Charity - The new consumer product

So if by the time the bar closes
And you feel like falling down
I'll carry you home tonight

-From the song “We are young”

Please allow me to exercise the brutality of cherry-picking a part of a song to abuse it out of its context. I believe that this is MORALLY justifiable given the GOOD INTENTIONS behind it. This part was particularly picked since it exemplifies a swan song whispered by many people today. Literally, what is the implication here? Let’s try to unreel it.

“Darling, you may be having dozens of friends who surround you to enter the bar and exploit you. None of them will be around when you fall down and REALLY NEED HELP. I will be the angel who comes for the rescue. I’ll give you my shoulder. Remember, not everyone is like me…and it’s just me.”

Really good people, aren’t they? Heavenly beauty of the world emanates from them. But let me shoot a nasty question here. Are you certain that the drunken guy really wants to go home? Aren’t you making his ostensible helplessness a mere vehicle for your own feel-good? Is it that obvious to decide on what the other person needs? The question of morality is not as simple as it appears. It poses the ever-confusing question that “What should I do to be good for other people?”

I assert that exploiters are better people than these good-doers. Exploiters at least do not proclaim their acts to be morally good. They just display the basic human drive of using others for one’s own benefit. Even so the “good-doers” practically do the same thing, they enjoy the luxury of standing on the side of good. Let me bring in an experience of mine.

When in Sweden I developed a habit of having a drink at pubs during weekends. In one of those days I got honestly drunk so that I literally could not walk to the apartment and found my self falling asleep in the road (true thrill in drinking is getting into this state. See here for a rationalization to this). Though I might have looked to be desperately helpless from outside I was enjoying every moment of this. I did not, for any reason, have the intention to reach the prison called the apartment. Road was way too good. At this point, a hero entered into the seen. He was a college student along with his girlfriend. He decided that I really need help (you know; college guys are idiots) and that the help I needed was to be under shelter. Two of them carried me to their hostel. I was physically exhausted and could barely resist. The two angels seemed to be a fresh couple, and the price I had to pay for their “help” was to listen to their stupid love story; the typical early-twenties romantic bullshit. It went for hours and they entirely ruined my day. What they wanted was a passive listener for their nonsense, but it was painted as an angelic act of helping a poor drunken guy.

Isn’t this the same way that charity works in today’s world? On one side you have millions of people pushed into utter depths of poverty. On the other side are the people who have sufficient buying power to let them accessible to the infinite spectrum of enjoyments provided by capitalist goods and services. The problem of the second category is the guilty feeling of being mere consumerists in their daily life. This formulates a fruity condition for a potential demand-supply paradigm. The tired consumerist can spend some of his time and money to make life a little bit better for the ones who are in “desperate need” for it. In return the consumerist can enjoy humanly pleasures of doing something for others supplementary to his otherwise-selfish daily life. This sounds at least not-too-bad and it really works in practice. The rationale is that “one cannot make everybody happy all the time – but he has potential to make some people happy sometimes”.

If you sensed the irony in above logic we can proceed to the next step by rephrasing our original question – now – on charity. Does the charity guy really know what the poor wants? Or, is he just projecting his presuppositions on the deprived for his own feel-good? I can assume two major rebuttals against this.

1    1. See the faces of those innocent people and if you are human, you will recognize that they need it

2    2. There are humanitarian organizations that work closely with poor. If you go through them your money is highly likely spent on something the poor really needs.

I’ll develop my counter argument for both of them in one shot. What is the true reason for poverty? I do not buy the religious bullshit on this, namely Karma, which says that poor became poor because they did not do sufficient good karma during their previous births. It is also not rational to land on the idea that poverty is a random plague on some unlucky or lazy people. The reason for poverty is entirely political. There are enough facts to believe that it is an organized crime. Utter poverty is a logical result of the dominant political force in today’s world which is none other than capitalism. Charity is an unthinking, immediate reaction to the popular definition of poverty under capitalism; the definition given to a problem by the process that created the problem. It can be proven that the world is resourceful enough for every human being to enjoy an acceptable level of living if not for a political process that systematically excludes a slice of population making them deprived of even the basic needs while rewarding another slice an amount of wealth that a human being does not deserve to possess. 

The system doesn’t stop from throwing the poor into an abyss of hopelessness. It proceeds to the next inhuman stage of articulating what those people really need. This is therefore a double crime. All what the humanitarian organizations do is romancifying the frustration of the oppressed so that it is put in a rhetoric form to be consumed by the charity guys. To put it bluntly, the system expels poor in the first place and then absorbs their misery back into it as a consumable product. In contrary, a good system would be one that sets conditions for people to have access to resources that enable them to realize for themselves what they really want and strive for it on their own. In no way I’m claiming that state-controlled socialism is this good system. Humanity has to find a better solution.

Imagine a guy buying an iPad. Effectively he has certain materialistic and psychological needs and spends money on a product that fulfills the need. The world does not get changed due to his consumption of the item, and it is not expected though. Now let us compare this with someone who spends time or money on charity. The person has a certain psychological need for feel-good and spends money to buy the charity product. Personal need fulfillment is obviously achieved. However, does this cause any change in the world? Statistics show that poverty in the world has been only becoming worse despite of millions of goodwill seekers pumping billions of dollars on charity. Just as the first case (iPad) the second act too does not do anything to make a difference in the world. Why is the need for making the second act sacred compared to the first? I claim that the second act is worse than the first in moral terms. The iPad guy just fulfills his need with a material product whereas the charity guy plays with someone else’s personal human space to fulfill his own need. In its purest definition, charity is another form of violence. Is it unfair to label the act of those two angels on me as violence?

Some people claim that those who are rich enough should give a part of their wealth away to alleviate problems of the poor to make sure that they don’t fire up violent revolutions against the system. But what is the system that these guys are trying to protect? It is the very system that cultivates poverty. The ostensible good-doers are saviors of an evil system. I think here I am logically permitted to proclaim that charity guys are worse people than selfish guys.

Nonetheless, isn’t it good to make someone HAPPY even for a short moment? Didn’t the eyes of those innocent kids say that they were having the moment of their lives when they received your charity? I think what works here is Hegel’s master-slave theory on human relationships. According to him, every human relationship is of master-slave nature and the slave implicitly knows what to pretend to make the master happy. The poor implicitly know what sort of dialogs to throw and what kind of facial expressions to make in order to please the charity master. What they don’t know is that these masters are great protectors of a system that consciously put them in their current situation. If I were a poor kid I would prefer death to charity.

Capitalism always comes up with innovative products to maintain the dynamics of global capital. I think charity is one of these new products. The ideology today is that the solutions for problems such as poverty, natural disasters and power crisis are already well thought in the macro level and what remains to be done is to enact micro level individual duty to realize macro solutions. The drive is to act without thinking. However, a close examination of these proposed individual responsibilities would reveal that they would not bring the world anywhere more than serving to global capitalism. Humanity is far away from any acceptable macro level solution to any of these problems. An honest attempt to solve them would require enormous amount of thinking to question the way that the current questions are posed before forming a solution. Thinking is not about solving problems the way they are presented to you. The way a problem is presented can constitute a part of the problem itself.