Hamlet’s Timeless Question Applied To Today
To give, or not to give? With regard to whether Americans, individually and collectively, should continue to pour billions of dollars and hours of manpower into charitable endeavors every year, that’s one of THE most important economic and social questions facing us today. It may seem like a strange query, but when our national debt is soaring above $21 trillion, our deficit is topping $1 trillion annually, we have trillions in unfunded liabilities coming due, interest rates are almost zero, real (not official) price inflation is probably somewhere near 7 or 8% annually, and our government is thinking about imposing digital currency on us so they can confiscate our wealth directly through negative interest rates, it’s not unreasonable to inquire whether pouring hundreds of billions, even trillions, of private and public dollars into charitable endeavors, is really the right thing to be doing at this moment?
Let me be clear. I’m not talking only about the forms of charity that usually come to mind when people talk about giving, like volunteering at the zoo or leaving some cash to the local children’s hospital in your will. I’m also speaking about the larger, broader, more insidious and institutionalized forms of wholesale charity that American taxpayers and, indirectly, all citizens, are forced to participate in whether we want to or not. Examples include the bailing out failed miscreant banks and the propping up of entire communities with free social welfare. Those are most certainly forms of charitable giving, too, though we’ve been conditioned to stop seeing things like taxation on behalf of social programs, the imposition of government mandates to give this or that group preferential treatment, and hidden financial manipulation to funnel money to favored industries, as forms of charity.
Charity is a psychologically and socially complicated affair. It can elevate the human spirit and bring out the best in us, and it can be a handmaiden to our deepest, darkest impulses. The act of giving is frequently bound up with selfishness, fear, greed and manipulation. This is true whether donors and recipients know each other and are bound in a one-on-one relationship, or whether masses of donors and receivers don’t know one another yet are bound together in a complex web of giving (for example, when disaster victims receive food and blankets from unaffected strangers half a world away). While certainly not every act of generosity is a bad thing – far from it! – giving is fraught with unconscious energies and potential side effects which, when allowed to accumulate, can destroy the giver, the recipient, the community, and even an entire civilization if they spread to a mass scale, which is what we’re witnessing in America today.
Charity as a Weapon of Mass Destruction
I believe that misplaced and “toxic” charity is a largely unrecognized force that has contributed greatly to the fraying of our cultural fabric and explosion of America’s financial crisis. On a personal level, toxic charity mires the lives of individuals and their circles of contacts (family, friends, caretakers) into a sea of unresolvable depression, dysfunction, and wasted time, money and energy. Add up thousands or millions or tens of millions of cases of toxic charity cumulatively and, a cultural level, you get a sort of poisonous social cement that binds up and drags entire communities – and then systems of communities and ultimately civilizations – into nearly inescapable downward spirals of anger, depression, crime, debility, social dysfunction and economic collapse.
“Seeing” Toxic Charity And Its Effects
America has, from its founding, always been a generous nation, and yet charity during our earlier days was a force that helped build and strengthen our society. So how did it turn into such an economic and existential threat? I think the key lies largely with the confluence of the technological revolution, fiat based currency (which causes social problems of its own, but that’s a topic for another paper), and the rise in charity as a government and public obligation, rather than as a personal decision. A number of years ago, as a result of numerous puzzling and paradoxical experiences connected with my own charitable giving, I started to inquire why donating one’s time, money and effort for a cause often doesn’t generates the positive results for donor or recipient that one would expect. I looked at the phenomenon of giving at both the simplest level – one donor interacting directly with one recipient – to the most complex level of charitable giving involving mass numbers of donors (such as taxpayers) interacting through an intermediary (such as the government) on behalf of mass recipients who were total strangers, both personally and culturally, to the donors. I found several surprising characteristics common to all forms of charitable giving and, when present, conditions that always and everywhere changed the charitable relationship from one of mutual benefit to one of mutual harm. I also discovered that these pernicious conditions had an innate mechanism by which they could, like a virus, replicate and spread themselves from even one giver and one receiver to larger and larger groups of vulnerable individuals until families, communities and even entire civilizations were infected and ultimately destroyed. I put my findings into a short book (only 33 pages) and decided to release it now because I think it fills a desperate need to understand how economics, biology, social policy and spirituality have combined to create a well-intentioned but almost insurmountable social mess, and to provide guidance and justification in choosing where and how to attack our current social and economic problems.
