In the first chapter of Walden, Thoreau wrote:
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”
The major philanthropic institutions like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations or Carnegie Corporation have become household names, and are thought of as having the loftiest and purist of intentions. In actuality, these institutions operate more so as de facto tax-evasion schemes and public relations agencies. The original philanthropic trusts started as a way to avoid inheritance taxes and to curry public favor around the causes that were of interests to their business practices.
In 1913, Ivy Lee, the father of modern public relations and inventor of the press release, was hired by John D. Rockefeller Jr. following the Ludlow Massacre to help clean up his public image. Only one year earlier, the Rockefeller Foundation charter had been formally granted, and Lee schemed to use the foundation’s works to humanize the image of the son of the world’s richest man.
The US Senate’s Nye Committee found that many of the preeminent Titans of industry like the Morgans and the du Ponts were actively behind escalating WWI; within a year of the report the du Ponts had established their own philanthropic foundation to help abate the family’s negative image as merchants of death.
Another Congressional Committee in the 50’s the Reece Committee found that the foundations were not interested in philanthropy at all but rather advancing their own ulterior motives of social and economic control.
Four decades later after Bill Gates had become persona non grata for his monopolistic cornering of the software market in the 90’s, the Gates Foundation was founded to help buy back good will with the public. Before he donned the carefully curated image of world-savoir, Bill was more known as a conniving dweeb who wanted to rise to the top of Silicon Valley at all costs. And his foundation is almost explicitly a tax-shelter – Warren Buffett’s promises to donate his fortune to the BMGF are explicitly contingent upon the foundation maintaining its tax-exempt status.
Even further, when digging into the contributions and allocation of assets one discovers that grants given by the foundation are paltry in comparison to the capital it allocates to investments through Cascade (the hedge fund that manages its assets). You might say well of course they have to invest more money in order to be able to give grants in perpetuity, but when you find out that there are effectively zero stipulations on what companies the hedge fund arm invests in, you get to see exactly how the con is run. The foundation has major dollars put towards private prisons, fast food, weapons manufacturers, and oil companies, meanwhile the grants it hands out are a fraction of this capital.
From a 2007 piece in the LA times:
“hundreds of Gates Foundation investments -- totaling at least $8.7 billion, or 41% of its assets, not including U.S. and foreign government securities -- have been in companies that countered the foundation’s charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy… The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France -- the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe. Indeed, local leaders blame oil development for fostering some of the very afflictions that the foundation combats… Oil workers, for example, and soldiers protecting them are a magnet for prostitution, contributing to a surge in HIV and teenage pregnancy, both targets in the Gates Foundation’s efforts to ease the ills of society, especially among the poor. Oil bore holes fill with stagnant water, which is ideal for mosquitoes that spread malaria, one of the diseases the foundation is fighting.”
Further hundreds of millions of dollars in grants actually go towards companies that the foundation has invested in. This “giving” comes across as incredibly self-serving. In this light the BMGF comes off as a sham - there are serious doubts over whether its actual goals are even achievable.
Philanthropic foundations are a way to put a nice smiley face on calculated and ruthless profiteering – and I don’t have any great qualms with seeking profit, but going about it through devious and deceptive means can lead to much harm and suffering, the exact opposite of the stated aims.
The Biafra War in 1960’s Nigeria highlights how even the purist of intentions can go awry. It represented one of the first cases of modern international humanitarian interventionism, and out of it was spawned Doctors Without Borders. Unfortunately, the philanthropic aims here of the international community to support the women and children caught in the severe blockade of Biafra wound up largely causing more human suffering than had they not intervened at all.
