There are some that claim the holding-up of one’s own experiences, as examples, is a boring, egotistical thing to do, and that only repeating learned quotes from well-known sources, is a valid form of writing. I do not agree with this view, since anything, from anywhere, can never be known with certainty to be truth, and is only ever a matter of preference as to what one chooses to believe. I choose to believe the evidence of my eyes, my ears, and my experience, first-hand, to draw from whatever conclusions at which I may arrive.
And, so, to my story, from the fertile ground of a life uncommonly well-lived…
There was a woman: an ugly, fat hag, who was rather poverty-stricken, and doubtless needy.
Her beat-up old car had broken down, and now was impounded by the tow-truck driver, pending payment for his services. She could not afford his fee, and, also, had great difficulty walking, in a location which ensured the necessity of a car for her to get about in.
I knew a little about her, and seeing her obvious need, decided to assist. The towing fee was no great sum, to me, and so I volunteered to pay it, on her behalf, so that she would again be mobile. This, I thought, would be helpful to her.
The tow-truck driver duly delivered the sorry vehicle to her location, and parked it there, but, alas, it still would not run, because it lacked gas. Which was why it had needed to be towed in the first place. Again, I made off to the local co-op, jerry-can in hand, and filled it with enough gas to get to the station for more. Whereupon I discovered, that even though the vehicle would run, she would be unable to drive it, because it was uninsured. Her coverage had lapsed, some time before, and she had never renewed it.
Unwilling to let this thing rest, after so much invested into it, I drove her to the insurance broker, to buy her insurance, so that she might resume her automated life, only to find an outstanding debt, that first would have to be cleared, before current insurance could be bought.
Fine.
A few hundred dollars later, she was set to go, and very pleased about all of this. At which point our story takes a brief intermission, while I resumed my own life…
The next time I saw her, she was, again, lumbering painfully about, on foot, her vehicle not in evidence. When I enquired as to the whereabouts of the vehicle, into which I had poured considerable of my own resources, she informed me she had sold it, for enough money to pay her rent. At which point I began to feel twinges of regret, for ever having become a part of any of this.
But by and by, I paid off the new buyer, who hadn’t actually paid anything, yet, but merely said he would, before rent-day came due, and returned the decrepit vehicle to its rightful owner. Who again, could not drive it, because the gas tank was almost dry.
Fine.
I handed over a further sum, to enable her to half-fill her empty tank, and made off, once more, to resume my own life.
When next I saw her, hobbling along, slowly, on foot, I stopped to enquire as to why she was walking. Did the car not run, again?
“No, no,” she replied. She had run out of the gas that half of what I had given her had bought, and with the other half, she had bought a birthday gift, for her son.
Fine. Well, not really. I suddenly saw this saga running off into the distance, with me financing a hole that was never going to be filled, no matter how much I funded its filling.
Here I was, now not only funding her own non-functional life, but her son’s, too.
And so I decided to inform her that this relationship would, henceforth, be terminated.
Which I did, and at which she became very angry.
In fact, we have never spoken, since.
Odd, no? That all the funding I supplied her with, should be instantly not only forgotten, but replaced by a seething resentment at its removal. As if it had never happened.
The moral of this story?
Well, there really isn’t one.
It is rather a non-story, based upon real events surrounding a non-person with a non-life.
There is actually no way anyone can ‘help’ anybody like this, no matter how well-intentioned one is, and no matter how much cabbage is tossed in, by way of ‘helping’.
So do I give to charity? No. I don’t. I help things that can actually benefit from my assistance, and humans, unfortunately, are generally not among them.
I’ll walk more than that extra mile, for a forest, and all that it shelters, beneath its nurturing canopy. I’ll do what I can, whenever I can, for anything that doesn’t expect, or demand it.
And do what I feel like doing, if and when I feel like doing it, on a very limited basis, for humans I chance to personally cross paths with.
I deal with moments. As they arrive. Each one known only as ‘now’.
Each one, as they arrive: the only moment that can ever actually be lived.
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This is a great article that all adults should read. It is very hard to overcome how difficult it is to process the truth of it on an emotional level.
Like most of you, when I see someone (this includes animals and plants) suffering, I want to help them.
Over the years, I have learned that I cannot help them directly. They are still the captains of their own souls; they need to be ready to meet me half-way, and help themselves.
As the old saying goes, “God helps those who help themselves.” Whether or not you believe in God, there’s a truth to this.
People who are ready to move forward can be helped by offering a stable society and opportunities.
People who are not ready to move forward, paradoxically, can only be helped by being ignored. Let them hit rock bottom, and see the full depth of the choices they have made, and then they will pick themselves up and move on, or opt out.
These are the rules of the universe and we puny humans can do nothing to change them. In fact, if we analyze these rules, we will see that they are sensible, despite our emotional revulsion.
For these reasons, I support a society without welfare, but without job-mania either. Cut back the bureaucracy, and the make-work, and cut out the crime and other problems that raise costs, and let people be slackers if they want. Give them time to figure themselves out and to mature.
