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Reading about the FTX dèbacle and what the founder and his friends thought (especially about their EA space) made me understand how much utterly alien is to me the entire EA movement.
Watching the videos, the blogposts, all the infos that are getting out, made me reflect on "how" they think money should be used by rich people in order to maximise happiness and saving people and in particular the entire world.
Maybe it is because of my particular illiberal upbringing (Euro-mediterranean Catholic family), but I cannot fathom how this ideology is, for my eyes, "Utterly Evil".
How can you, a rich person, focusing yourself on improving astract things as the entire world, financing no-profits and calculating metaphysical moral earning based on how much money you are investing in EA?
Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises? It utterly repulse me on a philosophical and moral level, and this is probably the reason I never bought in EA.
If this is the alternative to the woke/progressive view, I have no idea of how the Western World can remotely fix its problems. Am I the only one who feels like this?
I 100% agree with you. “Globalism EA” is a reneging on the community that created you. Someone like SBF was the recipient of untold Western privileges, paid for by the blood and sweat of untold Westerners, many of whose children are struggling. To take up all of these privileges (which amount to subsidies) and then throwing a majority of the money at net Africans is wasteful and immoral. It’s trying to live with no communal responsibilities, as if the capitalist rules in place are the only that matter. It also betrays a misunderstanding of the recursion of morality. You want to invest your morality in a way that doesn’t just do some “one time good”, like with net Africans, but that compounds over time. Net Africans will never pay your good deed forward, at least I do not think so; compare that to when Native Americans donated cattle to Ireland in their famine, and 170 years later Ireland returns the favor and sends aid to tribes dealing with COVID. This sort of cross national charity is possible with sophisticated states, but not with net Africans.
Also, regarding net Africans, if you told me that one thousand of them have died today, I would not be affected. One hundred thousand, it would not affect my life at all. One million, no. If you told me ten trillion Africans died from an absence of malaria nets, I would be greatly puzzled how so many Africans could fit in Africa, but again it would not affect my life in the slightest, or the life of anyone I love, or my loved ones’ loved ones, or my entire civilizational history, or anything I care about. In this sense they are simply “not real” from any moral standpoint. Some amount of money should be spent on civilizing Africans, sure, so they can make their own nets and such, but i’m cognizant that others tried to do that and got fucked over for it.
I think this is a strange example to choose to support that point. The Irish didn't have a sophisticated state back when the Native Americans donated to them, the Irish tenant farmer had a lot in common with today's net African in his ability to repay. From the point of view of the Native Americans it must have looked like a one time good, straightforward altruism, which is why it made enough of an impression to be remembered nearly 2 centuries later.
Or maybe they just saw some of themselves in the plight of the Irish, as Devalera put it when he was made a chieftan of the Ojibwe Nation in 1919: “I want to show you that though I am white I am not of the English race. We, like you, are a people who have suffered, and I feel for you with a sympathy that comes only from one who can understand as we Irishmen can.”
As an aside, the Turks are also remembered fondly, and the crescent in Drogheda's crest is often (mistakenly?) thought to originate in the Ottoman Sultan's donation of £1,000 for famine relief.
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