Let me rephrase that. I 100% totally approve of donating your time, energy and labour. But donating money? The thing about money is that it's "made round to go round", and that it's totally fungible - which is the basis of the market economy - so whoever gets their hands on it can do whatever they like with it. The problem with giving money to an established charity is, to become an established anything in the World-As-Is, an organisation must do some kind of deal with The Prince Of This World (schmoozing big corporates and governments, etc). No matter its mission statements and "good works" on the ground, the larger the organisation, the more embedded it is in the very thing that the act of charity is supposed to be dissolving.
Of course, I'm not discounting the "metaphysical principle" that freely donating something which does have value to the individual is an act of selflessness which is good in itself - but as a consequentialist good, I would really recommend you get into volunteer labour. (And if you have more money than time and energy? Quit your job, schmuck.)
Is this one of your satanic verses?
ReplyDeleteWhen reading your blog, I understood that your goal was to create a system of action in which you don´t have to sacrifice yourself, and that you can make good by living a life in the world as is and still carry on your struggle against all that is wrong.
If I understood it right, donating money could be seen as something similar. That is, since we have our needs, and the world is organized in a way that we don´t want to do anything except leisure in our free time, at least we can give some of our money to the organizations ruled by people that have some more in their minds then profit.
If we work, and part of our money is donated to the right organizations, then we are actually using our labour to give money to people that don´t want profit, despite the fact that we are giving money to corporations in the process. If we just don´t work and live our lives only for the struggle, then it would be sacrifice and no one is willing to be crucified - which I think is the sad lesson we get from christianity and gandhi and all the good hearted people who eventually got killed - the lesson that if you do anything, you die.
So, learning from fire monks, I think we should distort the paths of money so that it ends up in the hands of people who can do good with it. Have you seen the movie, The Corporation? I just saw it, and Michael Moore says something like this in the end.
It rang so true to me, and right after seeing that I came to read your blog and saw this post. I think it sounds more like a satanic post like another I saw in this blog than something that belongs to what I understood as what you were saying.
I don´t know if I am making it clear or if my english is fluent enough to be understood.
I'm with you here. I had a friend who used to canvas for charities. At the end of the day, he'd usually gotten enough donations to cover what the charity was going to pay him for that day of work. He convinced me that it's a poor system. While the cause or needy may get a slice of every dollar you give them, it's only a small slice. If you want to spend your biosurvival tickets on a feeling of altruism, there are more productive and helpful ways to do it.
ReplyDelete"I think we should distort the paths of money so that it ends up in the hands of people who can do good with it."
ReplyDeleteYeah, but the issue is that money itself is the problem. Not precisely, actually - the fact that money is the universal solvent in our current world-culture is the problem. There's nothing wrong with donating money to charity, but I class it as up there with buying organic vegetables - a well-intentioned, but objectively fruitless, gesture.
This is not a "satanic verse", although perhaps I exaggerate a little for effect.
That´s the potential I see in donating. Using it´s own essence and twisting it to higher deeds.
ReplyDeleteIt´s a perversion of money. You take the universal solvent and instead of letting it flow as intended, make it flow to other purposes.
That is, once it starts flowing towards good, it stops being universal and begins to be channeled by a certain value other than itself.
In the beginning, it takes its value from all differente sources, than grows by becoming universal, than goes back again to be directed by values other than itself.
Just like Ju-do. The opponent tries to strike you and you use his weight to put him down. Gravity is there, so we do better by just using it in our favour.
What would happen if militants begun to work their ass off to become CEOs?
They would have acchieved high status in the world as is, and power enough to pervert it.
And how to do it? That´s where Chaos Magic would be handful (from what I have read of it, which was not much). Just adopt the World As Is world view and keep a sigil to bring you back to your purpose.
So when you are up there and you are Bill Gates, you remember that you are the antichrist of this world, and use your influence and the power called money to shake things up.
But if people don´t want to be the antichrist, then they can be a little satanist and donate money to charity and green peace. But it would need a lot of little satanists, and here is where the meme thing could help.