My first part of life I lived in a city with exactly that mentality (part of the reason i moved away).
“You should not do good A if you are not also doing good B”—i am strongly convinced that is linked to bad self-picture. Because every such person would see you do some good To Yourself and also react negatively. “How dare you start a business, when everybody is sweating their blood off at routine jobs, do you think you are better than us?”.
This part “do you think you are better than us” is literally what described their whole personality, and after I realised that I could easily predict their reactions to any news.
Also, another dangerous trait that this group of people had—absense of precautions. “One does not deserve safety unless somebody dies”. There is an old saying in my language “Safety rules are written by blood” which means “listen to the rules to avoid being injured, when the rule did not exist yet somebody has injured himself”. But they interpret the saying this way: “safety rules are written by blood, so if there was no blood yet, then it is bad to set any preventive rules”. Like it is bad to set a good precedent, because it makes you a more thoughtful person, thus “you think you are better than others” and thus “you are evil” in their eyes.
Their world is not about being rational or bringing good into the world. Their world is about pulling everything down to their own level in all areas of life, to feel better.
I was thinking more on the anxious side of things:
“If you could have saved ten children, but you only saved seven, that’s like you killed three.”
“If the city spends any money on weird public art instead of more police, while there is still crime, that proves they don’t really care about crime.”
“I did a lot of good things today, but it’s bad that I didn’t do even more.”
“I shouldn’t bother protesting for my rights, when those other people are way more oppressed than me. We must liberate the maximally-oppressed person first.”
“Currency should be denominated in dead children; that is, in the number of lives you could save by donating that amount to an effective charity.”
“If you could have saved ten children, but you only saved seven, that’s like you killed three.”
I suspect that this is in practice also joined with the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, where saving zero children is morally neutral (i.e. totally not like killing ten).
So the only morally defensible options are zero and ten. Although if you choose ten, you might be blamed for not simultaneously solving global warming...
The version that I’m thinking of says that doing nothing would be killing ten. Everyone is supposed to be in a perpetual state of appall-ment at all the preventable suffering going on. Think scrupulosity and burnout, not “ooh, you touched it so it’s your fault now”.
My first part of life I lived in a city with exactly that mentality (part of the reason i moved away).
“You should not do good A if you are not also doing good B”—i am strongly convinced that is linked to bad self-picture. Because every such person would see you do some good To Yourself and also react negatively. “How dare you start a business, when everybody is sweating their blood off at routine jobs, do you think you are better than us?”.
This part “do you think you are better than us” is literally what described their whole personality, and after I realised that I could easily predict their reactions to any news.
Also, another dangerous trait that this group of people had—absense of precautions. “One does not deserve safety unless somebody dies”. There is an old saying in my language “Safety rules are written by blood” which means “listen to the rules to avoid being injured, when the rule did not exist yet somebody has injured himself”. But they interpret the saying this way: “safety rules are written by blood, so if there was no blood yet, then it is bad to set any preventive rules”. Like it is bad to set a good precedent, because it makes you a more thoughtful person, thus “you think you are better than others” and thus “you are evil” in their eyes.
Their world is not about being rational or bringing good into the world. Their world is about pulling everything down to their own level in all areas of life, to feel better.
I was thinking more on the anxious side of things:
“If you could have saved ten children, but you only saved seven, that’s like you killed three.”
“If the city spends any money on weird public art instead of more police, while there is still crime, that proves they don’t really care about crime.”
“I did a lot of good things today, but it’s bad that I didn’t do even more.”
“I shouldn’t bother protesting for my rights, when those other people are way more oppressed than me. We must liberate the maximally-oppressed person first.”
“Currency should be denominated in dead children; that is, in the number of lives you could save by donating that amount to an effective charity.”
“If you could have saved ten children, but you only saved seven, that’s like you killed three.”
I suspect that this is in practice also joined with the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, where saving zero children is morally neutral (i.e. totally not like killing ten).
So the only morally defensible options are zero and ten. Although if you choose ten, you might be blamed for not simultaneously solving global warming...
The version that I’m thinking of says that doing nothing would be killing ten. Everyone is supposed to be in a perpetual state of appall-ment at all the preventable suffering going on. Think scrupulosity and burnout, not “ooh, you touched it so it’s your fault now”.