Pity ye not

Some ask: “Is it fair to consider pushy charities and their smug or self-righteous volunteers a nuisance?”

The simple answer is “Yes”. Because while nobody wants to snub genuine individual acts of charity any organisation that pays senior executives over £100,000 per year (over £200,000 for some notorious professional scaremongers) is in the compassion business for business reasons, not compassionate ones.

Historically, the concept of charity may have begun as acts of benevolence by the powerful (often, of course, on the understanding that they would pass into heaven with rather more ease than their camels could pass through the eyes of needles), but the modern charity format, as originally introduced by Quaker merchants, is primarily a tax avoidance strategy, though pursued on ethical grounds. Oddly, though major charities and their key sponsors spend far more time taking advice from tax lawyers and HMRC than self-confessed business corporations of equivalent size, none want to admit this.

We also need to recognise that one person’s ‘ethics’ is another’s flat earth bigotry, and just because a particular ethical framework is championed by the powerful does not mean it is correct . Or even reasonable.

What other idea, conceived and sustained by powerful elites, would you accept at face value? Why, then, do we meekly accept that the charity profession is a ‘good thing’?

Try, for example, carefully examining the views and policies of any large charity towards the unfortunate as if you were reading the manifesto of a fascist cult. You may be startled to find how little there is to choose between the misanthropy expounded by either party. Both, for example, maintain that certain groups of people are simply incapable of governing themselves, and resist all attempts for them to do so by either democratic political means or the commonly accepted codes of business practice.

Neither should one feel guilty about crossing the street to avoid a ‘chugger’, or putting the phone down on any fundraiser rude enough to pester you at home because you cannot get proper details about  a charity’s work and policies from their website without giving your phone number. Such nuisances are not volunteers. There is a market for professional fundraising companies who pester the public and take a 50/50 split with major charities.  The charities find it more ‘cost efficient’ to do this than to actually risk answering questions from the public, never mind consorting with the great unwashed in order to attract anyone but bored socialites as a volunteer base.

Some will say that this leads to only the cutest puppies and orphans getting money thrown at them, and there may be some truth in this. But the problem only arose when the charity profession reduced misery to a commodity, and turned the competition for funds into a corporate war in order to maintain their relative market positions. That is a problem they, and nobody else, created. If any of them had even a scrap of conscience then their last professional duty would be to solve it before declaring themselves redundant.

For far too long, charities have had a soft ride because we are not prepared to treat middle class professional spongers as we do common street beggars, and ask them just what they will do all day if we are fool enough to hand over our small change.

But we are also at fault. We must accept that every pound we give to a charity whose staff and policies we have not vetted, accounts we have not checked and past record we have not researched is a pound which could inflict more misery on a vulnerable person, or just subsidise another freeloader on another foreign holiday or ‘gap year’ (so called because the poorly – if expensively - educated folk who take them have empty spaces between the left and right ear and can afford to air them for years at a time).

Always remember that charity is personal, an individual act of kindness, so must always be something done from choice, not compulsion. It is not a duty, and should never be reduced to one.

If the real problem, as some charities intimate, is that too few people have too much power over too many, then charities are not the answer either, because they just transfer the power from one corporation to another with equally dubious ‘vision statements’ for future development. Instead of the dispossessed of the earth being controlled by multinational business corporations (who collaborate with governments and each other in order to maintain their power base) their fate will lie in the hands of multinational charitable foundations, who also collaborate with any government, business corporation and super-wealthy individual providing the bulk of their funding in order to maintain their powerbase.

Beneath the chimera of 'opposition’ it is strictly ‘business as usual’ between governments and the corporations, be they straightforward business or charitable ones. The poor and the dispossessed have no say in the matter. At best, like voters in Western pseudo-democracies, they may sometimes get to choose their parasites and oppressors.

Another approach is, rather than ‘who should I be kind to’, try asking ‘do I harm anyone’ and organise your life, as far as is practical, to avoid that. Consider your purchases, your job, and your relationships with family and community. Just who is affected, and how, by what you buy, how big your car or house is, the products and services you produce at work, the people you do (or do not) socialise with. How you deal with that, what decisions you make about how you interact with the immediate community or the wider world, it is not for anyone else to decide or to judge.

If you still feel guilty enough to give to ‘good causes’, then the only responsible thing to do is fully research one or two charities that interest you, being careful to consider their critics at least as well as their PR. You can then ignore the rest with a clear conscience. Set yourself a strict monthly budget , arrange some direct debits then feel free to treat any approach from a professional fundraiser in the same way you deal with, say, a cold-calling double-glazing salesman or Jehovah’s Witness.

Do any of this and you may never save an entire nation of starving people, but then, neither do charities. On the other hand, you cannot add to the sum of human misery by inflicting self-righteous halfwits with messianic intent on them either.