There is no genuinely altruistic behavior. Everyone needs to have sufficient amount of self-esteem, which crucially depends on believing oneself to be useful and needed. Behavior that appears to be altruistic can be understood as being motivated by the desire to reinforce that belief, a clearly self-interested motivation. A flaw in the argument is that it ['presumes, without providing justification, that if one does not hold oneself in sufficient self-esteem one cannot be useful or needed', "fails to consider that self-esteem also depends on maintaining an awareness of one's own value", 'takes for granted that any behavior that can be interpreted as self-interested is in fact self-interested', 'illicitly infers that behavior is altruistic merely because it seems altruistic']