Caring is Killing

Caring isn't evil, per se. We did deliver some jabs in Cult of Caring, but then again the issue there was more with the pretend caring. But that's just the thing. A virtue can be misapplied for evil outcomes. Patience is the canonical virtue but, if you knew I was patiently awaiting the opportune moment to kill you and your family, you might take pause to reconsider the benefits of virtue. The more noble the virtue, the greater its potential for grievous abuse, because an agenda cloaked in virtue is easier to sell to others, and to ourselves. The American public won't go to war for imperialism, but will to "spread democracy."

Caring is a virtue. We care. No one would read or write blogs like this if they didn't care about passing on the civilization they inherited to their children. Frankly, there are other more fun or leisurely activities to engage in. Politics is hardly my primary hobby, and is frequently maddening. We engage out of concern of societal decay and a sense of duty. If we didn't care, we wouldn't bother.

So it's not caring that's the problem, but caring stupidly. Stupid is never a virtue, as much as pop culture tries to indoctrinate us to that end. Virtually everyone wants to appear to be caring, a subset of them actually do care, and an even smaller subset has the intellectual curiosity to see that whatever emotionally gratifying acts of caring they engage in actually effect the desired outcomes. There's a market for caring, and a lot of people are selling. Democrats effectively sell caring to their clientele, in exchange for political power [see Churchonomics]. And yet, the hallmark of a liberal program is that it has the opposite of its intended effect. They care so much for the poor that they create a poverty trap and government dependency. They care so much for college students that tuitions and administrative budgets have exploded at many times the inflation rate, and students matriculate as neofeudal debt slaves. They care so much for the non-home-owning minorities that they cause a housing market collapse that drives millions from their homes. These kinds of programs aren't sold to the American people by rational people on sound economic principles. They're sold by career politicians who sell a sense of caring in return for votes.

But politicians don't deserve all the credit. At the end of the day most are just high-scale prostitutes, willing to do whatever dirty deeds the public demands of them. The people are perfectly capable of engaging in their own destructive caring without the treachery of elected officials. Some recent figures on orphanages are alarming. Despite shrinking poverty worldwide, orphanages are expanding. In Haiti the numbers have grown at least 150% just in the six years since a major hurricane garnered public attention. Eighty percent of orphans have at least one living parent, and over 80% of orphanages are not officially registered. Children raised in orphanages  it shouldn't need saying - are many many more times likely to become prostitutes or commit suicide. But here's the real kicker: the number of orphans grows in response to donations from charity. [That the emotionally driven throwing of money at problems worsens the original problem seems to be a hard & fast rule, rather than merely a rule of thumb.]

Throwing money at the orphan problem creates a demand for orphans. Shady charities set up shop to capture some of the inflow. If orphans can't be found, they can be made. Many of the children in third-world orphanages have effectively been sold into servitude by their parents, who get a kickback from the money that Judy from Vermont is sending down to help. Judy doesn't like to brag about the good work she's doing, but then again all her friends have heard about it several times now. Haiti in particular has had an explosion in orphan-related donations, not because the hurricane created a proportional number of orphans, but because the television coverage pulled on the sympathetic heart strings of caring but gullible Americans. Haiti is especially potent to prog-indoctrinated Americans because, in addition to being very poor, Haitians are very black, maximizing virtue-signaling potential.

A second phenomenon driving the growth of orphanages is voluntourism, which is just what is sounds like. Rather than a week on the beach, Judy flies to Santo Shitholé to volunteer at the orphanage, where she heaps on loads of caring and incidentally uploads some selfies to her social media. She makes a grand show to the children of her deep concern for them before flying back north, never to be seen again. The kids deal with this week in and week out. Fake orphans serving fake charities who sell status-signaling packages to supposed do-gooders. And, despite our political bent, let's not pretend that this is all the work of lefties. 90% percent of the donations come in from faith-based organizations. Although, to that end, I'm not sure how valid the Christian = conservative stereotype is. I know a lot of conservatives who don't attend church any more, I know a lot of liberals who do attend, and all the churches in my neighborhood are practically social justice operations. [Two are Unitarian, if that tells you anything. One of them rented space to a daycare, which is moving out. Rumor is that the church became a local hangout for trannies who were creeping out the parents.] Hell, even the Pope is a Communist.

The third driving force in all this is the sex trade. The other locale highlighted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation is Cambodia. A lot of people travel to southeast Asia as sex tourists. A lot of them shop for children. That's just how it is. Many charities are just fronts for sex trafficking. They double dip. They get pimp scratch and a check from Judy, who doesn't realize she's funding modern-day slavery and child prostitution. She just knows she got over four hundred likes on Facebook.