I’ve organised it loosely into books and longform articles. I will add some films, too.

Books

Abdel Monem Said Aly, Khalīl Shiqāqī, and Shai Feldman, Israelis and Arabs: Conflict and Peacemaking the Middle East
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/arabs-and-israelis-9781350321380/

The best general academic overview I’ve come across. Detailed and sensitive to different narratives. I think is a long but invaluable starting point. The authors go through the more important historical moments, then present narratives that are commonly held, for example, in Palestine, in Israel, in Arab States, or in the US, etc. The authors then attempt a short analysis comparing each.

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hundred-Years-War-Palestine/dp/178125933X

Rashid Khalidi is probably the most well-known Palestinian-American historian working today. He is a professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. This is a morally charged narrative history which foregrounds Zionism as a settler-colonial movement, and the displacement of the Palestian people. It’s forceful, well-received but not without its critics, and concludes to the continuing marginalisation of the Palestinians in Oslo Accords.

This NYTimes review is worth reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/books/review/the-hundred-years-war-on-palestine-rashid-khalidi.html

Ari Shavit, My Promised Land
https://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Promised-Land-Triumph-Tragedy/dp/0385521707

If you think of early Zionists as ‘evil’ colonists and occupiers, then this book is a useful corrective. It highlights the contradictions, romanticism, idealism, persecution, and naivety that motivated Zionists fleeing Europe in the late 19^th century and on. Drawing on Shavit’s own family history, it’s movingly and personally written. Shavit asks how his well-intention Zionists moving excitedly to Palestine to build new lives did not see the people already there. Or maybe did not care.

Alpaslan Özerdem, Roger Mac Ginty, Comparing Peace Processes
https://www.routledge.com/Comparing-Peace-Processes/Ozerdem-Ginty/p/book/9781138218970

The relevant chapter is a good summary of the peace process since the Oslo Accords and concludes compellingly how one-sided the peace process has been.

Benny Morris, 1948 and After
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/1948-and-after-9780198279297

Benny Morris is one the ‘new historians’ who challenged the traditional historical narrative in Israel. This is a good introduction to the debates and historiography that surround the 1948 war and beyond. The 1948 moment is probably the most crucial in understanding what motivates both the Israeli right and Palestinians, in particular.

Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beirut-Jerusalem-Thomas-L-Friedman/dp/1250034418

I have only just started this, but Friedman is widely regarded to be one of the best authors on the Middle East, spending many years living and reporting from both Beirut and Jerusalem. The preface alone is the best introduction I’ve read to the complex politics, relationships, and wars of the surrounding countries, particularly in Lebanon. It gives you a good sense of the complexity of the entire region.

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/israel-lobby-and-us-foreign-policy

Walt and Mearsheimer s influential claim that AIPAC has a disproportionate influence on foreign policy, which they argued would be much more effectively directed elsewhere. There is the paper and the latter book.

Asima Ghazi-Bouillon, Understanding the Middle-East Peace Process
https://www.routledge.com/Understanding-the-Middle-East-Peace-Process-Israeli-Academia-and-the-Struggle/Ghazi-Bouillon/p/book/9780415853200

This book also focuses on the new historians, but also the wider academic context in Israel, looking at concepts like ‘post-Zionism’ – that Zionism is over, has fulfilled its goals, and should be superseded. And ‘neo-Zionism’ – that new battles over things like demographics have begun. It is quite dense, drawing on philosophy and theory to think through the different discourses. But is a useful frame if you want to understand how Israeli academia has concrete effects on what happens.

Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, and Refutations
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2094-israel-and-palestine

A broad and accessible overview of the history from the Balfour Declaration on, including discussions of the different debates in the historiography, especially on the most contentious moments.

Longform articles

Haaretz, A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-brief-history-of-the-netanyahu-hamas-alliance/0000018b-47d9-d242-abef-57ff1be90000

Makes the case that the Netanyahu government and Hamas benefit from each other.

A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

A thorough 200+ page report by Human Rights Watch describes how, by the ICC’s own definitions, the Israeli government is pursuing policies that can be described as Apartheid in the West Bank by among other things, restricting freedom of movement and assembly, denying building permits for Palestinians but not Israelis, controlling water supplies, denying right of return for Palestinians and not Israelis, and effectively ruling over two-tier society.

Avi Shlaim, The War of the Israeli Historians
https://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0005/The%20War%20of%20the%20Israeli%20Historians.html#:~:text=This%20war%20is%20between%20the,years%20of%20conflict%20and%20confrontation.

A good introduction to a civil ‘war’ within Israel between two interpretations of the country.

Shlaim writes ‘this war is between the traditional Israeli historians and the ‘new historians’ who started to challenge the Zionist rendition of the birth of Israel and of the subsequent fifty years of conflict and confrontation’.

He continues, ‘the revisionist version maintains, in a nutshell, that Britain’s aim was to prevent the establishment not of a Jewish state but of a Palestinian state; that the Jews outnumbered all the Arab forces, regular and irregular, operating in the Palestine theatre and, after the first truce, also outgunned them; that the Palestinians, for the most part, did not choose to leave but were pushed out; that there was no monolithic Arab war aim because the Arab rulers were deeply divided among themselves; and that the quest for a political settlement was frustrated more by Israeli than by Arab intransigence.’

New Yorker, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of Chaos
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/27/itamar-ben-gvir-israels-minister-of-chaos

A good primer on the far-right in Israel.

More

I haven’t examined it in detail, but this reading list from UCLA looks useful: https://www.international.ucla.edu/israel/article/270276

The post Understanding Israel and Palestine: A Reading List appeared first on Then & Now.

‘Something changed inside of me. I woke up! I no longer saw the world as I used to. I quit my job. I sold my stuff. I’ve downsized my entire life. I’ve been living off my savings for a few years now. I no longer see a point in participating in the “real” (fake) world. I know that everything I see is a lie. Everything that I’ve ever known is a lie. My whole world has been nothing but one giant lie from the start, and I can see that clearly now. So why bother?’ – Anon message on Voat.com forum

On the one hand, the ideas around being ‘red-pilled’ are farcical – either meant as a derisive throwaway pop culture meme, or, because of that, a symbol of the decline of public discourse. But I think any language adopted so widely can tell us something – maybe even a lot – about that public discourse. Understood properly, it might reveal insights about why its so appealing, and how sensible people might respond.

What does it mean to take the red-pill? It means that, by discovering the correct knowledge about the world, you can see the truth for what it is, become clear-eyed, authentic – it means having a revelation, realising the difficult truth that we’ve been indoctrinated and duped by Jewish cabals, sinister globalists, cultural Marxists, or radical feminists.

The sidebar of the Red Pilled subreddit tells us that “It’s a difficult pill to swallow, understanding that everything you were taught, everything you were lead to believe is a lie. But once you learn it, internalize it, and start living your new life, it gets better”

In short, it means something’s deeply wrong with society.

Caleb Madison writes in the Atlantic that the ‘Matrix became shorthand for the uncanny feeling that our media-saturated, hyper-commercialized, machine-mediated culture had alienated us from some primal human reality.’

But lots of people believe that something’s wrong with society – and lots of people blame lots of different groups. So why has the idea of the red pill resonated so much with a certain type of right-winger?

Why do people like Andrew Tate and Logan Paul think it’s a reliable reference to call upon when they get in some kind of trouble?

Being red-pilled goes several ways. It can go to the subreddit r/TRP which argues that evolutionary psychology can give discontented men the answers they need to respond to feminism. But it might also lead to believing that a global paedophile ring is being operated from a pizza restaurant in Washington. It can also lead to one of the original Gamergaters Seattle4truth murdering his own father.

But whichever direction the rabbit hole goes in it always seems to go to the right. So, before seeing just how far the rabbit hole goes, I want to look at the relationship between being red pilled and the wider world views, ideologies, or conspiracies that the red pill offers release from.

Because many believe in an inauthentic, manipulated, or just faulty social structure. Many think our institutions need reforming, or our cultural values determine what we think ideologically, or that schooling or advertising or capitalism indoctrinates us, moulds how we think in some way.

So what sets the red pill apart? I want to look how we might think about the social structures and belief systems that influence all of us, ask if there’s any possibility of transcending them, overcoming them, taking a red pill, and living authentically – how can we know what the ‘truth’ is?

First, what is the matrix that the red pill seeks to free us from?

In his book, Red Pill, Blue Pill David Neiwert describes a conspiracy theory as “a hypothetical explanation of historical or ongoing news events comprised of secret plots, usually of a nefarious nature, whose existence may or may not be factual.”

