Sunday, March 13, 2016

for powerful, offering charity to powerless far easier than ACCEPTING help from them

The powerful are a tight-fisted lot but they would far rather give charity to all than accept help from anyone


I wish to argue that two seemingly opposed notions (the powerful offering charity to the powerless and the powerful murdering the powerless) are actually very closely related.

Charity should always be, but rarely is, offered horizontally to equals : equal fellow human beings. Too often though, charity is only offered downwards to unequals (and always with the half conscious intent to remind everyone who is on top and who is on the bottom).

And it is always relatively easy to let unequals (life unworthy of a full life) die by neglect ---- or even to go out and directly murder them.

But when the 'powerful' (note well the scare quotes) accept help from the 'powerless', they are tacitly admitting that they both equally relatively powerless before the problem at hand, which is why they are sharing possible solutions in the first place.

And equals find it harder to murder each other.

This is just another way to restate the bald facts that Churchill's imperial milieu would literally rather lose to their fellow white Europeans, the Nazis, than treat the dark Indian sub continent as equals, equals united in defeating the Nazis by sheer weight of superior manpower numbers.

And that Churchill's scientific milieu would literally rather see Allied frontline soldiers die of infection than see the primitive little microbes (the darkies of biology) make life-saving penicillin naturally instead of seeing highly educated white Europeans making it by chemical synthesis.

In the Churchill tradition, only the American powerful were permitted to make and control the nuclear Manhattan Project : no darkies on this set, please.

By contrast, Henry Dawson's other Manhattan Project was all about inviting anyone and everyone in the world to find ways to make abundant wartime penicillin as quickly as possible.

With Dawson's Manhattan Project having everyone helping out, instead of  just a small elite, this forced the very reluctant Allies to give the resulting penicillin to all.

For when Help comes from All, it becomes much harder to refuse to allow the Hope of the results to be distributed to All : which is why the 'powerful' are so very reluctant to ask any help from the 'powerless'....

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