Effective altruism: The new grift of the liberal media and academic classes
I just saw this thread defending “effective altruism”, which now has the endorsement of Elon Musk, because of course it does. One of their leading guys, some annoying wonk-nerd Ezra Klein clone (all these people are clones of each other) who is a professor in moral philosophy at Oxford (because of course he is) is now getting these fawning profiles in the New Yorker and New York Times, the clearest sign that we’re dealing with a new grift of the liberal media and academic classes.
If you look into that guy’s background, he’s been a frequent guest on Sam Harris’ podcast. Harris of “We need to murder all Muslims in my thought experiment” and “In defense of Israel and torture” fame. Very effective altruism going on there! The liberal pseudo-intellectual par excellence, who makes every annoying vegan Silicon Valley cunt feel like they’re smart and brave and, most importantly, virtuous and morally superior to everyone else, and of course is now a leading exponent of effective altruism.
And that’s what this “effective altruism” bullshit is all about: to make billionaires and rich liberals feel like they’re Good People, and they have this cool edgy wonk statistics moral philosophy logic argument to prove it! Just read that guy’s book! He’s a moral philosopher at Oxford, and at only 35! How does one become a professor at Oxford or Harvard at that age? That’s of course a question that’s never asked.
If you’ve noticed by now I haven’t bothered to name that guy, and I suggest you don’t look him up. He’s another one of those pseudo-intellectuals like Yuval Harari pushed hard by the media class who will flop and won’t even reach Malcolm Gladwell level of fame, though in hackery they are equal.
The most amusing thing about this entire movement is that they don’t even have the basic awareness that yes, obviously if you want to donate a significant part of your income to good causes that is a good thing, and being frugal for that purpose is a good thing too, and it’s what people who aren’t professors in moral philosophy at Oxford have been doing for centuries and centuries, people who have lived and died without anyone even knowing their names have contributed infinitely more to the betterment of humanity than any of these depraved liberal scumbags who as they whine endlessly about how good and virtuous they are in the pages of the New Yorker to sell one of their books and up their market price on the speaking circuit say nothing about capitalism and imperialism, which are the root causes of all the world’s misery and exploitation and death and the looming climate catastrophe.
Bertolt Brecht captured this sentiment perfectly in the following poem:
In the face of all this exploitation, misery and environmental devastation, you choose to spend all your time whining about how good you are as a person because you do what every minimally moral person already does, and then say that doing only that is sufficient and the be-all end-all of one’s activity in the world? This is just the protestant ethic secularized for a neoliberal age. It’s no wonder that the Oxford moral philosopher is a utilitarian who believes that value-maximization in the moral sphere overlaps with it in the economic and social. In other words, he believes that if you are a billionaire you have more opportunity to give more to charity, ergo it’s good that you are a billionaire because you can do more effective altruism. The neoliberal God has Chosen you to be one of the Good Ones. That’s why another one of his biggest fans and promoters is Bill Gates. It’s also why he was an adviser to Gordon Brown, that hapless idiot who decided to respond to the financial crash with austerity, opening the way for over a decade of Tory rule. And hence Elon Musk’s endorsement.
Thomas Piketty came out with a book in 2014 showing how inequality has increased dramatically over the neoliberal period after the 1970s up to the present, and is only getting worse (here’s a PDF to the entire thing, though if you’re short on time this talk also suffices to get the basic message across). He also captured the imagination of some of these very same liberal media and academic classes as the Occupy vibe was still in the air and it was permissible to feign anti-1% rhetoric among them because there were no actual stakes involved and in fact one could make a niche for oneself in the media class by specializing in that sort of stuff. But Piketty soon fell out of favor, and was immediately attacked by Gates and other billionaires because his proposal was clearly way too extreme. He didn’t call on them to donate money to charity, to invest more, to do these fake “wealth giveaway” PR schemes. No, he called for a global wealth tax and the elimination of tax havens, to systematically take away the power of billionaires. And he suggested that it was impossible to do this without a systemic change in the political and economic structure. He exposed the “effective altruism” con long before it became the current grift. This is all you need to know about it:
Individualism, personal interest is most important than anything, so they intentionally try to be selfish. Collectivism, when county’s interest is more important than individuals, so ppl try to help their families and relatives to leap them fr poverty. However, most billionaires just move their money to abroad cuz afraid of the government. It seems the same thing.