mass murder, and a level of apartheid that shocked Tutu and Mandela). In July 2014, Israel was once again inflicting a murderous collective punishment of grotesquely disproportionate force upon the Palestinians they have imprisoned and besieged in the Gaza strip – over 2,100 dead – babies to grandparents – two thousand one hundred human beings, extinguished – calculated physical and psychological trauma on a scale utterly unimaginable. The message was simple: “fear us; we are very powerful, and we will act without restraint; Hamas has brought this upon you.”

Now, 2024, and the entire world watches, stunned, shocked, almost to the point of denial of the reality before us as a genocide unfolds in plain sight, the numbers long since bereft of any comprehensible meaning. Forty thousand murders in the space of a few months. Forty thousand dehumanised victims of a culture of hate that the vast majority of the British people are completely unaware of, and yet it has been in existence for decades.

With whose mind do the architects of this carnage understand – the child or the man? Freud recognised the death drive as a ubiquitous but unaccountable phenomenon. It is anything but unaccountable if the theory is sound: the construct frames cruel, destructive, unempathetic behaviour, and transference of blame, in terms of the persistence, in the adult personality, of the predominance of infantile passive, egoistic motivation.

Narcissism is not just about the criminal of the tabloids; it is about the real world: the human cost of the evils of capitalism, imperialism, militarism, settler-colonialism, elitism and racism. It is about the intense, incalculable suffering of millions of the most vulnerable at the hands of men (and occasionally women) whose arrested motivational development grants them license to behave manipulatively, ruthlessly and without compassion or remorse, as would any infant.

And that, I feel, is the gravity and the urgency of the case for research.

Jimmy Powdrell Campbell