It is a more important task than most of us realize, this maturity. I don’t mean maturation in the sense of becoming an embittered adult who accepts a boring and pointless life as “manning up,” but maturation in the sense of coming to full consciousness of self, transcending self, and being able to find meaning in life.
The same rule as with charity applies here: people have to meet this truth half-way. You cannot hand it to them in a holy book. (This is the essence of esotericism.)
Each human being born onto this earth needs time to figure out who they are, what they value, and to find a place in unity with those values. This often includes working in the field toward full realization of those values.
Anything that impedes this is destructive. Including, paradoxically, the handouts.
Your words make me realize, again, how utterly devoid of comprehension leftists are, when it comes to the way in which they see conservatism.
Your average conservative expends zero energy appearing to be concerned with the very same things that leftists go to enormous trouble to appear to be concerned with, but actually aren’t.
The really, really big difference is that the conservative does what he can, when he can, as long as it ends well, simply because that is what he does. A case of no job too small, if it needs doing.
Whereas the leftist pays no attention to the small jobs that make up the one large job, concentrating instead, on displaying great concern for the biggest job he can find, and imposing on others to get it done, while paying zero attention to the results.
There was a family that came to live in our village from a neighbouring village a few years ago. They were from another series of places from which they had been moved continually for being messy and abusive. We calle them the ‘ASBOs’ after the abbreviation of a court order for they who commit petty offences. They had too many kids, mainly for welfare payments. They were awful to we neighbours. They eventually were moved but why were they given a house that folk I know should have had. Because they bred poor quality young?
Good article. Ive seen this scenario take many forms.. and specifically the point that a lashing out occurs or anger comes into play revealing much of the nature and its one sided ness from the perspective of the potentially benefitting party. This kind of thing occurs a lot these days when overly emotional self absorbed people seek sympathetic audience to play out their traumas and confusion in ways in are actually increasingly predatory in nature as they learn to hone in on weaknesses and blindspots and to gain energy and a sense of self worth in the act.
like brett said about meeting things halfway… this captures the essence of it for me.
Another memorable vignette from Crow!
I should add that in traditional societies, for example in Medieval England, these kinds of people and especially their children would often die of starvation, disease, accidents, violence.
In other words, many such people don’t reform, will not work – and they die.
I mention this because there are those (*not* Crow) whose thinking is wishful enough to assume that cutting back on welfare, or a more rational system of welfare, will make everybody behave sensibly and work hard. Not so. State welfare cannot be reformed, only destroyed.
The two basic alternatives are either that everybody is kept alive no matter what they do (the current situation); or letting people die – which is in fact what happens if assistance is voluntarily provided by individuals – in the model Crow describes.
Because most individuals will learn from their charitable giving, and limit it to where it is effective – as I did.
I was, and am, very mean with money – but once I gave a few days of my salary to one of my best friends who was in financial trouble. He blew it all on one meal at a smart restaurant with some friends – and then I finally realized why he was in financial trouble.
Of course, things are different for family – but most people learn about tough love, when needed. It is the impersonal coercively confiscatory bureaucracy which never learns. Unfailingly ‘generous’ with other people’s time, money, lives…
Bureaucracy can’t learn. That’s what I’ve just jelled into words.
I had a three-year relationship with a guy when I was in my twenties. I was always the good girl, giving emotional credit and putting up with being diminished, left for last, not listened to, etc. and I’m so glad I had the shadowy experience of figuring it out–my being nice was not recognized in all his machinations. I benefited from it all in the long run. Now I know the value of my caring for someone and I don’t give that out for free. I get myself cared for back. We are honest about that.
I figure that when people are given what they should and could be earning, they hate the giver. I wish they could have the gift of the rug being pulled out from under them. I know they would find a way to get what they needed much as they do now–cooperatively and with great ingenuity. I’d give them cheese and bread and fresh vegetables, their cavities filled, paper and pencils. I care and I want them to wise up.
And a library card.
Good points! My wife and I have found, time and again, that the more generous and kindly we are to those ‘less fortunate’, the more those people hate us for it. And I do mean hate.
This is an insoluble puzzle, from which no sense can be made.
It is as it is, and there is simply no more to be made of it.
Even in terms of employment-for-money: only professionals that do not desperately need payment, can be trusted to do anything like a useful job; while those “have you got any work” people, if they do anything at all, do it incredibly poorly, and it needs to be done properly, again (by us), when they have gone.
Some sense can be made of it. Its a redistributing of ones energies. Another layer of yin and yang relationships. A crude egotistical form of male energies being used by those who are more female. Like a fisherman casting his line into the water with hatred and resentment. Its a self affirming form of self hypnosis for the one hating. Another form of soft overcoming hard but in this case it is a downward spiral for the one hating. They get away with nothing in the end. The karma is in the fabric of space and time.
What’s this, then?
A taoist on Amerika?
That’s always a plus.
(Almost always, anyway :)
That makes a lot of sense to me, gg.