There are those who have seen through the conspiracy. Then there are the rest: drones, sheep, dupes, and fools.

The problem, Niewert points out, is that some conspiracies turn out to be very real. People do conspire, secretive plots exist, the powerful organise.

How then do we distinguish between a conspiracy and a theory?

Neiwert says that real conspiracies have 3 limitations: Their often small in scope – they aim to achieve one or two ends – short in time frame, and involve a limited number of participants.

Watergate, for example, had a single goal, over a short period, and very few people knew about it.

Contrary to this, conspiracy theories often hypothesise a grand plot involving thousands of people to manipulate large numbers of people over a long period of history.

Modern conspiracies, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum also argue, seem to be throw together from a spurious range of facts. They write:

‘There is no punctilious demand for proofs, no exhaustive amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of people are saying . . .’

So what’s the logic of the red pill? Is the ‘matrix’ it’s meant to escape from a conspiracy? Lets take a look at the Manosphere.

The Manosphere is a loose collection of online spaces usually responding in some way to feminism, with views that range from mild to misogynistic. It contains groups like Men’s Rights Activists, Men Going Their Own Way, and Pick Up Artist communities. It’s also the source of the Red Pill metaphor.

Much of it based on what some have called ‘hegemonic masculinity’; that men are, or should be, naturally dominant in society.

Feminism has challenged this.

On this view of many in the Manosphere, there’s a constellation of institutions, cultural beliefs, societal norms, that includes public figures, films, and literature that creates a belief system that imposes itself on men’s subjectivities, convincing men that the patriarchy has been oppressing women.

The red pilled truth is that male dominance is natural, either in certain contexts or outright. This is the true self that you can access.

At its most extreme, this is the result of a feminist conspiracy, or the result, according to the Red Pilled subreddit, of a new female reproductive strategy.

The reddit page r/TRP says that: “All of us have been taught how women have supposedly been oppressed throughout human existence … In reality, this narrative is entirely fabricated”

It continues “we have arrived at a society where ‘feminists’ feel that they are ‘empowered,’ ‘independent,’ and ‘confident,’ despite being heavily dependent on taxes paid mostly by men, an unconstitutional shadow state that extracts alimony and ‘child support’ from men”

And “[men] aren’t born with these values; they are drummed into us from the cradle on by society/culture, our families, and most definitely by the women in our lives (sorry, but that includes you too, Mom)”

Taking the Red Pill is to acknowledge this uncomfortable truth; everything you’ve been taught is a lie. And it functions as a kind of triad: a dominant ‘matrix’ of beliefs – for example, radical feminism –supresses and denies my authentic individual – say, masculinity. Taking the red pill is a route – a mode of knowledge –  that can help recover or find that authentic experience.

This ‘matrix’ framework comes up again and again in the history of philosophy:

In Ancient Greece, Plato framed it as a cave in which prisoners have been chained to a wall for their entire lives, seeing the shadows of things happening outside the cave on the wall in front of them. The philosopher, according to Socrates, can escape the cave and see the world for what it really is.

Similarly, in the 17^th century, Descartes asked how he could be sure what was true. How did he know that at evil demon wasn’t deceiving him through the senses, distorting reality. How could he be sure that he wasn’t dreaming? His answer was that he couldn’t be sure, but that even if there was, there had to be a thinking thing to trick for that to be true in the first place – his thought, then, was what was real – rationality was the path to truth.

More recently philosophers have framed it as the brain in a vat question. How can we know that we’re not, like the Matrix, brains in vats with an exterior ‘simulation’ hooked up to our ‘nerve endings’?

What all of these thought experiments have in common is this dyadic structure of inauthentic vs authentic existence. And they all posit a question: how would you know what’s true and what’s not?

They were formulating ways of thinking about the idea that the outside, exterior, objective world was mysterious, difficult to get to, that we might be being duped by something or someone. And they all have different versions of what ‘truth’ or authenticity is.

Another philosopher of the Enlightenment – Johann Gottlieb Ficthe – position but went much further. He argued that whether the exterior world is accessible, whether we’re being tricked or deceived or have faulty sense, doesn’t matter – the reason we don’t know is because we create our own experience ourselves – we are the centre of our own universes. Man isn’t the measure of all things – I am the measure of all things.

He was following Immanuel Kant who made the case that it isn’t the Matrix feeding us our experiences, but that we played an active role in coding our own experiences our of the raw material fed to us.

Kant made a radical leap that emphasised the importance of the individual. That the world is what we make of it. He said, for example, that in picking up an object we construct our own knowledge of it – its not just given to us – I’m coding in data about the sides, the colour, other knowledge I have it – my experience of basis objects is deeply personal.

Fichte took Kant’s thought and ran with it.

He told his students to look within, to have faith in themselves and their own worldviews and thoughts. This sounds commonplace to us today but in Ficthe’s time it was radical. He said that if we we construct the objective world ourselves, then every action, every interpretation, every choice we make is imbued with a kind of absolute freedom. We are at the centre of our own universe. We are free from the matrix.

He said things like the ‘I posits self absolutely.’ He called it ‘self-activity’. The I generates its own experiences – it is not in a cave or a brain in a vat – it creates the cave and the vat.

Ficthe was much more influential in popular culture than he’s given credit for. At the time, admirers from across Europe flocked to see him lecture his radical theories. This was the age of revolution, of freedom, of Napoleon, of Romanticism.

He told his students to “attend to yourself; turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self. Such is the first demand that Philosophy imposes upon the student. We speak of nothing that is outside you, but solely of yourself.”

The philosopher Rudiger Safranski writes that ‘Fichte wanted to spread among his listeners the desire to be an I. Not a complacent, sentimental, passive I, however, but one that was dynamic, world-grounding, world-creating.’

It was a period deeply influenced by Rousseau’s assertation that “”Myself alone. I know the feelings of my heart and I know mankind. I am not made like any others I have seen.”

And Ficthe said, echoing Napolean’s campaigns across Europe that “My will alone . . . shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe”

Ficthe was one of the first thinkers to posit something as truly central: the ego. And if you could find what was the core of that ego you have something else: authenticity.

Later, in the early 20^th century, Martin Heidegger argued that we could escape the everyday, ordinariness of the ‘they’ – the dull averagness of the other –  and live a uniquely authentic experience. And Jean Paul Sartre, following him, argued that we are always radically free to transform ourselves.  Society tells us we should be a certain way – fulfil a certain role- but authenticity means acknowledging that we can always transcend the roles, expectations, limits, and beliefs of the society that surrounds us.

If we think in terms of an onion – all of these philosophers, in different ways, believe in an unmediated core.

Jacob Golomb writes that ‘the concept of authenticity is a protest against the blind, mechanical acceptance of an externally imposed code of values.’

What all of these thinkers have in common – and have in common with red pill philosophy – is that the route to authenticity is present, within us, able to be accessed by all, regardless of the ways we’ve been subjectified, ideologized, moulded, and shaped by the world we find ourselves throw into. With the right tools and knowledge we can see through, overcome, and transcend the code of values that society has imprinted upon is.

Authentically Red-pilled

If this matrix triad – an exterior realm of dominant beliefs – an authentic individual to be uncovered like an onion – and a route to getting there – is so common in philosophy, and we see it in today’s political discourse, what can that discourse teach us about philosophy and what can philosophy teach us about the discourse?

The Reddit subreddit r/TRP describes itself as ‘The Red Pill: Discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.’

It’s been quarantined, so you can no longer see how many members it has, but its ethos revolves around             improving men’s health, wealth, confidence, and worth so as to hold what they call a higher ‘frame’ to attract women.

The posts range from the mild to the offensive, the personal to the political, but what we’re interested in here is that relationship between, the inauthentic matrix, the authentic experience, and the taking of the red pill to get there.

In the Red Pill subreddit, the inauthentic Matrix is the new feminist frame we live under. The authentic man has access to some timeless truths about attracting women. The Red Pill is the way to get there.

One post reads “The man of value, instead, brings wisdom, strength, mental fortitude, leadership, wealth, and excitement to the table. Women (girls) crave this. It is built into their evolutionary psychology and biology. It is so hard-wired into them … [that] not even all the movies, TV shows, media propaganda, and fiction books can overcome this instinct”

Another said ““We are, indeed, no longer in hunter-gatherer times. However, much of what was at play then still applies today. This includes women of course desiring bigger and more physically intimidating men, among many other things. It’s all evolutionary behavior bro.”