Yes, I know that economics, biology and spirituality may seem like odd bedfellows. However, like most things in the material universe, if examined closely enough, one sees that they form webs of interconnecting strands that influence one another in odd and surprising ways. Charitable giving as an integral strand of the fabric of everyday secular life for the masses is a relatively recent social invention. It is also primarily an invention of Western culture. It’s a trait that makes modern Western society distinctive. Everyday charity as we practice it, hardly exists in most traditional cultures. On the plus side, the ways in which mass secular charity has made life better for most, are too numerous and obvious to merit mention. However, along with the benefits of charity come the costs, which are rarely considered. In proper amounts and applied strategically, charitable giving is a powerful force for making life-improving changes for individuals and society. If applied in excess, however, or improperly (as is more and more the case), charity becomes a hungry and indiscriminately destructive beast. It’s also a non-linear phenomenon. The benefits of giving don’t accrue to infinity in a linear fashion. Like most other functions of nature, if we plotted the results or effects of generosity on a graph, we would get not a line but an inverted U-shaped curve, with benefits or marginal utility going down after peaking at some critical point. Indeed, if we plotted the benefits versus the problems created by charitable behavior on a graph, I suspect that we would get two curving lines that intersect at the “optimal” level of giving, much like the positive lift and negative drag curves for airplane wings intersect at the “optimal” level on graphs of aerodynamic efficiency. If I’m right, then we can ask if there any ways by which we can either objectively or intuitively grasp approximately where these lines might intersect for any given instances of charity, whether on an individual or a mass scale? I believe there are, and I detail them in my book.
How Has Generosity Become Such a Potential Problem?
The impulse to generosity is buried deep within the architecture of our brains and has persisted for millions of years because, in the environment we evolved in, it was a useful survival skill. Back in the day – really, until the very recent arrival of the urbanized, highly technological world – the impulse towards generosity was met by pushback from nature. Material circumstances created plenty of need for assistance, and some opportunity for that assistance to improve the general welfare. Generally, however, short, direct and sometimes brutal feedback loops would signal when enough was enough and more generosity would threaten the donor’s, or the recipient’s, own good. The environment functioned efficiently to keep our charitable impulses in check. Individuals and groups that balanced their giving with their withholding were usually the most successful in terms of overall survival. Besides, giving of the types and on the scale that we take for granted today, simply weren’t even possible just a century or more ago. A web of advances in everything from energy production to materials science (which made many previously expensive things from books to shoes cheap and abundant, increasing the average person’s disposable income as well as material wealth), to modern telecommunications, the internal combustion engine (which made mass transport of goods and services by land, sea and air both cheap and efficient), to a fiat currency that has the added bonus of being the world reserve currency, have combined in a “perfect storm” to render most of the old checks and balances on our giving impulses impotent. We no longer generally see charity as an unruly force that our forbears unconsciously understood must be somewhat curbed for the overall safety and benefit of the whole society. Today, giving is widely viewed as the correct and righteous foundation upon which society should be constructed.
‘Charity Vampires’ Assume Many Pleasing Shapes – But They’re Still Deadly
Movements and institutions as diverse, and sometimes oppositional, as Antifa, some Christian churches, and many self-proclaimed ‘socially conscious’ clothing companies (to give a few examples), are all constructed on excessive versions of the ‘society should be based on giving’ ideology (which, taken to its ultimate extreme, yields Utopia, which is possibly the most dangerous vision humans ever invented.) Antifa, for example, demands abolishment of all forms of imprisonment (among other things)1. What is this, except the ultimate generous gesture to be bestowed upon those who degrade the very foundations of charity, namely, orderly society? In an indirectly related and opposing point of view, various branches and sects of the Christian church glorify poverty – why? Because being poor and deprived diminishes one’s propensity towards crime, and lifts one’s soul? Or maybe – at least a little bit – because having a lot of poor people around guarantees that the church and its charitable functions form an exalted and indispensable fixture of society? Last but not least in these examples, some clothing companies manage to victimize both the wealthy and the poor simultaneously by using donations to the poor to boost sales. They prey upon the wealthy by pushing feelings of shame and guilt, while holding out the promise of easy dispensation via gimmicks like ‘buy one and give one’. (In this way, vampire companies operate not unlike the medieval Catholic church selling indulgences, although Church leadership did – officially at least – disapprove of the widespread abuse of the practice.2) What are the less savory ‘socially conscious’ retailers really doing, though, besides victimizing consumers with self loathing (and the false promise of redemption), competing with the domestic producers in the places they’re supposedly helping, and creating dependency instead of local entrepreneurship?3
Beliefs of our grandparents and their grandparents such as “Charity begins at home”, have been replaced with “kinder” beliefs like ‘”it takes a village…”, with little consideration for what happens when the village becomes overrun and ruled by its most ideologically driven, but not necessarily wisest, citizens.
Enter the Newest And Most Ideological, But Not Necessarily Wisest, Citizens?
