Selfrighteous Hippies: Helping the Rich Get Richer by Killing People In Africa (And Elsewhere)

I’m not ordinarily a ‘cause’ oriented kind of guy. It is my opinion that – at least in American life – mass-media-driven causes are basically institutionalized attempts to make a lot of money by playing off the gullibility and liberal white guilt of our fellow citizens. I’ve always been skeptical, but these kinds of things, even when they’re done with the best of intentions, always seem to go wrong. Remember all that grain that USA for Africa purchased for starving Ethiopians when we were teenagers? The USA for Africa organization gave that grain to the Ethiopian government to distribute to the starving. Of course Ethiopia was in the middle of a massive civil war, which is *why* all those people were starving in the first place – they were rebels. The Ethiopian Government simply sold the grain to Libya in exchange for guns and tanks and planes, which they then used to *Slaughter* all those starving people in Ethiopia. So in the end, USA for Africa killed more people than it saved. (Postscript: the rebels eventually won. Ethiopia is a good deal smaller nowadays than it used to be, and there’s a new country called “Eritrea,” where all those starving rebels used to be.
I mention that as an example of good intentions going horribly wrong. How much worse, then, must intentions that are utterly mercenary to begin with turn out? What happens when corporations and governments and shills decide to manipulate people’s best intentions to pump new revenue streams and votes out of them? There’s an old saw about how ‘A society that is no longer priest-ridden won’t believe in nothing, they’ll believe in anything’ (No, I can’t remember who said it. Probably nobody famous. It sounds a bit slogan-ish). There’s probably some truth to this. Conventional (orthodox?) morality and religious expression probably does function as a brake or a filter to check some of the more manipulative causes, or if they don’t actually stop ‘em, they give people a moment or two to reflect before letting themselves be led off into incredulity and (inevitably) becoming a cash cow for whomever is doing the manipulating.
Noted atheist author Michael Chrichton made a similar argument when he says that “Religion” is an inherent part of our minds for whatever reason, and we simply can not get rid of it any more than we can get rid of our sex drive or our ability to recognize patterns and do math. He says that since the religious impulse is unavoidable, if we get rid of “God” (or “gods” or whatever), we will simply replace them with a new concept that is religion in all-but-name. We’ve all met Atheists who are extremely evangelical about their atheism. We’ve all met Environmentalsts who are likewise virtual gaia-worshipers and are likewise very evangelical about it. We’ve all met Democrats who are every bit as slavishly devoted to the party line as any Catholic is to the latest ramblings of the Pope. (Republicans do this too, but somewhat less, I suspect because Republicans by and large are already religious, and don’t need to manufacture a new belief system to replace the old one. This, of course, can occasionally cause it’s own set of problems, though) The less said about the self-important undergraduate communists of the 70s/80s the better.