Misgivings of Materialistic Philanthropy

The World runs on balance. An Imbalanced state propels the world to undergo changes, whether evolutionary or revolutionary, that restores the collective aspirations of the complex web of life in it. “How much you take is how much you get” is the principle running through a balanced state of things. If however it shifts to any one part of the see-saw more than its needed due, then there are bound to be repercussions.

The Rich is getting rich & the Poor, poorer. Growing up I have seen families around me investing their sweat and breath in cementing their children’s future. The fact that they had few initial resources to start with have helped those families slowly build their children’s future and their kids have now passed college and have started earning handsomely. Rise higher than your raising is the unsaid motto running through each family, especially the lower middle class families which have not been remarkably privy to good education in the past decades. 

On the other hand, are the utter downtrodden, families at the bottom of the human pyramid with absolutely no resource to start with. Their day begins with their making plans for the day’s meals. Liberating their kids’ entrapped future through education is a foregone luxury and considered a thought best not birthed in their minds. Its a vicious cycle indeed. Formation of a knowledge based society in digital times like these in a way implies for me, that means through which resources can be pulled towards oneself are increasingly reaching beyond one’s immediate capabilities. In present times, such means, can be developed, through education chiefly which makes it more difficult for those at the bottom of the heap to emerge into the future. They do not have the resources to avail of education and without education they cannot obtain means to pull resources towards them.

To me, it seems like a whole category of human population is being left out of the loop. So, do they have the right to beg? Only If we have a concomitant duty to give alms. So do we have a duty to give alms? This is what brings me to the point I made initially about the world maintaining itself on a sort of balance. The balance that I talk of is not delicate or soft. Its a pretty sturdy and self repairing balance and is capable of creating remarkable effects. But it can only be tempted to a certain extent. 

Resources or Money, as understood in today’s times are not to be treated as individual properties. But, rather as means to experience the world and its offerings. We receive/earn/create money, not only through our own selves, but also due to several other subtle, faint and slight factors as well, which function in the larger world in which we live. It is this larger world to which we need to give back what we receive, after experiencing joys through it. If we feel that we have an obligation to maintain the world smoothly as it is for a long time to come, then it is really our obligation to give alms, and generously.

But charitable actions can spring from several motives. A person told me once about the great joys that he received after donating his toys and his belongings to a group of orphan kids. As he said so, he breathed in the sea of charitable relief which had opened up inside his-self. Even as he was drowning in the recollections of a great soul-satisfying act of charity, I had begun to loathe the feeling of a materialistic philanthropy. This is what I would like to label as a misguided sense of charity. Here the donor, is part of a system which works unwillingly to keep certain people out of the loop as mentioned earlier. This system functions to create (unwillingly) a vicious cycle which bars those at the very end of human society from entering back into the liberations which a society can offer (as mentioned earlier). Thus, a charitable donor, after benefiting materially in such a system which (unwillingly) puts some people out of the resource loop, is striving to give back materially upon a false sense of godly action of charity and self-pleasuring philanthropy that delusionally rests on spiritual masturbation. The world is but a garden for each one of its children. Each one has a right to be a part of it. So when extra resources flow to someone, and if that someone donates back some of it, it should, according to me be pursuant to a bounden duty and not as a discretionary choice of dispensation . Some may very well derive pleasure from doing so, even if pursuant to a bounden duty to give back to others, which is not objectionable however . I agree much of this is taking colours of a communist ideology, but the point which I want to drive home is that in this process of charity giving, what is lost is the “chance to make a choice”, for others since they are being given things on their hands in a platter; things, which the resource laden deem important for their well being and not things which they must have obtained upon exercising their “chance of choice”.

It is this chance of choice that must be safeguarded in any system. Circumstances and chances must be ensured to everyone so that they may exercise their decisions over utilisation of society’s resources. This ensues from an understanding that each one of us have an equal right to enjoy society’s resources. A system, described as above, which is increasingly shifting resources to only one side of the population, deprives this chance of choice-making to the downtrodden in making decisions regarding utilising nature’s treasures. Upon this rests, the soul-puffing activity of charity.

I hear that the big millionaires and billionaires donate profusely for charitable purposes often with an objective to make the world better. But is not the “better world” as imagined by those donors something of a world that only belongs to them? Isn’t the world which the philanthropists seek to improve their own personal world, ploughed with their own choices?