Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible.

This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass,

His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. (Daniel 2:31-33 describing Nebuchadnezzar)

Now I see what people mean when they act like EAs haven’t “earned the right” to care about faraway people. On some level, they are right. Our bodies have limits, and our bodies support our brains. Caring about increasingly abstract things takes a lot of mental and emotional energy. If you don’t have a stable base that replenishes your energy, you’re draining the principal. The principal is eventually lost anyway, no matter its size, when you die, so you shouldn’t store it up forever. And sometimes it pays to take risky bets; to gamble the principal. But you’ll live a walking death if you mortgage yourself for others and you can’t make the payments. A zombie, no matter how pure its intentions, is not much help to others. The best thing a zombie can do for everyone is stop and take care of itself.

Some people are better or worse at interpreting their body’s signals– hunger, thirst, heat, cold, pain, etc. Some people put too much stock in these signals and take more resources than they need to deal with them. We say someone is selfish when they are unwilling to bear their own pain and hassles to spare others the trouble. The opposite of selfishness is not effective altruism. It’s asceticism. It’s a level of self-denial that becomes reality-denial. All of our bodies have needs, and if those needs are not met, then you’re standing on feet of clay.

Some people really are too selfish. They can afford to help others, and their own lives would probably be richer if they did help others. But some people have a tendency to deny their needs (EAs often fall in this camp). And they build increasingly elaborate structures on a shaky foundation. They have feet of clay. Nebuchadnezzar had an undeserved ego– a head of gold on top of arms of silver all the way down to feet of clay. Some EAs, recently including me, have an unsteady superego. It comes from a beautiful impulse to help others, but if the foundation is not sturdy enough to support it, we’ll collapse under the weight of the world. We can’t neglect to take care of ourselves when our goal is to use ourselves to take care of others.

I didn’t mean for the above to sound didactic. I’m sharing this because I recently went through a crisis from pushing myself too hard. When I’m in a bad state, I move toward self-denial that easily disguises itself as altrustic sentiment. I’m writing this to share, but also to remind myself when I need to step back and care for myself.