Pathological altruism is the condition of wanting so badly to be seen to be ‘kind’ that you end up committing great harm. It’s a notable affliction amongst late-middle-aged bourgeois Western women who turn to ‘causes’, to fill the void of their post-childbearing usefulness. I call them the ‘nosey-nannas’.
Even worse, though, are idiot celebrities – oops, a tautology – who are pathologically addicted to virtue-signalling at any cost.
And the cost is sometimes very great, indeed, when the virtue-signallers are staggeringly wealthy.
Earlier this month, Simon Cowell – who has already done enough damage by unleashing One Direction on an unsuspecting planet – announced that none of his estimated $600 million will go to his son. Not a penny, not a farthing, not even the loose change rattling around the glove compartment of his Bentley. “I don’t believe in passing down from generation to generation,” he declared, a bold philosophical stance from a fellow who grew up amid the leafy comforts of Hertfordshire and parlayed inherited showbiz connections into global dominion.
So, is Cowell going to do something useful with his money? Or waste it on boutique causes that make middle-class ‘progressives’ swoon?
You guessed it: Cowell is intending to spend hundreds of millions on dog charities.
One presumes the dogs are delighted. The child, perhaps less so. Cowell reassured the lad that “college will be paid for…and then you must start,” which is the sort of thing very rich people say when they’ve forgotten how they themselves started – namely, several rungs up the ladder they are now theatrically kicking away.
Leading this stampede of moral exhibitionism is Bill Gates, high priest of the Giving Pledge, who has long promised that his children will inherit little more than the satisfaction of being related to the man who accidentally helped create vaccine-derived polio in half of Africa. The real inheritance goes to NGOs, UN agencies, and transnational bodies so large and unaccountable you need a PhD in global health metrics just to find out who stole the money this time.
From Gates to Warren Buffett to Mark Zuckerberg, there’s not a plutocrat who’s not trying to buy a stairway to heaven by trying to pretend that they ‘really care’.
This isn’t charity in the Carnegie sense; it’s performative sanctimony for the global ruling class – a priesthood of billionaire ascetics renouncing their heirs while buying moral indulgences at scale.
We know, though, that the precious Zuckerberg and Cowell progeny will never face a struggle harder than deciding between the Fair Trade quinoa or the free-range organic egg white for breakfast. What will suffer, though, is Western civilisation.
For thousands of years, civilization endured because old men planted trees in whose shade they would never sit – and because they expected their grandchildren to sit there instead of loitering in a gender-activism pop-up. They built houses, not tents; dynasties, not hashtags; worlds meant to last longer than a weekend mindfulness retreat.
Most importantly, they didn’t plant the tree so that a horde of Third World grifters could swarm in and shit under it, before cutting it down and selling the wood on the black market.
It’s what any honest anthropologist would recognize as an intergenerational death cult, albeit one with better PR […]
And the charities themselves? Put a trust fund in their hands and they’ll chop down the donated trees to hire a new DEI commissar, import more Gambians and Haitians to socially reengineer Ohio, or fly a conference speaker by private jet to Davos to explain why your children should eat bugs.
These NGOs aren’t charities in any historic sense. They’re extraction machines – ideological strip miners flying the banner of mercy.
When Andrew Carnegie built libraries and the Rockefellers funded universities, they did so for the express purpose of building Western civilisation. Carnegie openly stated that a healthy democracy required literate citizens. Carnegie’s goal was exemplified in the Norman Rockwell vision of Freedom of Speech, with its stirring image of a working-class man with his little pamphlet in his pocket, speaking his piece at a town hall.
Lost amidst all the celebrity posturing and billionaire redemption arcs is the simple truth: Civilization is not built on charitable write-offs. It is built on multigenerational stewardship.
Charity is lovely. Civilization is better. And civilization, unlike the Giving Pledge, requires heirs. When a civilization stops passing the torch, the fire goes out.
Nowadays, ‘charities’ like BLM dedicate themselves to tearing down the statues of men like Cecil Rhodes, who dedicated their fortunes to building the next generation of civilised people. NGOs fund the ressentiment of the hordes of the uncivilised. To turn the words of the high king of ressentiment, Barack Obama, on himself: they didn’t build that. All they can do is tear down what better men than they’ll ever be strove so hard to build.