As Nietzsche points out, giving a handout affirms the relative position of superiority of the giver and the relative position of inferiority of the receiver.
That would make anyone angry, except that in some cases (like yours) the giver intends no harm, and doesn’t want to be recognized for the act.
This is why that Jesus fellow suggested that the left hand not know what the right hand is doing, when it comes to giving.
It’s a generalization that is not always the case, e.g, you can please me with a new yacht as a birthday present (without the crew, I prefer my own, reliable and predictable). In this cases I would say “thank you” without any inferiority driven emotions.
There is an art of giving and receiving.
If you want to give to a person possibly lacking this proper receiving culture, and may even hate you for that, but you want to give anyway (i.e., scholarships, scientific grants), do it anonymously. That always works the best.
Generalizations are useful things, as are stereotypes, but this is not known to leftists, who prefer to drown everybody in a sea of redundant words.
Perhaps they do this so that the one idiot who doesn’t get-it doesn’t feel excluded, who knows?
Almost nothing is ever “always the case”. That is why generalizations exist. There: now you know.
Giving and receiving is an “art”? That’s laughable.
As is ‘giving anyway’ if you can manage it without ‘being hated for it’.
What planet do you come from, Ferret?
One where everyone takes issue with every word uttered by everybody else, for no conceivable reason?
Really, if you are unable to understand the language here, nor the message conveyed by the language, it might be as well not to comment upon it. There is a purpose to language, and that purpose is not to initiate endless arguments that go nowhere, achieve nothing, and annoy everyone.
Unless, of course, that is your purpose.
To demand all people to be from the same planet is a leftist idea of equality.
You assume, accuse, and generalize.
I was asking, not demanding.
Which planet do you come from?
I came from the planet where it is possible to discuss different matters without reducing the discussion to the participating persons qualities.
And, show me an example where I accuse.
Sorry I used four “I”s in this comment.
Your idea of ‘discussion’ has nothing whatsoever to do with discussion. This is what I take issue with. You have no idea how to ‘discuss’, and whatever it is you do isn’t it.
To discuss, is to exchange ideas and observations about a topic. It does not involve relentlessly claiming everybody else is wrong, while you are eternally right.
Compare the dictionary definitions of ‘discuss’, ‘debate’, and ‘disgust’.
Crow,
Can you tell me something on the topic in addition to your priceless emotions, expressed by “laughable”, “annoying”, and the like?
Something that would rather convey a thought or an argument?
I’ve brought an example when in order to help a certain person with the educational expenses the giving party may remain anonymous.
Tell me what’s wrong with it, assuming that person is a traditionalist and needs to receive a good education to make a better progress through ideas of the past?
I’d engage you, at your whim, because you are a simpleton, and I could hardly lose.
But you don’t have that much credibility that I would bother.
And I have no interest in winning.
You simply haven’t a clue, so there really isn’t any point.
I will, however, say whatever I feel like saying, in response to your ignorant ramblings, and furthermore, will use the internet in ways of my own choosing, rather than adhere to yours.
Do you begin to get the idea I really don’t give a toss what you think about anything?
That’s good. It’s a start.
This comment fails to address the simple question was asked.
It is out of topic.
Thanks.
You’re welcome.
I don’t do what you do, I am not you.
And you are not the topic.
In those cases that can be helped, where perhaps it is merely an issue with motivation or lack of self-worth, giving hand outs are counter-productive as they only suggest “you are incapable, take this.”
For those who are chronically and permanently lost, giving does not help because it does not solve the problem – it only hinders the more productive by enabling the continued and long-term parasitic behavior of the destructive.
So if there are going to be these incredible bottomless pits, then it makes sense to me that we need corresponding overflowing fountains of production that make more than they can absorb.
Well written crow.
But, the poor are sacred and should not be criticised!
The woman you helped needed to realise that success in life results from foregoing short-term gratification in pursuit of a larger goal. And contentment from knowing you have worked hard for what you have.
I used to give to third world charity, when I was a young liberal out of a sense of guilt more than anything else. Now I think altruism is best exercised in situations similar to those which established it as a selected-for trait through evolution – primarily to family, and secondarily to close friends and their families (i.e., members of the tribe). Able-bodied people who have decided not to support themselves and rely on others are fundamentally selfish and do not deserve my friendship or altruism.
These values used to be operative at a national level, through a socially-conservative, Laborite, family-oriented government. Altruism was extended in the form of full employment, which afforded almost every man a job with a wage level sufficient to support his family. In a full-employment society like this, socialised medicine is not so controversial, as by definition just about everyone receiving healthcare is part of a household paying tax. The nation is culturally homogenous so claiming government assistance involves taking away from others who are like you, and therefore is extended only where necessary.
Altruism to people who decide to be unproductive or people who are outside the tribe is just ideological multiculturalism and liberalism.
You seem a level-headed fellow :)
That, in left-ese would probably translate to ‘Nazi’.
Thankfully, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers, know better.
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