When you take a good look into The Business of Charity it's nothing different than any other business, they have a board, advisers and call their Profit 'Surplus'.
They have image advisers and PR departments and carefully choose which picture to use to be able to stir the most disturbing emotions and feelings and will go for it, they are lucky, they can even justify their behavior because they do it for the 'Good of the Less Fortunate', meaning 'anything goes'.
Just this year some charities were warned to stop using their "depressing, manipulative and hopeless' advertising portrayals.
We are tired to watch starving people starve - give us a break- we want to see them well, recovered, plumped up due to our 10 dollars donations so we know we did make a difference and that we can go back to our privileged lives without remorse.
When I was a kid we already had those picture of starving children showed to us by the Catholic missionaries who would come once a year for fundraising, basically 4 decades went by since I was a kid, and children are still starving. We pledged to put an end to Famine by the year 2010 with Live Aid and then we just forgot about it.
We can't compute Famine in our world as a product of a society we are a part of and as such equally responsible for.
Yet the guilt comes up when we are shown pictures of those whose lives we wouldn't like to exchange ours for, that's how we came up with the idea of Charity, for the small givers charity is their guilt suppressor, the feel good factor that is well worth the few dollars given and for the big donors, thats a completely different ball game, those actually benefit from Charity, not once, twice, they get tax relief and often times they take the money back as the people behind the foundations to whom the money is given for charity activities.
Then we have the celebrities fund raising for Charity, we shouldn't even talk about them any longer because regardless of what they set out to do, they didn't achieve anything of substance, we could say amazingly so, because they did manage to raise a lot of money and give temporary relief to many people but they were unable to establish a Solution that was long standing or resolutive. Not their fault, it's a system change we require, not a musicians get together to raise money for the poor we ourselves made poor through a system of abuse and exploitation we call Free Market Capitalism and its 'Management' of Resources.
Much of Foreign Aid -as Charity- was used to help dictators who were keeping a system that we the Rich countries approved of, plus many African countries were covered in debt from loans they were forced to take on through some of the most cunning financial operations ever set forth after robbing their resources and land, namely through the World Bank and the IMF.
Those are the current Axis of Evil of our World system, you have to work out the truth of these institutions by yourselves but we must do so, because those institutions are systems that we created either by direct participation or by our acceptance and allowance of the way 'things are' and really, they are NOT working in the interest of the majority but of a selected few who always end up winning in this rigged monopoly game.
And last but not least we have to look at the nature of Charity as plainly immoral, we know what we are doing, we named the game as 'giving back' and that it is, charity is giving back what has been stolen in this surreal game of make belief paper money through which we have managed to get power over others, to make our lives more valuable than others because, apparently, the worth of a life is determined by the assets that are owned, we have become defined by our assets, our goods and we don't see anything unusual in this because we were born into it, we were dissuaded from questioning the system since we were children and as such we accepted that some are rich, like some are tall or skinny, it's a genetic quality because it's determined by in which family 'genies' we were born and what kind of magic bottles we were gifted to stroke at will and make 'all our wishes into someone else's commands'.
We don't notice that "giving back" is an activity of those that have deliberately inappropriately taken from the whole just for themselves, to make extra sure we would not question this inappropriateness we created system upon system in layers to justify the growing gap between rich and poor.
One of the most successful is religion, as a justification for the caste system we live in.
Religion was a clever decoy system, because it seemed separated from governments and wealth owners, by giving to the Church powers on the invisible and to the governments power over the visible, we have the religious institution as governance of people's minds and what is acceptable and good because it will be one day rewarded with heaven, while they openly enjoy Heaven on Earth through all the assets and goods they pile up as the fee the mortals are required to pay to have relief from their anguish, anguishes that were systemically created as imperfection, flaws for which a product to buy has been created and through which we buy the illusion to cure the delusions we bought into as we became trapped into this Consumerist system where everything has gone on sale, including the Right to Life.
"The Catholic church is the biggest financial power, wealth accumulator and property owner
in existence. She is a greater possessor of material riches than any
other single institution, corporation, bank, giant trust, government or
state of the whole globe. The pope, as the visible ruler of this immense
amassment of wealth, is consequently the richest individual of the
twentieth century. No one can realistically assess how much he is worth
in terms of billions of dollars." THE VATICAN BILLIONS by Avro Manhattan
Charity is an act of repentance, too little too late, it serves only those that engage in it and make sure the system that is working for the few owners of the world stays in place as it is, if we were passionate about changing the world we would have done so by addressing the root cause of suffering and poverty, which is the unequal distribution of the earth resources that leave some hungry, homeless, jobless, healthcare-less, and with no access to education.
We have previously suggested that philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932
What is the 10 dollars we give going to change if not the shifting of the perception of ourselves as good human beings and caring individuals, when in fact what we do apparently for others has plenty strings attached, the strings of all the returns we benefit from by giving, be it tax relief, exposure within out philanthropic community -of this we have many examples among those who organize expensive charity events just to give 1/10 of the cost of the event in Charity while gaining good standing within their society and if possible, some business contacts- or just the good feelings we get to access for 'doing good', those are sometime a reward good enough as we bask in the illusion that we are not 'like the others' that we are in fact better, doing something for real, meanwhile we are born and we die leaving behind a world that gets worse by each generation that walks this planet. What's wrong with us?
It is more socially injurious for the millionaire to spend his
surplus wealth in charity than in luxury. For by spending it on luxury,
he chiefly injures himself and his immediate circle, but by spending it
in charity he inflicts a graver injury upon society.
For every act of charity, applied to heal suffering arising from
defective arrangements of society, serves to weaken the personal springs
of social reform, alike by the 'miraculous' relief it brings to the
individual 'case' that is relieved, and by the softening influence it
exercises on the hearts and heads of those who witness it.
It substitutes the idea and the desire of individual reform for
those of social reform, and so weakens the capacity for collective
self-help in society.
J A Hobson, Work and Wealth, 1914
So, let's get off the Charity delusion, Charity is just another self serving tool of a world that has lost its moral compass and that refuses to see that we are coming off the wrong starting point here, we are starting from our accepted idea that some are more entitled than others to Life, just by validating the Birth lottery that placed us in more favorable positions instead of seeing and realizing that by the very fact that we have more privileged lives we have more responsibility to bring about a long lasting change that will prove that we saw the wrongdoing of our separation, that we are willing to rewrite this world in a way that it may work for all and not just for some, even if we happen to be among the some for which this world is working, we must remember it is not at all for over 1/3 of the people that share the planet with us and that they do not need Charity, trying to substitute itself to what our government as the Will of the People should be providing For All Equally as a certainty, a given and not as a benefit that can be taken away at any time and doesn't guarantee that we have in fact recognized the Equal Value of Each Other, and that is what we need to do to end poverty and charity forevermore.
...large-scale philanthropic activity carries with it serious risks of changing the balance of funding from the public to the private sector, thereby exposing those most in need to the vicissitudes of the market. To the extent that private funding of essential services becomes the norm, the vulnerable become the recipients of (at best) uncertain aid, which is liable to fluctuations and constant reduction.
Neil Levy, Against Philanthropy
Stop Charity for good and stand up instead for a Radical World Change that will consider the Equal Right of All to a Life of Dignity and enjoyment, we don't have to live this way, nor should we give as charity what equally and rightfully belongs to all, the World can change with Equal Money and Your Support. Join us.
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