Charity degrades and demoralizes
Posted on | februari 5, 2011 | 1 Comment
Mario Raimondi pointed out this video yesterday and I think it has very interesting points, so I wanted to share it with you. Basically it comes down to the fact that not everything that seems to be good, is actually good. We need to be a bit more critical.
The video is an animation based on a talk of the Slovenian filosopher Slavoj Žižek given at the RSA about cultural capitalism.
Žižek sees Starbucks as cultural capitalism at its purist. He says: “You don’t just buy a coffee. You buy in the very consumerist act, your redemption from only being a consumerist. You do something for the environment, starving children in Guatemala, etc.”
I was happy to hear him being critical to TOMS Shoes – a ’social’ company I have been strongly disagreeing for years now – as well. “The almost absurd example of so called Toms shoes. An American company which formula is 1 for 1. For every pair of shoes you buy with them, they give a pair of shoes to some African nation. So one act of consumerism, but included in it you pay for doing something. This generates almost a kind of a semantic over-investment or burden. The act of egotist consumption, already includes the price of its opposite.”
Žižek also makes clear why charity does not work and people doing charity are actually not helping anyone (but themselves?). They make the problem worse. “People find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, ugliness and starvation. It’s inevitable they should be strongly moved by all this. With good intentions they set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies don’t cure the disease, but merely prolong it. Their remedies are part of the disease.”
So what can we do? Actually his anwer to this question is at El Desafío ’s core: “The real aim is to try to reconstruct the society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. The worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves. And so prevented the slaves to realize the horrors of the system itself. Charity degrades and demoralizes.”
Watch the video and let me know your comments. Maybe I am a bit more pragmatic than Žižek. But in order to be pragmatic you need to have your basic values clearer than ever. This video made me think and I won’t stop thinking – and acting.
AUTHOR: Jorn Wemmenhove
URL: http://www.jornwemmenhove.nl/
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One Response to “Charity degrades and demoralizes”
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februari 8th, 2011 @ 23:27
I would like to command on this opinion of Mr Zizek;
“Žižek also makes clear why charity does not work and people doing charity are actually not helping anyone (but themselves?
Charity degrades and demoralizes.”
I do not understand. I mean..I am born in The Netherlands. The government invested in me by Primary school, Secundary school and University. Mr Zizek, how do you like to call this?
Investment or charity for me? So when I give some money to somebody in Argentina, Tanzania or Indonesia. What is the difference? I can name this charity or investment.
So stop thinking in borders. It is not the place where you are born which says, this is charity or this is investment! It must be all the same. There is enough money all over the world to send all the children to school, to feed them and to give them healthcare.