616. Thoughts On Volunteering

616.   Thoughts On Volunteering

In Germany as also in some other countries too, actually the social trend is such that the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the public administration lacks the money to fulfill basic needs of the general public. 

  
Sometimes volunteers fill this gap by self-exploitation.   Considering volunteers as individual persons, this is noble and honorable behavior.   Politically and generally seen, it is nevertheless wrong, because it perpetuates the very reasons, why there is a need for the volunteers.  

While volunteers do help needy persons on a short term basis, they also help to maintain the unjust distribution of income and the success of greed.   Volunteers' work has the side effect of supporting the rich to remain rich.  
Volunteers contribute to avoiding the collapse, which would at least make it unavoidable to require the rich to pay higher taxes.   Unfortunately even in the case of the collapse, as in Greece, the collapse is still not generally attributed to the wealth stolen by the rich from the public and the poor.    

Every person, who works, should rightfully get some payment, unless there is the reciprocity of helping between neighbors and friends.  All public services for infrastructure, culture, education and welfare are expenses to be reliably paid by taxes. 

As long as income, prices of goods and taxes are balanced to supply a moderate income for everybody, this can work.   As soon as some people succeed to get rich, they disrupt the balance.   The rich sit on the stolen money, that the administration rightfully should have for public services.   

I gave one example of the imbalance in entry 402 (Justice By Coincidence).   Here are some more examples.

Recently a German politician has been giving lectures and receiving ridiculously and outrageously high payment.   For one lecture he was paid 25.000 €, and similar payments seem to be quite usual for such vultures.  If he were given a decent 100€ for the lecture, there were the remaining 24.900€ available to pay for necessary community services without the self-exploitation of volunteers.      

Also this money was paid to him by a public company supplying electricity and gas to costumers, including people on welfare.  These poor people are supposed to live for more than two years on what this greedy politician pocketed for a few hours.    Electricity could be cheaper without extra expenses making a greedy rich man richer. 
   
One man got extremely rich on software, which is used on the majority of computers also in the public administration and other tax paid public institutions.    He has got millions or maybe billions of €uros paid for licenses from tax payers' money in many countries.   This money is lacking for other public services, and substituting it by the self-exploitation of volunteers is not a correct solution but repairing unnecessary damage.

While this greed is legal, morally it is theft.   When the revenue for provided goods rise, because they are widely used on a mass market, the morally correct reaction is to lower the price instead of getting immorally rich.   

The possibility of producing so many goods, that there can be Cockaigne for everybody, is a myth.   Whenever some people succeed to have a life of luxury, others are deprived and pay the price.   Whenever one person consumes more goods and services than can be produced in the same time as it is consumed, another person is deprived of some of his share in the world's total production.  

Even in spite of the growing productivity in mass production, there are many kinds of services, which cannot be provided without human working hours.   Not only are the hours of the day limited, but so is the capacity of humans to function without being physically and mentally tired.     

In a village hundreds or thousands of years ago, the farmer supplies the baker with grains. The baker supplies the farmer, the smith and the lumberman with bread.  The smith supplies the farmer, the baker and the lumberman with tools.   The lumberman supplies the smith and the baker with firewood. 

As long as they all are free to live by such a system of exchange, all is well.    But when there is a feudal owner of the village, who claims to own the fields, the buildings and the forest and who greedily demands to get a portion of all produce while not producing anything himself, then this lowers the standard of living of the farmer, baker, smith and lumberman.  They cannot compensate by producing additionally as much as is taken.  They are limited by not being able to do more than drudge from morning until night.    

This example is of course oversimplified, because it omits many other decisive factors, but the principle is still the same today, no matter how complex the society.   As long as there is a balance in the exchange of the division of labor, all can live moderately well.   

As soon, as too much of the production or its equivalent in money is taken away, the standard of living of the deprived sinks.    Whenever people are rich, their privileges are enabled by the poor people, from whom they are taken.  

In my village example, there were only the exploitative feudals and the poor villagers, so there were not volunteers to intervene.  The rich did not care, when the poor starved to death.   Today, there is a middle class between the greedy rich and the deprived poor.   They are the pool, from which volunteers are recruited and self-recruited.   

Only for middle class people, there is more or less a balance between their working efforts and their standard of life.   This balance instigates them to contribute to improving the situation for the less fortunate, while they are not themselves discontent with their own situation.   They do not see a benefit for themselves in a drastic social or political change.   They have compassion with the needy poor without attributing their misery to the injustice caused by the greedy rich.  

