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Notes -
I think this is misconstruing the candle metaphor as I used it. "Buying a candle" isn't "buying housing/shelter/food/etc.", it's "helping people". The candles-smell-nice insight I am trying to communicate is that I want people to be helped, it's something I enjoy, something I want more of in my experience-of-the-world. It is a positive good that I essentially purchase by giving my time or money to those in need, and this is something which I feel was absent from your framing, the sense of "good things happening to other people" being something you want, for their own sake.
(Mark that I am not talking about a Catholic-indulgences-style purchase of personal self-respect through the act of self-sacrifice. I mean that the knowledge that somewhere out there some people are better off than they were before is itself an experience I value, one which I would value in much the same way whether the improvement in their circumstances is my own costly doing, or something that spontaneously happened to them without my input. It's just that sometimes, if you want something done…)
What I called ghoulishness was specifically the absence of such a 'conscience-sense': a state of mind where you don't care whether Tiny Tim lives or dies; where being told that Tiny Tim has made a miraculous recovery would be no different for you than hearing he's just croaked. I think a non-ghoul wants Tiny Tim to live in a positive sense; that they will be disappointed if they conclude that they can't afford to make that happen, or that there's nothing they can do. I want a world with happy non-dead Tiny Tims in it, in very much the same way that I want to live in a luxurious mansion and I want to make love to the girl of my dreams and I want my grandpa to not be dead. (Some of these are more achievable than others.)
People vary in how they'll handle trade-offs between those wants, of course. But most conventionally "selfish" people simply have a tendency to put their personal wants over their universal wants (i.e. non-subject-dependent preferences about world-states i.e. moral values) as opposed to lacking universal wants altogether. Ghoulishness is a somewhat different thing, a unilateral absence rather than an imbalance. I'm not actually sure whether you're ghoulish! When I spoke about a "nagging suspicion", I wasn't being euphemistic or sarcastic.
I wish I had a more helpful reply to the personal venting than the following, because I truly appreciate you stepping back and unburdening yourself of all that background. Ultimately I can only give you sympathy and tell you that as far as I'm concerned your suffering is valid and should be a genuine concern for people with decision-making power. I don't consider what you and your local community have endured to be some sort of acceptable sacrifice in the name of improving the life circumstances of others; I think that's a very dangerous game to play with lives other than your own, particularly if you happen to be a government. I want you to be safe and housed and happy, and evidently you're only hitting 1/3.
And… that's bad. We might disagree, separately from all these value questions, on what policies would be best to resolve this - we might disagree on the extent to which the government should be willing to hurt people you regard as foreign back again in order to make it up to you if that should turn out to be necessary (though I don't think it would be!). But I do agree that it's bad.
I fully sympathize with your sense of outrage at the country having been so badly mismanaged that it got to the point where people have life-experiences like yours. I just don't think "including a term for doing-good-for-other-people-for-its-own-sake in the budget" is where the mistake is.
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