For you or for me?

Does altruism truly exist in us humans? Whatever one does channeling one's altruism may bring goodness into the world, but the underlying reason for why they do what they do has apparently been commonly blown up as altruism, either by the society or in talks with the self. How can it be altruism when the very action that you do advances a feeling of goodness within you? Are you not performing the act for the sake of selfishly advancing your actionable answer to the existential crisis?

The society labels as you being a person that abides by the couplet இன்னா செய்தாரை ஒறுத்தல் அவர் நாண நன்னயம் செய்து விடல். (Do good unto all, immaterial of being done bad unto you)

Society can see only a finite version of you. It sees the words you utter and coupled with your actions, it qualifies you to be of a certain pedigree. A certain type of character that fits in to their definitions. And ages of stagnation and subjugation have rendered their definitions obsolete and outdated to accommodate the entire gamut of emotions. Never am I professing that our far or immediate ancestors ever were aloof of such emotions. Their expressions have been suppressed citing baseless inherited morality that killed thinking about their own selves. Our ancestors' immediate ancestors were quite good at a term I have just recently been made aware of by an intellectual common: Gas-lighting. Dictionary defines it as: manipulate (someone) by psychological means into doubting their own sanity.

Manipulate here, I feel, is not the correct term. It places a negative connotation. It subtly plays in the minds of those who look up this definition. Without the reader being aware, a seed of negativity is embedded when they hear or read this term anywhere. And this mental seed has the ideal (not optimal) conditions for growth in human life: experiences. As you wake up from one day to the next, you encounter various people and place a marker on their characters. Your experiences coupled with your thought on those multiply exponentially over a single day. And when someone does gas-light you, you jump to the conclusion that it is wrong and it should either be suppressed in the perpetrator or condemned by the defense or prevented from spreading into society. When this compounds over a period of time, say a week, imagine the consequences of how that seed, having been deeply rooted, has started to grow. The seed that has been placed by the person who concocted that definition has grown inside you. But have you truly grown? Have you expended time to truly think, on the term used in that definition? And once you do that, have you mentally silenced precedents formed through experiences and questioned the 'why' of gas-lighting, let alone answer that?

And when you do find an answer to that question, it leads me straight back to the labeling that society has done on you. For toeing by the couplet, you are labeled an altruist. Answering to the society is always easy. Answering to the self in the dark's rhythm never is. If unresolved within, you might delay the inevitable but the agony of this unanswered question does eventually catch up and intensify by the moment during its expression. Can you with full-blown conviction to the self profess that the very act that you perform and get credited with altruism has no advancement in the mental/emotional/intellectual/physical well-being of either the self or your loved ones?

Is altruism the psychological equivalent of a Carnot Engine?