Aid given to local secessionists there actually prolonged fighting in the war, funds donated were often siphoned off by local warlords, and the same infrastructure used to transport food and medicine was also used to smuggle weapons and fighters. The gulf between the aim of the actions and their actual effects cannot be understated – the road to hell is paved with good intentions; or as the Journal of African Development put it:
It is “the dark side of humanitarian aid, where international intervention often assists belligerents rather than civilians, prolongs suffering, and poses new threats to national sovereignty…. Agencies are rewarded chiefly for spending and being active; they are almost never punished when that spending and those activities come to nothing, or entail unwelcome side-effects”
One of the best pieces of advice I received recently is to never be someone else’s useful idiot. I think generally people with philanthropic bents are a great boon to society (so long as they aren’t too sanctimonious). Many have nothing but the best of intentions in their hearts, but this combined with perhaps a bit of naiveté makes them easy pawns to be used in other’s schemes. This lesson is lost continually when it comes to international aid. As the article linked above points out many belligerent factions across the globe are all to eager to utilize the sympathy and soft feelings of the West to their own ends. As it points out, “in Liberia and Sierra Leone, civil war combatants starve their own population to attract relief and divert it.”
David Graeber in his debate with Peter Theil blamed the lack of a social safety net for the ossification of culture and the decline in innovation in Western society. As an example Graeber states that the Beatles were only able to realize their creative greatness because they weren’t forced to eek out an existence in a soul crushing 9-5 but knew that they had a robust welfare state to rely on should they come upon tough times.
It's sad that the late Graeber, a self-purported anarchist, has allowed ideology or sentimentality to blind him to reality. Any student of history like himself should understand that the modern welfare state established across the UK and replicated in the US was designed specifically by the Fabian socialists with the intent of crippling and enfeebling the recipients. Read the writings of Beatrice and Sydney Webb to see that the targeted aims were eugenical social designs meant to protect the higher and more lofty Anglo Saxon race or as they put it to ward off “national deterioration; or… this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews.”
All aspects of the social welfare state were enacted with these aims in mind. Immigration reform was put in place to help cull the number of degenerate races from entering the country. Child labor laws were signed to undermine the ability of “undesirable” families from being able to support themselves. A minimum wage was enacted as a “sorting mechanism” in order to keep derelict lower races, referred to as the “unemployable classes” out of the workforce, where they would be forced on government assistance and eventually were expected to be out bred due to their inferiority. Many of the plans of these social reformers involved state-led forced sterilization efforts to be done en-masse on the deplorables of society as an essential part to how they hoped to make the world over. In Sweden for example, where the model was actually implemented, over 60,000 women were sterilized over a 34-year period beginning in 1941.
The aims were explicit – the goal of government aid was to weaken and enfeeble its recipients. This effect has been known since the time of the Romans where it was understood that the Cura Annonae or free grain passed out to the people (that’s the bread half of bread and circuses) actually made them more reliant on the state and weakened their inclination to fend for themselves.
The Fabian’s are named after Roman General Fabius Cunctator, who is known for defeating Hannibal in the Second Punic War by patiently waiting for Hannibal to exhaust his resources and attacking when the time was just right.
The Fabians’ impact on the Anglo-American world has been and continues to be tremendous. They established the London School of Economics along with the Labour Party in the UK. Among their members were John Maynard Keynes, Stuart Chase the architect and originator of FDR’s New Deal, and the Huxley Brothers, Julian who was a preeminent eugenicist and later genetics researcher who was also the first head of UNESCO and Aldous who would go on to write the dystopian work Brave New World, based off of a totalitarian regime that cemented control by keeping the common peoples dependent upon their handouts and rationing access to pleasure and enjoyment. The image that the Fabians used as their esoteric icon was the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
If you were unaware of these facts, it may sound unbelievable that the champions of progressive social reform had aims and beliefs that sound revolting today. But I cannot state enough how central what we would now consider racist social planning was at the core of the progressive movement. William Ripley the president of the American Economic Association in the 30’s made his original claim to fame with a best-selling racial taxonomy called The Races of Europe. E. A. Ross who is the father of modern Academic Sociology and was active in progressive and academic reform is the person who coined the term “Race Suicide” and Theodore Roosevelt while sitting president regarded racial suicide to be the “greatest problem of civilization.”
Throughout the world-transforming progressive era the idea of eugenical racial hygiene was the au courant altruistic ideal, these people viewed themselves as saving the world, and if you were to preach racial equality you were considered an extremist if not a lunatic. I am not preaching Whig history here, but times and taste change, and not all for the better. Who’s to say our progeny won’t look back on our beliefs and the unbridled sanctimony with which we held them and be filled with equal horror and disgust.