For the Redpilled, femininity and masculinity are fixed, unchanging, and stereotypical.

One recent post tells us that most women are naturally ‘hysterics’, and ‘followers’ and don’t have desires of their own because they base their desires on the ‘desire the other’.

The Red Pilled sidebar recommends to ‘work on your frame [the way you present yourself]’ by working on some timeless truths. Most of them are innocuous – work out, eat right, dress well – but deep in the how to guides of the sidebar you find advice like ‘ Contrary to feminist sloganeering, no doesn’t always mean no. Often times “no” simply means “not yet” and critiques of feminism like there’s a ‘tendency of media and culture to put women first, excuse their misdeeds, and criticize any holding of accountability or pointing out of double standards as being “anti-women”’

There’s much to wade through here, but what I find interesting about the r/TRP is the way any man can draw on immediately accessible timeless truths about what masculinity is and what women find attractive.

This is why being redpilled leans conservative. In conservative philosophy, wisdom comes from passed down tradition, everything we need is available from that tradition in the present moment. The best of all possible worlds is here. It aligns with other conservative ideas like rational actor theory and the invisible hand of the market – that the market, rational individuals, and sexual selection are all self-balancing – a naturalised order.

Of course, if that self-balancing way of the world is natural, then any ‘feminist’, ‘leftist’, ‘interventionist’ or ‘regulatory’ attempts to adjust, correct, aid, or change it becomes inauthentic – tipping the natural off balance and forcing people into an inauthentic matrix that skews the true self.

The wider Manosphere all draws from this basic frame.

It’s why r/TRP redditors are attracted to Andrew Tate, why Andrew Tate supporters align with Jordan Peterson, and why Peterson fans don’t have to do much intellectual work to agree that the swamp of the matrix in Washington needs draining.

For all of them, climate change discourse is an attempt to control us, as covid-19 lockdowns were, government officials are mini tyrants, feminists are indoctrinated cultural Marxists, the universities are lost, and so on.

Tate, like Peterson, says he takes on full responsibility for everything that happens to him. Like this introductory video from r/TRP says ‘you’re on your own’.[1]

For authentic, timeless, inner truth to be accessible it has to be so without much influence from the outside. Individual responsibility has to be just that, individual. This mode of conservativism seeks wisdom in the present moment, in the present self, rather than in institutions, universities, political solutions or wider critiques.

Advice like ‘build muscle’, ‘make your bed’, ‘work on your frame’ is timeless, universal, requires no depth of thought.

The Matrix frame has to rely on authentic, natural, eternal truths that are immediately accessible because any other appeal to any other authority is tainted by the Matrix. The media are feminists, the universities are cultural Marxists, the government are globalists, institutions are untrustworthy, salvation is found, in Jordan Peterson’s words, within.[2]

This lines neatly up with wider Paleoconservative views – paleo – meaning ancient – conjures up images of a timeless experience we can access through the nation – national identity is natural, Christian ethics eternally true, capitalism the way of the world, paternalism passed down for generations.

Paleo thinking relies on the idea of natural state of nature where everything hangs neatly together. The past should be repeated authentically in the present without change. The sacred worship of the present. Within this frame desires, needs, base impulses – especially masculine one’s – are taken as natural and to be fulfilled, fitting neatly with consumer culture: every cultural and consumer proposition is a hook, a quick fix. History is replaced with Stoic insights. Sociology replaced with pop psychology. Literature replaced with action films. Deep critique replaced with shallow quotes.

The Return of the Universal

This frame of authentic knowledge being found within through the red pill contains a fundamental error about how knowledge is formed. Thinking about this error can help us think about how we should respond to the manosphere.

Knowledge never immediate but always mediated. It runs through different points, like a river, never coming from a single source but from multiple entry points – to understand a river we have to look to physics, geology, its tributaries, weather cycles etc – not to any supposed single source. Any understanding of the concept of a river, requires an engagement with the wider idea of nature.

In fact, immediate knowledge or supposedly authentic identity is often mistaken.

Immediate, direct experience tells us that the sun revolves around the earth, or that sticks bend in water. Immediate direct historical evidence from, for example, a soldier during a war is powerful, but tells us nothing of the wider war – the reasons, the politics, the campaign. Memory and the senses can also be faulty.

Several philosophers have argued against thinkers like Descartes, Kant, and Fichte that knowledge can be based on immediate & authentic first person principles.

The German philosopher GWF Hegel, for example, influentially argued that all knowledge is mediated – that the whole is more important than the individual parts.

What does this mean? It’s impossible to understand any concept without going outside of it to the whole. It’s impossible to understand men without considering the relationship to woman, and as such the concept of human. It’s impossible to understand the concept of timber without the concept of tree, landscape, water, oxygen, and so on.

Because human action is social, any choice of what any individual should do jumps outside of the individual and has to consider the whole – how others will react, what the law is, what friends will think, or colleagues, what the science says – in short, all action is intersubjective.

Because there’s always another person to limit what we say, to prod, to argue, another subjectivity becomes part of ours. Even if we ignore them, move away, there’s still a space – the ‘where they are’ – that becomes part of our mental map.

Philosopher Terry Pinkard puts it like this:

‘self-legislation must start from somewhere in particular, from an involvement in some kind of prereflective, pre-deliberative context of rules and principles that we have not determined for ourselves and thus from some other legislation that has been imposed on the agent from outside the agent’s own activities.’

Thinking involves going outside of yourself. If you live egoistically – as Andrew Tate does – believing in the sheer power of self-confidence and self-will, you fail to incorporate the ideas, social rules, and influence of the other into your map for acting. You can act as if you’re realm of authentic red pilled existence is ‘my truth’, but you’re shutting yourself from other people’s modes of living, thinking, acting, and because of this, you’ll become a less successful actor in the world.

This is why empathy is one our most powerful human tools. In attempted to see something from another’s point of view its not just that you’re being altruistic, thoughtful, benevolent, considerate. It’s that your widening your own knowledge, picking up different ways of seeing, talking in multiple personal languages, thinking about what the other would do, and why. The wider you cast your net of understanding the more you touch the most powerful thing: the universal – the perspective of infinity. The person who can call upon and has a sense of the universal inevitably over the longterm becomes the most influential.

The philosopher Friedrich Schelling, in responding to Fichte’s all powerful I, said how can it be the case that all knowledge starts from an I when there must be some kind of ‘pre-established harmony’, a ‘common world’, of some kind, to even communicate to at all. Otherwise, he says, those “who intuited utterly different worlds would have absolutely nothing in common, and no point of contact at which they could come together.”

With hyper-personalized experience we get from the internet conspiracy theories become more common precisely because the I thinks it can always dispute the ‘common world’ by choosing its own evidence. But this is a mistake.  As Philip K. Dick said ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.’

Freedom – being more free – doesn’t come from believing in tapping into some inner wisdom, but instead comes from without – comes from our institutions, historical contexts, bodies of knowledge, collective responsibilities, how others respond to you. It’s not the HITT workout and self-help book that sets you free, its our collective landscape.

Which is again why red pill ideology lines up with libertarianism. People like Jordan Peterson have to believe that freedom to be masculine, for example, comes from timeless individual freedoms, rather than an idea of freedom that’s evolved and changed over time.

Institutions, feminism, cultural Marxists, regulations are all criticised based on how much they supposedly restrict that innate individuality.

But institutions – whether the media, governments, churches, families, schools, friendship circles, colleagues  – are all the raw material from which individuals are formed. They are the common world, in Schelling’s terminology, that should be the object of analysis, it is there that our intersubjectivity plays out.

In a culture that doesn’t believe this, history doesn’t matter because we have the supposed eternal truths of evolutionary psychology. Sociological change doesn’t matter because ‘there’s no such thing as society’. Institutions are only important to the extent that they align with my truth. There’s a turning inward, rather than an acknowledgement that all experience is mediated.

In this way of thinking there is only the immediate desire, the individual feeling, the present moment. What this really amounts to is ‘stop thinking’, ‘renounce analysis’ and ‘reflection’ – things wont change.

In this video, I wanted to explore some of the philosophy that might help explain that red pill matrix triad. For me as much as for you. It helps to lay a foundation, a structure, to further explore this. But any analysis needs to think about exactly why men get pulled down this rabbit hole in the first place.

Ben Rich & Eve Bujalka write in a Conversation article that:

‘For many young men, their introduction to the manosphere begins not with hatred of women, but with a desire to dispel uncertainty about how the world around them works (and crucially, how relationships work).’

