The US is particularly prone to this pattern. Americans *like* a society built on benefactor-benefactee relationships of humility/gratitude as a basic building block. “Charitable person” is in the top 5 American archetypes. ESP religious and high-society subtypes.
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Inefficient though it might be there’s a dignity-preserving aspect to receiving safety-net support from a well-run bureaucracy that catalyzes personal agency and provides an impetus towards self-sufficiency in a way personal dependence on “the kindness of strangers” does not.
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I suspect conservatives who get into a moral panic about creating parasitic dependency/welfare queenism etc actually *want* to preserve the humiliation-based culture of community charity (not saying those who give *want* to humiliate, but that’s often the structural effect)
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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted
I know this is sincerely the ideal many people believe to actually be true, but is just wildly psychologically implausible on the receiving end at least, *excelt* where both are part of a religious culture https://twitter.com/unorthodoxxxy/status/1249049542630051841?s=21 … https://t.co/uIJq0SbVPm
Venkatesh Rao added,
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The actual effect of being the beneficiary of highly personal charity is often resentment. Beneath the mask of expressed gratitude is often anger, a sense of unwanted burden/obligation, unworthiness, low status in the community etc. It can drive people to leave communities.
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Blanche duBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is of course the best-known American portrayal of the oppressiveness of “kindness of strangers” cultures. Tennessee Williams’ other play Glass Menagerie has similar themes. There was a really good quote by him on dignity I can’t find
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Basically, problems created by industrial scale extraction, negative externalities, or direct cruelty can’t be solved by palliative measures based on family and church scale compassion. Impedance mismatch. You need same responses that rhyme with the causes.
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It’s like pretending Covid19 is just the flu and everybody should just walk it off. People being forced to use GoFundMes as de facto health insurance isn’t heartwarming humanism. It’s a blaring systemic emergency alarm. I’m glad the option exists, but it shouldn’t have to.
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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao
Re UBI, I have very mixed feelings about it. LVT otoh, seems truly like a bit of a cure-all here. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1249060360402829312?s=21 …https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1249060360402829312 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
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In a sufficiently simple and primitive world, privatizing the rewards of success to a degree while socializing the costs of failure almost entirely, is a win-win for everybody. In a sufficiently complex and technologically advanced world, it tends to be a lose-lose.
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It’s because the taller and wobblier the tech stack, the deeper the hole failures can put you in. Innovation goes from antifragile to fragile with the height of the stack it rely on. And when things fail, they hurt more people, more badly. Beyond the scope of personal charity.
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There’s something silly about expecting churches and gofundmes to fix externalities of say heavy metal contamination, asbestos, slums created by redlining and highway systems, and pandemics spread by globalized industry. America bridges the gap with lawsuits. Not ideal.
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