Kidnapped
I WAS enjoying a long bike ride when I saw an elderly woman clinging to a metal post and clearly having difficulty walking in the heat. She yelled at me to stop, so I crossed the street and helped her make it up the steep hill between Jardim de Arca d'Água and Lapa church. She was clinging to my arm like a lovesick octopus and each time I asked her in broken Portuguese if we had reached the appropriate destination, she just shook her head. I told her that she should have taken the local bus, but the poor lady seemed more interested in sharing my company than anything else and I was only too happy to oblige for around two hundred metres before continuing on my journey down into the city.
I'm only telling you all this because I want to score a few extra points in the virtue signalling league and won't be happy unless this breathtaking act of human kindness allows me to add the words "I've had my old woman" to my Facebook profile picture. After all, it has to be worth ten times more than one of those idle boasts about having taken the death-jab.
Not virtue signalling, pehaps. As Pimker and Matt Ridley admit, altruism is a basic instinct. But they think they have reduced its substance to nothing but evolutionary selfishness of the gene. One day, walking home to our shared house in Albert Square Stockwell, it suddenly hit me that our instinctual pleasures and feelings could be a force for good - could be 'Good'. So hard had my Christian upbrininging taught me that this was impossible, this came like a streak of enlightenment from the sky. I think most mystics say that the pleasures of enlightened altruism are the greatest bliss possible? Not just no pain no gain. No pleausre no gain! More power to your so called virtue sigmnalling which it is not!