They continue that:

‘The foundations of the manosphere s populamay not strictly centre on misogyny, as irly imagined, but in young men’s search for connection, truth, control and community at a time when all are increasingly ill-defined.’

The sociologist David Morgan argues that as the world has shifted from brawn to brains, many men have fallen behind. Boys don’t do as well as girls at school, wages have stagnated for 50 years, we’re staring at screens all day and presented with unrealistic models of what success looks like. Morgan says some men devoid of status find themselves in a position of ‘cultural redundancy.’

But instead of thinking through change, the conservative tendency is to blame change. If feminism, cultural Marxism, and conspiracies are the problem, then all you have to do is look within to a timeless kernel of masculinity to find the solution.

In taking the red pill and seeing a truth that cuts itself off from the wider matrix of beliefs, you end up stubbornly cutting yourself off from other groups, other ideas, other people.

This is a topic I need to return to, because I was reading Ficthe and Schelling and Hegel and just thinking about a simple little video about how some philosophical ideas relate to the idea of the red pill, and, to be honest, I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I’ve got a reading list to get through – I’ll leave it in the bibliography below if you want to join me – and I’ll return to this topic. Because the intersection of Masculinity, Conservatism, Identity Politics, & people like Tate & Peterson aligning clearly tells us a lot about our present moment. So in conclusion I’ll try and keep it simple. I think the message from the philosophy is, the red pill doesn’t exist. There’s no escaping the social common world and reverting some authentic rational notion of what masculinity – or anything – is. If you think you can find the key to ‘relationship success’ for example in a forum or method or formula, there is none – intersubjectivity is more important than you.

Some Sources

Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy: 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism

Rudiger Safrinksi, Romanticism: A German Affair

David Neiwert, Red Pill, Blue Pill: Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us

Eileen L. Zurbriggen, Hegemonic Masculinities in the ‘Manosphere’

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2021/12/pilled-suffix-meaning/620980/

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/reddit-red-pill/

https://iai.tv/articles/andrew-tate-nietzsche-and-the-matrix-auid-2373

https://theconversation.com/the-draw-of-the-manosphere-understanding-andrew-tates-appeal-to-lost-men-199179

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/30/whats-the-matter-with-men

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How can we make sense of the effect the internet is having on society, our political system, and on our very minds? These four videos from Then & Now offer some thoughts.

How the Internet Was Stolen

The internet – as new as it is – has a history. In its earliest decades, many hoped that it would create the ultimate level playing field, on which innovators and creators would be continuously blazing new pathways and burning down the old. The expectation was that the virtual world would buck the trends and power structures of the physical world around it – and liberate us all. But instead, the history of the internet is a history of privatisation, manipulation, and of power being concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of individuals. This is the story of how the internet was stolen.

Why the Internet Hasn’t Fixed Democracy

Giving us almost unlimited access to information, providing a platform for people to connect to others and mobilise against the powerful and corrupt, and bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of narrative – in its early days the internet was expected to become a democratising force. But in the 2020s, democracy feels like it is consistently in retreat, and the internet feels more like the cause of, rather than the solution to, this problem. Through looking at a paradigmatic example of the kind of toxic conflict the internet has brought into existence – and via Wittgenstein, Sartre and Spinoza – this video explains how early hopes for the internet were frustrated, but also why we shouldn’t give up yet on it being a positive force for democracy.

How New Addictions Are Destroying Us

When someone says the word addiction, people usually think of substances. But with the rise of the internet, a new and equally pernicious form of addiction has exploded into being – and has come to effect nearly everyone. This is the story of how we all became hooked by limbic capitalism, a dopamine-engaging strategy of manipulation – for profit – that captures us through our screens, keeping us all hopelessly entranced.

The post The Internet Series appeared first on Then & Now.

But MrBeast is part of a larger story. The story of American capitalism, corporate profit, and politics. The story of American mythology. It’s a story that takes some surprising turns. One in which a complacent media has neglected to follow the money. A story with a narrative that has been shaped, manipulated, and twisted by corporations like Coca-Cola, monolith chemical and shipping companies, international meat monopolies and the deep pockets of big oil. It is a shadowy story of injured workers, low wages, shady deals, collusion, pollution, bribery, and even suicides.

What we can see through MrBeast is not speculation, but a perfect postmodern example of how capitalist mythology is manufactured, how it hangs together, and shapes all of our lives.

So before we get to MrBeast’s philanthropy, we have to do some important ground work. To make some progress in unravelling the problem, we have to understand the roots of this much wider trend, maybe the most worrying trend of our time.

Because propaganda, lobbying, advertising, public relations, and the ideological weapons used by big business have become expertly proficient in obfuscation, runs so deeply through back channels to avoid regulation, is so entangled in our culture, with philanthropy, education, with the media, that big business can make perfect use out of an affable, generous, seemingly decent and well-meaning figure like MrBeast.

What’s interesting with prodigious figures like MrBeast is not how they managed to do what they do, but what they tell us about the culture that gave rise to them. What can MrBeast’s success, his approach to business and philanthropy and Youtube and entertainment and sponsorship, tell us about American culture, capitalist culture, western culture by extension, and even more, about ourselves.

Every civilisation has its myths. Rome had Romulus and Remus. Ancient Greece had Zeus and Achilles. India has Brahma and Vishnu. The British Empire had great explorers and ‘civilizers’. And myths all have a function, a purpose, a use in society. They all support a narrative about the culture that created them.

What is America? Well, I want to start with a quick story.

Everyone’s heard of Davy Crockett, the ordinary woodsman, the wild king frontiersman, the self-made hero of the American west. He was known across the country in plays and short stories for his larger-than-life, mythical adventures.

When the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville toured around America in the wake of its revolution to try to understand what was distinctive about American life he noted: ‘Two years ago the inhabitants of the district of which Memphis is the capital sent to the House of Representatives in Congress an individual named David Crockett, who has had no education, can read with difficulty, has no property, no fixed residence, but passes his life hunting, selling his game to live, and dwelling continuously in the woods. His competitor, a man of wealth and talent, failed’.

In Europe, a rise to notoriety from such humble self-made beginnings was impossible.

Culture turned Crockett into a legend. A popular song described him as ‘half a horse, and half an alligator’.

One man wrote, ‘you have heard of the celebrated Loco Crockett ‘who can whip his weight in wild cats,’ ‘jump up higher, fall down lower and drink more liquors than any man in the state,’ he is returned now a very gentle and respectable man’.

Crockett’s meteoric rise became mythical because it seemed to come from nowhere. But as the historian M.J. Heale has noted, this isn’t strictly true. Crockett’s image was actually carefully crafted by politicians and publishers who believed that his image would be useful to their cause – libertarianism on the frontier.

The idea of a frontiersman out there on his own, independent, self-reliant, with no need for federal assistance or elite rule was important to the image of democracy that Jacksonian democrats were trying to sustain in 19th century America. Jacksonians wanted to expand suffrage to the ordinary man and in Davy Crockett they saw a compelling narrative that would help them win the public image battle.

And while he was of course real, Davy Crockett became a mythical figure for this reason: he was exaggerated, used, crafted, memorialised, manipulated, and proliferated for political, economic, social, and cultural reasons.

Tocqueville noticed this. Crockett fit in with the image of the American out there alone, ‘apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands’.

Heale remarked that ‘realizing the imaginative power of the West, political managers sought to touch responsive chords in the electorate by finding and fashioning political heroes from beyond the Appalachians’.

Davy Crockett was one of the first examples of something we love in democratic societies: underdog stories, adventurers, a self-made man, a man of the people. But stories can be used and misused, appropriated and twisted, reimagined and rewritten in calculative and disingenuous ways.

MrBeast is a likeable guy. He’s the guy next door. He’s the carefree guy having carefree fun with his group of friends. He’s ordinary, but he does extraordinary things. What if I filled my friend’s house with slime? What if anything you place in this circle you can keep? What if we went to the Bermuda Triangle.

He’s also become known as a very generous philanthropist. He’s given homeless people homes, $10,000 in cash, tipped waitresses $30,000, and given away houses to delivery drivers. #Teamtrees has organised Youtubers to fundraise to plant 20 million trees and more recently #teamseas has done the same to remove 14 million kilograms of trash from the ocean. He’s even started a second channel – Beast Philanthropy – where he’s given away 10,000 turkeys at Thanksgiving, helped after a hurricane, and set up his own foodbank.