There is an implicit insult embedded in aiding and helping – every offer for assistance is an implication that the receiver cannot do it for themselves – and this does not mean it is something that should never take place, or that one should never experience either receiving or giving aid – every rose has its thorns. But without a doubt any hand reaching out to help you up is implying you are unable to get up on your own – even the implication that someone or something can help raise you up is a de facto placement of themselves over you.
When aid at scale is attempted – think of philanthropies or effective altruism here – it is institutionalized or systematized, it is a necessity of scale that it be this way. And any institutional philanthropy if it is to survive, perpetuate, and grow (i.e. attract donors) needs to maintain the appearance of doing good. And this keeping up of good appearances demands legibility. It is because of this that once a system is in place then aid-itself is no longer the objective, but rather the program now aims for types of aid that are legible, i.e. aid that is rational, measurable, and statistically scalable. The dynamics of any institutionalized system demand this – as mentioned before these philanthropies are PR machines and they must be able to get across the “awesome impact” they are having on the world. This further necessitates a teleological aim and additional system, bureaucracy, and institutionalization.
Unfortunately, when helping gets to this point, whatever benefit could have been present is quickly over-powered by the negative effects that come with the systemic teleological aims of institutionalization. A systems approach is the killing field of individual dignity and spirit. It interdicts the ability to self-select the type of life a person wants, when people are given systematized aid, they are enfeebled and weakened, turned into dependents. Every parent knows that in order for their child to grow they must face obstacles themselves – they cannot have mommy and daddy solve all their problems. Ancient wisdom from Sophocles, to the Aesop understood that God helps those who help themselves. These insights are nothing new.
The root issue here is too often scale, when too many intermediaries and stakeholders, along with their many individual motives and beliefs get in the mix then you have something much more likely to end in ruin than good. The more complexity and abstraction one adds to their aid the more things have to synchronously go right for a positive outcome to come about.
I am not advocating for a world where nobody helps anyone else out. We have all been in places where we need aid. Communities, countries, let alone families couldn’t exist if everyone simply fended for themselves. But our modern obsession with doing good – specifically doing good for people in the abstract, or for the largest abstraction of all: humanity – seems to me to be a surefire path to more devious usurpation and human suffering.
When Scott Alexander defends Effective Altruism by turning up his nose at critics and asking “Well what are you doing that’s equivalent to donating 10% of your income?” I think he plays into the same issues that have gotten us into this mess – equating money spent and resources used with the wellbeing of people the world over. What effective altruism and so many other forms of giving get wrong is they deal with humans as if they are mere numbers and data and doing so they miss out on what any real human life is about.
Last year, I had to abruptly travel over 100 miles at the drop of a hat, when I received a message that my 70-year-old father had had multiple falls, was having trouble communicating, and was incapable of remaining continent. I wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong with him, but I knew for certain I wasn’t going to allow my father to face it alone. I uprooted my life and my job to move back to my hometown; yet, for six months the barrage of specialists we brought him before were unable to give any conclusive diagnoses. However, slowly as I spent more time making sure he took care of himself, ate properly, and kept active, I saw with my own eyes my father slowly regaining semblances of health and vigor.
Surely, it would have been more efficient for me to have hired a nurse or to simply put him in a nursing home and hoped for a recovery from afar. I have a very well-paying job and the political capital spent on moving away and working remotely for reduced time cost me tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of compensation and delayed promotions. If I had stayed, I would have had more expendable income to buy malaria nets for Africans and to help build septic systems in India. I certainly took a more selfish, and suboptimal path, and the entire world is of lower utility for it.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with my father over dinner. It was remarkable to witness this same man who would stare at you silently four hours just a few months ago chattering excitedly about his day. I told him how happy I was to see the progress he’d made. And he told me that it wouldn’t have been possible without me coming to help him out all this time. I think that after two years of lockdowns, isolation, and social strife he really just needed someone he knew and loved to show that they cared and loved him back. Helping doesn’t need to be about rescuing the world or saving humanity, it can be about making a difference for the real people you know.
Against Charity, Helping, & Generally Being A Good Person