The supporters of the New, what I might term “Hyper”, Keynesian economics may turn out to be the newest and most deadly citizens who will try to run and ruin “the village'” While Keynes’ basic theory posited that economies in a slump could be revived through a combination of increased government spending and reduced taxation (with the resulting deficit being made up later through tax increases once the economy recovered), generous New Keynesians have stretched his idea to a deadly extreme. They believe that government spending can be increased without limit, and without consequence. Debt can be piled to the moon and never repaid. People can be lifted out of poverty and the economy strengthened by free tuition, loan forgiveness, and endless fresh bread for all. In the mind of a New Keynesian, there is literally no limit to the charity the government can dispense, nor the goodness that will flow from its largesse. Nature’s dictate that one must take care of oneself before taking care of others is backwards in the minds of New Keynesians. In what I would call the social corollary of New Keynesian economics, there is the assumption that, in a properly functioning society, we can all afford become our brothers’ keepers and give him everything he wants without having to be concerned about out own subsistence. That sounds lovely, but is there any way to find out whether it might actually be possible? Or good for those who will have to be the foundation of givers? I think there is, and I think a quick look at recent American history might provide an answer.
The Great Society? Or The Great Failure?
When America embarked upon the expansive monetary and social experiment in the 1960’s dubbed “the Great Society”, the premise was that the government could harness and deploy our resources (material, manpower, intellectual skills) so effectively that we could achieve a stable society so egalitarian and wealthy that no citizen would ever need to go to bed cold, hungry, or lacking any of the increasing number and variety of necessities in life. Progressive leaders assured working people that the ethic of taking care of one’s own first was selfish and outdated, because there would be no more need for the idea of “first” in a land brimming with plenty for all. With wise government correcting imbalances and deficits of giving created by selfish and short-sighted citizens (collectively known as “the invisible hand’ in capitalism), everyone, regardless of their level of participation in the system, could be supported in a style that would be the envy of most of the rest of the world. (Universal Basic Income is the current manifestation of this idea.) Americans could create a material and spiritual Utopia for ourselves if we would only put old-fashioned, limiting ideas like hierarchy, standing in line, the family unit and scarcity (especially of money) into the ash heap of history where they belonged.
Well, how has that been working out for us?
Charity as Our Swan Song
While I wouldn’t ever say that charity is a bad thing – I’ve actually given a yeoman’s portion of my own time, energy and money to various causes over the years – time and experience have conspired to suggest to me that maybe the Great Society that rests upon an embedded ethic of endless charity, is actually more of a killer than a spreader of the American dream. I’ve come to the conclusion despite the shrill objections of the people who have far more economics training than I have, such as Alexandria Ocasio-“Just print the money”-Cortez and the seemingly infinite cadre of class warfare warriors. They say that average Americans have perpetuated poverty and other social ills by being too fiscally and emotionally stingy. I say the problem is that America, as a society, has actually been too generous to the “underprivileged”. I believe that the abundance of ‘help’ thrown willy-nilly at those who are all too willing to outsource the work needed to fix their problems to others (usually family members, taxpayers, social workers, the police or the state), is one of the primary roots of our rising social and economic dysfunction. Left unchecked or not reversed at this late stage, this continued largesse will completely corrode and weaken what is left of our social and political system until it falls. I know that sounds crazy and even offensive to many people, but it’s far from a poorly considered opinion. The bottom line is that I have created an evidence-based, integrated economic and spiritual perspective on why I think that charity, when practiced mindlessly, carelessly, selfishly or manipulatively – the primary ways in which we’ve been trained to do it over the last six decades or so – has become a modern weapon of mass social destruction. The methods that traditional societies subconsciously used to keep the destructive power of charity in check no longer apply to us. The idea of running to world by making abundant charity available to anyone, anywhere who asks for it at any time, is primarily a modern Western practice that may have exceeded its levels of usefulness to society. Because mass charity is a relatively new and culturally localized (advanced Western economic) phenomenon, we have few, if any, significant precedents in which charity has been able to play a major role in ruining civilizations, to learn from. But perhaps we’re about to set one?
This article is a condensed version of the principal ideas in my book Charity: A Force For Good, Or Weapon of Mass Destruction? If you would like to pursue these ideas in greater detail, or find out whether they may help you identify and solve issues in your own life that are holding you back, you can access the link to my book here: https://wordpress.com/page/economicswatchdog.com/309 Just one note: it was written for people seeking help and answers to certain seemingly inexplicable or intractable problems in their lives. It is therefore presented in a very different style than my blog. If you’re willing to accept that, however, you may find it very useful and eye-opening even if have no “issues” to which it speaks.
You may download and print out my book for your personal use for free. You may also share it in electronic or print form at will, with attribution to Economics Watchdog.
2. https://www.catholic.com/qa/does-the-catholic-church-still-sell-indulgences
3. https://www.triplepundit.com/story/2012/problem-toms-shoes-charity-model/66636
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