And before we move on it’s important to say this. This is obviously commendable stuff. This video is not an attack on MrBeast’s personal morals, its not a question of whether he’s a good person or not. I don’t know him, he seems like a nice, generous, hard-working guy whose built a hugely impressive Youtube channel and probably just wants to use his influence to do some good.

But because he’s so influential, because he’s successful enough to be close to some significant organisations – non-profit and for-profit – looking at MrBeast can tell us a lot out about some of the trends he’s part of and, ultimately, benefits from.

So lets look at some of these giveaways and philanthropic efforts.

First, the most obvious thing to note is that MrBeast runs a business. A very, very successful one. Jimmy has openly said the motivation for these giveaways come from two places:

First, its business. They attract views. They make profit. He wants to be the most successful youtuber in the world, and he’s succeeded.

Second, they make him feel good. He likes helping people.

Lets take a quick look at the first motivation before returning to the second later on.

Every MrBeast video that involves a giveaway of some kind – whether to a friend, a stranger, a homeless person – is paid for by a sponsor.

It’s a kind of for-profit philanthropy, or, what economist Matthew Bishop coined in 2006 as ‘philanthrocapitalism’.

He writes that ‘philanthrocapitalism encompasses not just the application of modern business techniques to giving but also the effort by a new generation of entrepreneurial philanthropists and business leaders to drive social and environmental progress by changing how business and government operate’.

Philanthrocapitalism has become something of buzzword over the last few years. It has several features and is broad enough to vary in meaning and scope, but essentially has come to mean:

• Treating philanthropy as a business
• Expecting a return on an investment in some way
• Using traditional business methods for philanthropic projects

The merging of business and philanthropy and the involvement of ‘power individuals’ in philanthropic efforts has become a frequent talking point in recent years with the rise of institutions like the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, and phenomena like ‘fair trade’. Gates has convinced fellow billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett to pledge to donate their fortunes to philanthropic efforts.

MrBeast has become something of a philanthrocapitalist himself, turning giveaways into advertising revenue, food drives into profitable entertainment, and homelessness into a spectacle that pays.

Now, at its best, philanthrocapitalism does important work. Gates himself has spent considerable resources and effort vaccinating, feeding, and helping significant numbers of impoverished people around the world. But as several authors have pointed out, some of the trends not only have a darker side, but could actually be doing more harm than good.

At its worst, as we’ll see, philanthrocapitalism allows sponsors, donors, and big-business to whitewash, greenwash, and conceal or draw attention away from their otherwise questionable business tactics and propagandise positive spin and public relations. This is done to combat disturbing trends that they themselves have created and still perpetuate.

In this way figures like MrBeast can end up spreading corporate messages, believing they’re doing good, and sometimes contributing to even more harm.

MrBeast’s sponsors vary; some, like Skillshare, could be categorised as simple advertisers, exchanging a fee for a short promotional section of a video like this. There’s no claim of philanthropy from the sponsor, and MrBeast uses the money to finance the stunt or giveaway. In others, though, as we’ll see promotion doesn’t seem to be the objective of the sponsor.

But to understand this trend, we need to quickly look at how philanthrocapitalism became a central part of capitalist culture, before exploring some of the ways the trend does harm today. We can then understand how MrBeast has participated in that harm, and how Youtube is becoming fertile ground for a disturbing trend.

The late 19th century was the gilded age of American capitalism, an era known for greed, corruption, exploitation, and the spread of industrialisation and wealth across America. It saw the creation of vast new monopolies in railroads, oil, steel, banking and media by now household names like Andrew Carnegie, J.P Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller, figures that came to be labelled the ‘robber barons’ because of their tendency to employ oppressive, harsh business tactics, exploiting their workers and bribing local and national politicians to amass vast fortunes never before seen in America.

The robber barons have a mixed legacy. As Historian Richard White writes, they’ve had a contradictory reputation, at first ‘standing for a Gilded Age of corruption, monopoly, and rampant individualism. Their corporations were the Octopus, devouring all in its path’.

Later though, ‘they became entrepreneurs, necessary business revolutionaries, ruthlessly changing existing practices and demonstrating the protean nature of American capitalism’.

But I want to focus quickly on a particular trend the robber barons have become known for: their philanthropy.

Take Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American industrialist who built a vast steel and railroad empire across America.

He gave most of his vast half a billion dollar fortune to charity over the course of his later life, and at the time of his death was left with around $30 million.

Carnegie was the forerunner to the new capitalist philanthropist model, writing an article, The Gospel of Wealth, to urge capitalists to use their new found fortunes for good.

Carnegie wrote that ‘the millionaire will be but a trustee of the poor, entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself’.

The wealthy paternalist could dispense their wealth in a responsible way, building libraries while discouraging ‘the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy’.

And while Carnegie was building libraries, donating to churches and universities, on the one hand, he was ruthlessly expanding, paying politicians bribes, and subjecting his employees to grim conditions and paying them just enough to stay above the poverty line.

One worker said, ‘you don’t notice any old men here. The long hours, the strain, and the sudden changes of temperature use a man up’. Sociologist John A. Fitch said the conditions led to ‘old age at forty’.

Workers worked 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, with just one holiday – 4th July.

And Carnegie’s philanthropic turn came after one of the most brutal labour disputes in American history.

In 1892 workers were striking at Homestead in Pittsburgh in response to a pay cut. A battle broke out between Carnegie’s men and the striking workers, and eventually 8000 National Guardsmen were sent in to quell the strike. At least 10 men were killed in the fighting.

Afterwards, Carnegie was sent a telegram by his chairman Henry Frick: ‘Victory!’

Carnegie replied: ‘Cables received. First happy morning since July. Congratulate all around’.

And Frick responded: ‘Our victory is now complete and most gratifying. Do not think we will ever have any serious labor trouble again’.

But Homestead had turned the public against Carnegie and later, in a letter, he complained that ‘the mass of Public Sentiment is not with us about Homestead on the direct issue of re-adjustment of the [wage] scale – people did not understand it, but I observed that Opinion was greatly impressed by the few acts of kindness’.

Carnegie knew that there was more than one way to tip the balance of public opinion, and he knew how important public opinion was for doing business.

So while his philanthropic efforts ramped up in the following years, it did so at the expense of his some 40,000 workers. While the values of Carnegie’s business empire more than than doubled over the years following the strike, his wages were cut by 67%.

Carnegie discovered that when it came to profits, public opinion was as important as bribery and wage cuts.

And he’s probably the most notable example of a trend that became widespread.

Around the same time the oil baron John D. Rockefeller was also giving away large sums while simultaneously crushing worker strikes.

In 1914, strikers in Ludlow were gunned down by the National Guard. At least 25 died, including women and children.

Rockefeller congratulated the National Guard for ‘fighting the good fight, which is not only in the interests of your own company but of other companies in Colorado and the business interests of the entire country and labouring classes quite as much’.

He threatened his competitors and chaired secret meetings to monopolise the market and drive up prices.

Companies like Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel became so powerful that in 1890, Congress passed an antitrust act to weaken the robber barons and breakup their monopolies, prohibiting anti-competitive practices including artificially raising prices. Senator John Sherman, who the act was named after, proclaimed: ‘if we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life’.

Lawyer Frank Walsh said in an inquiry that, ‘it has been stated many times, that it might be better for people controlling very large industries, instead of devoting the excess profits to the dispensation of money along philanthropic lines, that they should organize some system by which they could distribute it in wages first, or give to the workers a greater share of the productivity of industry in the first place’.

In 1911 the Supreme Court split Rockefeller’s Standard Oil into 36 smaller companies including Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron.

Today, we all know that PR and image is as important as reality. The most savvy public figures curate a kind of mythic figure around themselves And we can see the phenomenon everywhere.

Dominoes, for example, recently donated £100,000 to small business in a ‘support local’ campaign, but then spent $50 million on a marketing campaign making sure everyone knew about it.

And recently, Volkswagen championed their philanthropic donations to a variety of causes including beach preservation efforts while simultaneously designing ‘low-emission’ vehicles that were rigged to cheat emissions tests.

This phenomenon is so widespread that it’s difficult to choose which examples to pick, and, even more worryingly, many of these ‘philanthropic’ contributions end up running through foundations like the Gates Foundation, which, as scholars like sociologist Lindsey McGooey and professor of law Garry Jenkins have argued, have a host of problems that are caught up in this logic of charity in exchange for influence and good PR.

