Eric Falkenstein 's blog has drawn my attention to an observation on the human condition by Walter Bagehot that I had not previously heard, though I had been growing towards a personal sense of it: " The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm." The way Falkenstein paraphrases it is "that charity does more harm than good." He observes that giving someone something does not help them pull themselves out of their bad circumstances to become self reliant, it rather appears to just increase their dependency. This is his little riff on the mutual interdependence of western feelgood third world giving and the third world "cargo cult" mentality. It can take a long long time to break this cycle, and sometimes it persists in perpetuity (see Untouchables). In Australia the insidious effects of this mutually self supporting vicious circle have seen the perpe...
Stirring grist, grizzle and gore to flavour the stew.