Reply #263: Please clone yourself and distribute one hundred copies :) [View All]

[Psephos]

Your observations are dead on.

Feeling sorry for people you don't know so often has nothing to do with actually helping anyone, but with beating your own breast to claim the high moral ground. I can always tell that sort of person when they quickly resort to faux outrage, nasty name-calling, and self-righteousness on behalf of "the children."

On behalf of the children my ass. Punching keys in "outrage" on a computer is actually worse than doing nothing, because it allows the moral sermonists to pretend they've done something. My theory is they enjoy the feeling of anger and having someone to spray it on. They think it validates them.

You rightly point at the lasting dysfunction a patronizing or infantilizing attitude toward "the poor" can engender. (It's highly instructive that "the poor" must always be an abstraction to their would-be saviors.) Every warm-blooded animal mother on Earth understands that her young must learn adaptive, integrative, and defensive skills - or perish. There's a word for patronized or infantilized animals: dinner...for some other, better-adapted creature.

Young humans who don't learn adaptive, integrative, and defensive skills - otherwise known as learning how to link what you do with what happens to you - are destined to a lifetime of self-perpetuating dysfunction.

We can and must and do help the less-fortunate. I want to see us do lots more. But in ways that enhance rather than degrade responsibility, discipline, and dignity. The issue isn't money - I'd be glad to be taxed more to pay for that, in addition to private giving. But not to see the money used ignorantly to inculcate the victim mentality. There is no worse long-term poison than to put the victim worm in some kid's head.

Treating "the poor" as a bunch of babies who can't take care of even the most mundane responsibilities of day-to-day living is deeply bigoted, highly patriarchal, and a theft of basic dignity. It robs them of the very thing we want them to have.

Give a woman a fish, she eats for today. Teach a woman to fish, she eats for a lifetime.



edit: typo