McGooey argues that the Gates Foundation is paternalistic, ignores grantees’ concerns about their approach, focuses too much on vanity projects, and is often in favour of loosening regulations in developing countries.

Furthermore, McGooey writes that: ‘study after study has proven that only a small percentage of charitable donations from wealthy donors reach poor individuals. Most of it tends to go to alma maters or cultural institutions frequented by the wealthy. The rich also give less of their incomes, proportionately, than the poor do’.

In fact, the number of private charitable foundations have skyrocketed in recent years – about 5000 are set up every year – despite charitable giving in the US being steady at about 2% of GDP.

What explains this? As inequality increases and wages stagnate and billionaires amass pools of wealth so vast it would make Carnegie and Rockerfeller’s eyes water, what better way to spend that money than on PR and influence that avoids regulation, is not as crass and transparent as traditional advertising, and comes with tax breaks?

In this context, of course whitewashing, greenwashing, and pinkwashing are everywhere.

Take this startling fact. One study in 2012 found that just 7% of donations reached causes that could be defined as a benefit to the average in-need person. Another study found that 55% of grants went to large organisations with budgets over $5 million already.

In other words, most donations went to religious or cultural institutions like churches and art galleries, which are much more likely to be frequented by the wealthy associates of the wealthy, and, lets face it, whiter donors who might get a shiny plaque under some modern art piece but are a bit less likely to help individuals who probably just need a few decent meals and better wages.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the participation in this kind of thing the accumulation of ‘symbolic capital’ – good deeds, connections, and support for institutions that buy you public prestige, power, and influence.

And this trend over the last few decades has coincided with the loosening of regulation, the rolling back of labour laws, the decline of average salaries, and an increase in inequality across the world.

As Carl Rhodes and Peter Bloom write in the Guardian, ‘what we are witnessing is the transfer of responsibility for public goods and services from democratic institutions to the wealthy, to be administered by an executive class’.

All of this begs an important question: where’s the line between philanthropy and self-interest? Between doing good and looking good? What happens when philanthropy becomes a spectacle for distraction?

Much of MrBeast’s reputation centres around his philanthropy. Media outlets like the AP, Looper and the Independent praise MrBeast uncritically, reporting that he’s ‘rethinking old notions of philanthropy’, and describing him as Youtube’s biggest philanthropist. Scan a few comments, listen to a few podcasts, watch a few interviews, and you’ll get the impression that MrBeast is seen as a generous, selfless, heroic philanthropist.

And again, this is certainly not to take a way from all the good MrBeast does, the effort he puts in, and his intentions. I think he genuinely cares, he has fun, and he has a huge audience that he’s hopefully inspiring to go out and do some good in the world.

I want to draw attention to something else: a wider trend, the problems that arise from this format, the money behind it, and the motivations of some of the people that support the content.

Let’s start here. In November 2021, MrBeast and the team spent the day giving away 10,000 turkeys at a food drive in Greenville, North Carolina. The video has almost 6 million views.

The 10,000 turkeys, worth $250,000, were donated by Jennie-O who get credited throughout the video and in the description.

Of course, while a $250,000 donation sounds like a lot of money, its a small figure for a company whose parent company – the food conglomerate Hormel Foods – is worth $27 billion.

$250,000 is around the same price a company like this might pay for a television commercial that would be shorter, more direct, less-likely to go viral, and soon disappear into the ether of forgotten adverts. And of course, this video does not come across like an advert. It appears to be a simple philanthropic act from a socially responsible company.

Jennie-O’s vice president of marketing Nicole Behne told the Associate Press, ‘he’s entertaining and he makes giving back and these philanthropic tie-ins really cool to be part of’, and told WINT, ‘what a great way for Jennie-O to partner with somebody that we can really tell the story about making sure everybody has a Thanksgiving turkey on their table for that special holiday’.

She continues, ‘no matter what their gathering size is Jennie-O is going to be helping provide turkeys for families and then they just have to bring the sides! And really enjoy Thanksgiving all together’.

Comments and articles like these have been syndicated across the web by outlets like the Independent, Yahoo News, and US News.

Other than the obvious publicity, what motivation could Jennie-O have for publicly giving away free turkeys every year?

Hormel Foods is a huge conglomerate which owns over 40 brands including Jennie-O, Spam, Applegate, and Skippy peanut butter.

Conglomerates like Hormel, Nestle, Pepsico, and, as we’ll see, Smithfield, dominate the market in the US and much of the rest of the world.

In 2021, Hormel and Smithfield – who MrBeast also worked with in this ‘Feeding America’ video – were accused of being involved in an illegal price-fixing scheme to inflate the prices of pork and increase their profits.

These 2 companies – Hormel and Smithfield – along with two others – Tyson and JBS, control 80% of the meat market in the United States.

The lawsuit accused the suppliers of trying to ‘to fix, raise, stabilize, and maintain artificially inflated prices for pork sold in the United States’, since 2009.

In 2021 Smithfield – whose Chinese owner, WH Group, is the world’s largest supplier of pork – settled, paying $83 million in fines.

And, there’s been an increase in the discovery of similar price-fixing schemes in Big Meat in recent years.

In 2021, Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride were fined $221 million and $108 million respectively for doing the same in the poultry industry.

And seafood giant, Bumble Bee Foods’ CEO Chris Lischewski was sentenced to 40 months in prison in 2020 for price fixing in the tuna industry.

Is it a coincidence that the same people that are effected by price-fixing schemes that satisfy CEOs and shareholders but drive up the price of everyday essentials are the same people who need to come to a food drive to get handouts at thanksgiving?

In 2021, the Guardian investigated the effect these huge food monopolies have on our economies and societies.

Nina Lakhani, Aliya Uteuova and Alvin Chang write that, ‘a handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans’.

These conglomerates have been growing in power since the 80s as regulation has been weakened, mergers and acquisitions have been encouraged to cut costs, and lobbying of politicians has increased.

At the same time, half of the least well-paid jobs are in the food industry.

One study in 2013 found that 42% of poultry workers had some evidence of carpal tunnel.

One former worker of Chick-n-quick said that ‘there are so many injustices there. Sometimes you get really dizzy from how fast the line speed went, but we are not allowed to say, ‘We’re not going to work at this speed.’ They’re not asking you, they’re telling you you have to do it’.

And in 2019, these workers at Jennie-O went on strike after a worker claimed she wasn’t offered medical attention and was fired after her hand got stuck in a machine she was never trained to be on.

Debbie Berkowitz of the National Employment Law Project said that ‘the meatpacking industry is much more dangerous now than in the 1990s, and the biggest factors are consolidation and cutting corners of worker safety’.

Amanda Starbuck, a policy analyst at Food & Water Watch told the Guardian, ‘it’s a system designed to funnel money into the hands of corporate shareholders and executives while exploiting farmers and workers and deceiving consumers about choice, abundance and efficiency’.

Remember, Jennie-O spent $250,000 in this video with MrBeast. The previous year, during the 2020 election cycle, the food industry spent $175 million on lobbying and political contributions. Two thirds went to Republicans who want to roll back regulation even further.

To understand how much of an effect this has, it’s worth nothing that this figure was only $29 million in 1992.

These conglomerates dominate our shelves and our politics while driving out competition and inflating prices.

Jennie-O’s parent Hormel Food’s profits have skyrocketed in recent years, while the price farmers get paid for meat has declined.

Across the world, while food conglomerates do well, farmers are struggling financially, getting into debt, and facing a  mental health crisis.

The same report in the Guardian writes, ‘advocates say that a toxic mix of financial woes, climate chaos and trade wars have contributed to a mental health crisis among farmers’.

Farmers are one of the most likely groups to take their own lives in countries including the US, Australia, the UK, and India.

In the Midwest alone, 450 farmers committed suicide between just 2014 and 2018. In the UK one farmer a week takes their life, and in India 270,000 farmers have died by suicide since 1995.

The president of Family Farm Action Joe Maxwell told the Guardian, ‘the economic power of these corporations enables them to wield huge political influence, so we have a system in which farmers are on a treadmill just trying to stay afloat. Basically there’s a handful of individuals in the world, mostly white men, who make money by dictating who farms, what gets farmed and who gets to eat. Consumer choice is an illusion; the transnationals control everything in this extractive agricultural model’.

Furthermore, farming in the US relies on an influx of some 2.5 million undocumented migrants. These are workers who have no recourse, no rights, and likely no healthcare.

