Charity & Profit-Seeking: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Throughout its investigations of the world system, one of the most interesting points I hadn't previously considered that Desteni exposed is the dark side of Charity. This is not to say that organizations working to alleviate the world's problems aren't meaning to do good work. Rather, within exploring the nature of polarity inherent in the money/ego-system of the world, it's to realize that charity as it exists today- where wealthy people give money to attempt to solve problems mostly affecting those without money- is part of a feedback loop that need not exist if only the world were set up to prevent diseases, war, and destruction caused by the pursuit of profit as survival.

In short, Charity exists only because of the unequal distribution of wealth: if everyone were provided with sufficient income to be empowered to choose a life path that didn't contribute to the destruction of nature and people, a lot of the problems charity seeks to fix would no longer be reproduced.

Recent media coverage of seeming collusion between the charitable Clinton Health Access Initiative and pharmaceutical companies that produce drugs used to treat AIDS is a prime example of how profit-seeking creates charities and vice-versa. In a leaked e-mail, an agent for the Clinton charity was speaking out against efforts to bring awareness to the need to lower US AIDS drugs prices. The implication here is that both the Clinton charity and the pharmaceutical companies stand to benefit from artificially high AIDS drugs prices in the United States. By looking the other way as pharmaceutical companies charge high prices for AIDS drugs in the US, the Clinton charity stands to benefit by securing continued access to cheap drugs for distribution in poor countries.

This is just one example. Another would be how charities that help people ravaged by war are necessitated by the actions of weapons corporations seeking to make a profit off of the exact type of violence the consequences of which such charities are ameliorating. Corporations that profit of environmental destruction breed charities that clean up that destruction. The list goes on.

This is why we must work towards implementing a new world order based upon the principle of providing equal access to necessary resources for everyone. It starts with guaranteeing a basic income for all.

Interesting links:

EQAFE
Living Income Guaranteed
Desteni 'I' Process
DIP Lite
Desteni forum