DOMINATION, CHARITY, OR CHEAP STATUS SIGNALS?
There is a great difference between these levels of interest: domination, management, insurance, and charity.
The world is a pretty charitable place really.
If a people ASK for charity we should be as charitable as their behavior warrants. But the Japanese for example, pretty much refused our assistance (wrongly). And our assistance in most places (Haiti included) has been more damaging than good. Our attempts to help Africa have almost all been damaging to Africa – and the scholarly review of our failures is not even a matter of dispute any longer.
Involving ourselves both at the state level and via multitudes of NGO’s that the EVIDENCE shows CLEARLY cause more harm than good; or involving ourselves as the world’s police force – which the evidence suggests causes more harm than good (we have been wrong more than right); or acting as the evangelists of the religion of Universal Secular Christianity that we call “Social Democracy” which the evidence again CLEARLY demonstrates that we cause more harm than good – is just an elaborate way of using our wealth to generate status signals for ourselves at other people’s expense.
We are not smarter than the rest of the world. We are wealthier. We are wealthier because we have had longer to convert our society to ratio-scientific thought. And we are wealthier because we have the common law (in anglo countries), we used our technological leadership to conquer the two most remote continents (Australia and north america); and because we have influenced Continental law by two major wars of conquest in which we dictated terms. And because we inherited the british empire’s control of the seas built up over 500 years, when it committed suicide in the wars. And because we forced the world onto the petro-dollar standard in order to finance our global war on communism.
Those are the reasons we are wealthier. And while we have done a lot of good by converting the rest of the world unwillingly to CONSUMER CAPITALISM – which is our greatest contribution – we have also done a lot of harm with our wealth – motivated by good intentions, in practice, out of ignorance.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-24 04:05:00 UTC
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