Hormel Foods’ share price has skyrocketed over recent years. So as long as Jennie-O can improve their image by throwing $250,000 to partner with a fun youtuber that probably isn’t going to ask many questions, and has more influence than any farmer, worker, or migrant, then they probably don’t have much to worry about.

And we can see something similar happening under the surface of MrBeast’s #teamseas campaign.

In the video, ‘I Cleaned the World’s Dirtiest Beach’, MrBeast and friends commendably organise to clean up trash from Bajos de Haina in the Dominican Republic. The storyline is class MrBeast, as they realise how long something is taking, how insurmountable the task is, the stunt escalates as they bring in more volunteers and admit that ‘obviously the beach is going to get dirty again’. Eventually this Ocean Cleanup device – a trash eating robot – is introduced and they tell the viewer that for every $1 you donate 1 pound of trash can be removed from the ocean. Half of the money will go towards paying volunteers to clean beaches while the other half goes to Ocean Cleanup.

Many have already questioned the premise. Science youtuber Simon Clarke has pointed out that the project is ‘problematic’ and could end up doing more harm than good.

There’s up to 150 million tonnes of plastic in the ocean, much of which is small microplastic which cannot easily be removed. And we add another 8 million tonnes each year, a figure that continues to increase. Teamseas goal to remove 13,600 tonnes is a drop in the ocean. As Clarke points out, TeamSeas will remove in 3 years what’s added in 15 hours.

Many marine biologists have also questioned the premise, pointing out that the problem is much more systemic.

But I want to ask a different question. Why is the project so popular? Any why are we focusing on this trash eating robot in the first place? Why have solutions like this attracted the attention of so many youtubers? Clarke calls it the ‘misdirection of attention’. Why is our attention drawn to this but not other solutions?

While machines like this look pretty cool and taking your mates to clean up really dirty beaches might make for exciting content, much more engaging than lobbying the government and plastic industry for change, we can also follow the money and find out who is funding the promotion of devices like this.

Ocean Cleanup lists its partners on its website. They include Safalio – the worlds second largest manufacturer of plastic sunglasses – AkzoNobel – an $8.5 billion multinational manufacturing paint and chemicals – and, right at the top, under ‘our most generous partners’ Coca-Cola, who are, quote ‘the world’s worst plastic polluter for the fourth year in a row in 2021′, according to the  NGO Break Free From Plastic.

So let’s talk quickly about why the world’s best known supplier of gut-rotting sugar in ocean-rotting plastic would want to spend so much money funding such a philanthropic shiny garbage-eater. Coca-Cola obviously have a huge budget. They spend around $4 billion a year on advertising and $1 billion on philanthropic grants, which, as I hope I’ve convinced you by now, should be included as a type of advertising, and often as direct lobbying.

In 2005, for example, Coca-Cola donated a million dollars to the American Association of Paediatric Dentistry.

And like clockwork, this study found that there was a ‘shift in tone’ on the subject of sugary drinks from the AAPD, transitioning ‘from describing soft drinks as “a significant factor” in tooth decay, to describing the scientific evidence of the relationship as “unclear”’.

Another ‘philanthropic’ donation in 2013 from Coca-Cola and PespsiCo went to the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation.

Afterwards both groups joined Coca-Cola and Pepsi in a protest against a proposed New York ban on large surgery drinks arguing that the move would disproportionately effect minorities.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo funded 95 public health organisations between 2011-2015, and sometimes the influence the donations have on the organisations is explicit.

The Associated Press discovered leaked Coca-Cola emails that were directly involved in shaping policy at anti-obesity group GEBN after they received a $1.5 million donation. Coca-Cola’s chief health and science officer was involved in advising on content for the website, editing the mission statement, and even choosing senior staff. The emphasis of the advise was in shifting the blame from sugar being responsible for obesity to other factors like a lack of exercise.

The BMJ writes: ‘an analysis of thousands of emails has shown the extent to which Coca-Cola sought to obscure its relationship with scientists, minimise perception of its role, and use researchers to promote industry friendly messaging. The findings represented a “low point in the history of public health,” said one of the authors’.

Another study has found Save the Children received $5 million from Coca-Cola and PepsiCo in 2009 and their campaign for a tax on sugary sodas soon mysteriously disappeared.

So of course Coca-Cola have interest in promoting a ‘philanthropic’ cause that supports the appearance that millions of tonnes of plastic waste can simply be cleaned up afterwards. That we can all continue using plastic and go on like we are rather than focusing on real change that will effect their bottom line.

And instead of relying on bad-taste advertising and lobbying that might affect their public image, corporations like Jennie-O and Coca-Cola have discovered a much more ‘behind the scenes’ and ambiguous strategy that looks something like this:

• Invest heavily in philanthropic efforts that align with profits
• These efforts become the most well-funded
• Which then effect popularity, clout, and talking points around the topics
• While simultaneously being able to plaster the causes’ websites and operations in corporate logos for free advertising
• And also enjoying the positive press coverage

Take another ‘top supporter’ of Ocean Cleanup, A.P. Møller – Mærsk, the largest shipping company in the world, with arms in oil drilling, oil tankers, and air freight, and who have been accused of being responsible for abusive conditions and harsh labour practices across the world.

Maersk are making a commendable effort to decarbonise, but why?

Shipping accounts for 3% of the globe’s carbon emissions, burning 300m metric tonnes of fossil fuels every year, and the industry is nowhere near meeting the Paris Climate Agreement goals that most agree are needed to keep the rise of global temperatures below 2%. Rather than decreasing, shipping emissions actually rose by 10% between 2012 and 2018. Regulators are beginning to realise that tougher restrictions are needed.

By 2026, for example, shipping companies in the EU will have to pay a tax on carbon emissions.

Like Coca-Cola, Maersk has a clear vested interested in supporting the clean-up of pollution after it’s been used to generate profits, rather than supporting causes that might actually make a difference.

The corporate funnelling of resources into philanthropy means that the media are more likely to listen to the non-profits, like Ocean Cleanup, uncritically. Corporations get what they want, without the crassness of advertising, or risking the bad press from lobbying politicians directly.

Instead, they end up financing and using ‘useful idiots’, a term I don’t really like but goes some way in capturing the logic – naive entertainers and uncritical journalists who end up on their side without ever really knowing why.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled, convincing the world he didn’t exist, disappearing into the shadowy margins using slights of hand and misdirection.

Oceanic Society writes about the best ways to reduce plastic pollution in the ocean. Beaches are there, but the top two are to reduce the use of plastics in the first place and ‘support legislation to curb plastic production and waste’.

By supporting specific causes, companies like Jennie-O, Coca-cola, and Mearsk are essentially saying ‘don’t worry about this huge mess we’re all making guys, we can just tidy it up tomorrow!’

Katie Matthews, chief scientist at advocacy group Oceana told Vox that ‘it’s like mopping up the spill when the spigot is still on. We can’t clean up our way out of plastic pollution’.

But once they magically become well-funded, Ocean Cleanup becomes the topic of conversation, a trend, a talking point, placed on a pedestal to divert attention away from the real problem.

They get turned into a spectacle, exciting new content-worthy tech, massaged into a flashy youtuber-supported positive image, supplanting the rather dull, laborious, and costly task of actually changing our attitudes, reducing use, and affecting real change.

And it’s worth noting quickly that this, of course, is everywhere.

In leaked documents describing the agrochemical giant Monsanto’s funding of grantees that would happen to disagree with banning of its controversial pesticide, Roundup, a Monsanto executive states that ‘the key will be keeping Monsanto in the background so as not to harm the credibility of the information’.

In another study, during a merger between telecommunications giants Comcast and NBCU, its author Susan Crawford found that ‘the company encouraged letters to the FCC from more than one thousand non-profits… including community centers, rehabilitation centers, civil rights groups, community colleges, sports programs, and senior citizen groups’.

What these groups know about telecommunications mergers is unclear.

Another leaked document from the oil giant Mobil describes how donations should have a ‘benefit to Mobil’.

And in this study of donations, authors Marianne Bertrand, Matilde Bombardini, Raymond Fisman, Brad Hackinen, and Francesco Trebbi describe corporate philanthropy as a hall of mirrors.

They write that their research ‘robustly’ shows ‘that non-profits are more likely to comment on the same regulation as their donors, and that this “co-commentary” is most strongly associated with donations in the year immediately preceding the comments’.

In short, a donation leads to a 76% chance of a shift in commentary.

And sometimes the influence is even more direct. We can see this trend illustrated most clearly through one of its worst examples: The Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

The non-profit, which has raised around $2 billion, has been plagued with accusations of conflicts of interest, cash for favours, and a lack of transparency. One employee claimed he could point to over 500 conflicts of interest at the foundation.

