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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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 twitter.com/unorthodoxxxy/
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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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Gone back and forth on UBI a lot. I think it is total hypocrisy unless you also advocate open borders, in which case it becomes unviable. But in a Covid19 world where borders are closed for stronger reasons, it might both work and be non-hypocritical.
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