Why do the people you help the most seem to notice it the least? The 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who defended compassion yet slept beside a loaded pistol, had a darker answer than "watch out for bad people."

In this video essay we look at how kindness gets exploited, why generosity doesn't change the people who take it for granted, what a famous economics experiment shows about when kindness survives, and what Schopenhauer's porcupine parable says about boundaries.

QUESTIONS FOR THE COMMENTS
1. When did you realize your kindness had become something someone else was relying on, and what did you do?
2. When someone keeps taking from you, is cutting them off self-respect, or giving up on them?

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality (1840)
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will (1839)
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), including the porcupine parable
Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, "Altruistic punishment in humans," Nature (2002)
Adam Grant, Give and Take (2013)
Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)
Wilhelm Gwinner, Arthur Schopenhauer aus persönlichem Umgange dargestellt (1862)

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#Schopenhauer #Philosophy #Kindness