If every work done by volunteers and all public debts were paid out of rich people's assets, the rich could still live comfortably but in moderation.   I do not consider violence a solution.  Every political revolution has caused too much suffering to innocent victims to justify it.   

While seeing theoretically, what is wrong, I am unable to suggest, how the rich could be convinced to give peacefully back, what they have morally stolen from the rest of the population.  


I just discovered, that it rhymes:

The poor are needy,
'cause the rich are greedy.

615. Social Change And Psychotherapy

615.   Social Change And Psychotherapy

I have been mentioning the growing amount of harm done either carelessly or ignorantly by promiscuous jerks as the consequence of the social norm of oversexation and the subsequent desensitization and lacking empathy for the suffering of the abused women.   (Entry 493:  The Social Norm Of The Drooling Men)

In a world, where men have their on average greater physical strength as an advantage enabling them to gain power and control over resources including media by hook or by crook, the instinctive reaction of many, if not most men is subconsciously welcoming the social norm of oversexation.  While some men would not consciously admit this, I have rarely found anybody explicitly pointing out the damage caused by it.   

By considering the appropriate place for sexuality being the privacy of couples' bedrooms I am sometimes even called a prude.   But I consider it as much better to be a prude than an animal blindly driven by instincts.  

Therefore I was very pleased to have found George Simon's web page.  He is a clinical psychologist and therapist, who has described this unfortunate social development with much better words than my limited English allows me to do.     The emphasis in the following quote is mine.

"Character Disturbance is indeed “the phenomenon of our age.” That’s because the intensely socially repressive atmosphere of earlier times has been supplanted with an atmosphere of entitlement, permissiveness, and license. It’s not as common for people’s shame and guilt to be so unreasonably intense and unyielding that they become pathologically debilitated with anxiety. Rather, it’s more common for folks to lack enough shame or guilt to inhibit them from doing harmful things to themselves as well as others. So, it would be fair to say that character disturbance is indeed more prevalent these days, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that significantly disturbed characters are everywhere."

http://counsellingresource.com/features/2011/10/10/are-they-everywhere/

But Simon not only expresses with better words than myself similar concerns about contemporary permissiveness and lacking inhibitions and constraint.   Simon takes this further to a very clever observation, which had never occurred to me:  The assumptions, upon which psychotherapeutic interventions are usually and implicitly based, have become obsolete and are lacking behind and failing to react to the real problems caused by the drastic social changes of the last decades.      

Therapeutic interventions helpful for people being overwhelmed with unbearable negative emotions about themselves are counterproductive to people, whose problems is predominantly the harming and exploiting of others, while harming themselves is only secondary by depriving also themselves of the benefits of close and harmonious relationships.  

Simon explains the example of denial:

"In classical (psychodynamic) psychology, denial is an unconscious ego defense mechanism.  Basically, that means that a person unwittingly puts up a barrier to experiencing what is too painful to consciously bear."

"Sometimes, denial is truly an unconscious psychological state.  Sometimes, it’s a refusal to admit a problem.  Sometimes, it’s a tactic of manipulation and impression management.  And the basic tactic of denial can be expressed in several other subtle variations such as feigning innocence, feigning ignorance, and acting surprised.   But no matter what form in which it comes, it’s most often merely a way of lying. "

"Disturbed characters of all sorts frequently engage in denial.  It’s extremely rare, however, that they do so because they are in such inner distress over their behavior that they simply can’t consciously accept what they’re doing.  Most of the time, they know exactly what they’re doing, but they want you to think otherwise."

http://www.manipulative-people.com/denial-what-it-is-and-isnt/

"Disordered characters often won’t admit when they’ve done something wrong, and resist looking at any role their behavior patterns have played in creating problems in their lives.  They lie to themselves and others about their malevolent acts and intentions as a tactic to get others off their back.  If their denial is forceful and convincing enough, others will likely be successfully manipulated. "

"Denial is not only an effective manipulation tactic, but it’s also a sure sign someone is not about to change his or her way of behaving.  A person who won’t acknowledge their wrongs in the first place isn’t likely to feel any inclination to correct them.  Habitual denial is the way many disordered characters resist internalizing the values and standards of conduct that could make them more socially responsible."

http://www.manipulative-people.com/denial-manipulation-tactic-4/