The Price of Altruism Read Online Free PDF Page A

logic into evolutionary biology, what further lesson can his unusual life confer? In a way trying to answer that question amounts to trying to understand his suicide. Why, in the end, did George Price kill himself?
    The obvious answer is that George was unwell. Whether he was born that way or became that way, from early on he was different from the rest. His interest in numbers, his obsession with odds and ciphers, his awkwardness in social situations, his repeated behavioral patterns, his inability to hold a job or to stay in one place for long, his frequent insensitivity to the feelings of others—all point to the constitution of a highly gifted, highly unusual character. Before the days when Asperger’s syndrome was routinely diagnosed by psychiatrists, George might have stood somewhere on the slippery spectrum between normal and autistic social behavior. And of course the thyroid problems couldn’t have helped. In particular, failure to take thyroxine for the kind of problem George suffered from is known to cause depression. In George’s case it might also have led to delusions. Joan, for one, felt that he kept getting things all wrong: Years after his death she would claim that she never had any intention of marrying him but had just been trying to save him, while he kept jumping to conclusions. While this is debatable—the letters from the period seem to suggest that she was entirely in love with him—increasingly, undoubtedly, he was becoming unhinged from reality. The last letters from him spoke of wanting to make love in threesomes, and of Jesus and Margot (a BBC colleague to whom she had introduced him) saying that it was not yet time for them to be together. But Margot had been dead for months, a victim of cancer; like his mother, George was talking to the dead. The combination of an unstable personality and the depression brought about by no longer taking his medication might well have pushed him over the deep end, and ultimately to suicide. This is what Joan and Hamilton and the people at UCL thought. It is also what the last doctor to see him, Christopher Lucas, seems to have thought, and there might very well be some truth to it.
    But attributing George’s suicide strictly to illness somehow doesn’t feel entirely sufficient; there were life circumstances, too, after all. One of these was Sylvia. Unable to win her heart, George had become despondent. Whether he wanted to marry her because he thought Jesus wanted him to or not is, in a sense, beside the point. His heart was broken, and despair had descended. If the note that he left for her is to be taken at face value, George himself seemed to have decided that he would need to leave this world because of unrequited love.
    And yet the suicide arrived just as, in his words to his daughter, George was “heading back upward.” After a year and a half of radical, selfless giving to others, he had come to see that it was time to take care of himself once again. He had decided to hold on to more of his possessions, he had stopped working tirelessly for alcoholics in the square and station and courtrooms and squats. He had begun to try to do some economics, and was planning to write to Samuelson at MIT. Clearly conflicted about whether or not to stay in genetics, he nevertheless seemed to have determined that being a full-time selfless angel was going nowhere.
    What might have gone through his head when he thought such thoughts? What, in the final analysis, had his giving been all about?
    One way to understand George’s unusual and courageous decision to take destitute and dangerously violent alcoholics off the street and bring them into his home is that it was a test. Pure and simple, this was a religious command. And since George himself came to believe that he was being led by Jesus on a path of suffering, he willingly accepted his fate. If giving to the needy meant having to leave his home, if having to leave his home meant living rough, if living rough