The foundation’s annual event is described as a place for ‘showcasing opportunities’, a place where a member can publicise their philanthropy to the ‘nearly 1,000 members of the media [who] are on-site at the Annual Meeting each year to report on the accomplishments of CGI members’.

To attend this event you have to pay a $20,000 membership fee.

McGoey writes, ‘it’s an annual extravaganza permitting donors to announce vast donations secure in the knowledge that a promise is not exactly a binding commitment. There is no global cabal of philanthropic bounty hunters, making sure CGI attendees make good on their pledges’.

And some of the motivations of the foundation’s donors are crystal clear.

Mining magnate Frank Guistra travelled with Clinton around developing nations on a philanthropic mission. Clinton brought the contacts and Guistra brought the MD-87 private jet. In Kazakhstan – which holds 20% the worlds oil reserves – Clinton and Guistra happened to dine with the then president, Nursultan Nazabayev. And they happened to discuss Guistra’s mining interests. Three days later a $450 million deal was announced which ‘stunned the mining industry’.

Later Clinton and Gustra met the president of Columbia, Alvaro Uribe. Soon after a $250 million oil venture deal was struck with a shell company that had links to Guistra.

If this is philanthropy it is extremely rewarding, and I imagine most people don’t dream of securing multi-million dollar contracts while they’re volunteering to feed homeless people.

More and more corporations are cutting out the middle man and starting their own foundations so that they can ‘philanthropise’ directly. Which accounts for that rise in private foundations we talked about earlier.

One of the worst offenders is Walmart. Its ‘foundation’ lobbies against higher taxes, contributes to political candidates and think tanks and supports the privatisation of education. It’s has been accused of illegally lobbying in areas it wants Walmart to expand into.

So when it comes to Coca-Cola, Jennie-O, big food, Walmart, oil ventures, mining interests, and global chemical companies, let’s call a spade a spade and call it what it is. It’s not philanthropy, it’s lobbying. Often indirect lobbying, but lobbying all the same.

In fact, an old 1946 lobbying act describes a lobbyist as: ‘any person who shall engage himself for pay or for any consideration for the purpose of attempting to influence the passage or defeat of any legislation by the Congress of the United States’.

What corporations have discovered is that influence is much more influential and much more hidden when they take their cash a bit more upstream, away from Congress and into the court of public opinion.

I want to turn now to how the narratives financed by corporate cash function to support the status quo, resist change, and boost profits.

The narratives hang together with the help of a couple of threads we can see running through MrBeast’s videos:

• First, the narrative tends to feel good to people, has a feel-good factor
• Second, the narrative tends to give the impression that the current way of doing business is fine and that they – the elites – have got this covered

Take a look at this campaign from Dominoes Pizza – paving for pizza. It went viral in 2018, when dominoes committed to filling pot holes around America, telling its customers that the holes ruin your delicious pizza en-route. The campaign got picked up by endless websites and news outlets who eagerly displayed the images of trucks with the Dominoes logo, filling holes again with the Dominoes logo, next to signs with the Dominoes logo.

As Bernie Sanders complained at the time, coverage usually happened to sidestep or ignore the question of why there were so many potholes in the first place.

Author Anand Giridharadas told Fast Company that roads should be ‘a pretty open and shut case for government. We don’t need pizza companies to build roads. We need pizza companies to pay their workers enough, and pay their taxes’.

He continued, ‘they use the do-gooding to undermine the idea of solving these problems together. It’s not just like subsidizing a road. At some point, on some panel somewhere, [their road paving] will then be used to say it’s better to keep taxes low: ‘It’s better to have government not do a lot, that the private sector can step up.”

Giridharadas makes an incisive point. The basic premise of supplying public goods is that, unfortunately, it is work. Coming together, paying taxes, solving problems comes at a cost in time and resources that, as an investment, pays dividends for a community later on.

The community chips in taxes and everyone reaps the benefits equally.

Of course, when this is left to private individuals it leaves a massive question mark as to whether these services will be supplied to everyone equally, rather than just for the roads that dominoes happen to need for profit.

MrBeast’s sponsorship rely on the same logic. They have to be entertaining, have a feel-good factor, they have to get views. When in reality, difficult problems like global warming, labour rights, not needing a handout at thanksgiving – is not always fun, and can’t always be fun-washed and turned into entertaining spectacle.

It often leaves commentors like this one feeling like they’ve contributed to solving a problem just by clicking like and sitting through an advert.

And it gives the impression that problems can be solved on a win-win basis, a positive sum game, where we can use the market to exchange our way out of all difficulties and all make a profit, where I will only give change to a homeless person if I get something in return, where I must be entertained to do philanthropy, where I only donate in return for sponsorship deals, and I only support causes that align with my interests.

Economist Fred Hirsch called this the ‘commercialization effect’, when the introduction of commercial mechanisms into an idea or an object or a relationship changes the nature of that thing.

Philosopher Michael Sandel points to examples like hiring friends for the day, paying for best man speeches, auctioning off college admissions, and selling adverting on police cars and ambulances. Commercialising certain things that are meant to be based on such old-fashioned stuff like values, fairness, and meaning twists and changes that thing beyond recognition. You can’t buy a friend – a friend means something deeper.

Economist Fred Hirsch, who coined the term, said that the commercialization effect was ‘the effect on the characteristics of a product or activity of supplying it exclusively or predominantly on commercial terms rather than on some other basis—such as informal exchange, mutual obligation, altruism or love, or feelings of service or obligation’.

When philanthropy is commercialised in this way it has to drain it of important questions, conceal any unfavourable elements, and draw out the feel-good factor. Should these things really make us feel good? Or should they make us feel guilty? Lazy? Spur us into action? Rather than escapism? What happens when a story that needs the limelight is not a feel-good story? What happens if it’s depressing? Violent? Difficult?

When corporations are motivated by profit to support philanthropic causes that only align with their motives, and then partner with the media in a way that anaesthetises the problem to make everyone feel good, then of course the more difficult, boring, academic, less well-funded solutions get crowded out. Who wants to read about plastic pollution when they can watch a MrBeast video? Which leads to the second phenomenon that ties the narrative together. What I’ll call the ‘Big Man’ effect.

The new philanthrocapitalists – from Carnegie and Rockefeller to Clinton, MrBeast, Coca-Cola and Jennie-O – lead us to an important question: where’s the line between altruism and self-interest? And does it matter?

In the 1960s anthropologists studying tribes in Papa New Guinea discovered a phrase the tribespeople had: the ‘big man’.

They found that the tribe leaders had become well-known and respected for one skill in particular: giving gifts.

This giving created a unique type of economy: one where who gave gifts to whom and when acted as a type of exchange for reputation and power.

‘The aim of the “big man”’, the anthropologist Chris Gregory reported, ‘is to acquire a large body of people (gift-debtors) who are obligated to him’.

Another anthropologist Marcel Mauss looked at these studies in his influential essay ‘the gift’. He argued that giving gifts was a type of power: it increased the gift-giver’s prestige.

The absolutist ruler of France King Louis XIV, known for his extravagant palace and spending, was also a generous supporter of the arts.

One of his contemporaries wrote of Louis that ‘let him who wants, or rather who will be able to do so in a worthy fashion, speak of the wisdom of this great King who provided the life of grace to so many souls by this holy zeal, his patience, his gentleness, his gifts, by laws as salutary as they are just’.

Louis created a cult of personality, becoming known as the Sun King, the centre of France’s universe. He commissioned busts and portraits of himself and supported ballet, theatre, and music that functioned as royal propaganda.

Louis knew that in the eyes of the public, more than anything, it was more important how one looked.

His gifts, like the leaders of tribes in Papa New Guinea, established prestige.

His people were his children, look after by a benevolent benefactor.

Oscar Wilde wrote a famous essay critiquing charity that was really about prestige.

He complained about how the so-called benevolence of wealthy Victorian industrialists was a means to compensate for their harsh labour practices. He wrote that ‘the best among the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient and rebellious. They are quite right to be so … Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it’.

The French poet Baudelaire saw through this two. In a short story about a man giving a counterfeit coin to a beggar he wrote that his ‘aim had been to do a good deed while at the same time making a good deal; to earn forty cents and the heart of God; to win paradise economically; in short to pick up gratis the certificate of a charitable man’.

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida also saw that gifts were full of double meanings. They can be remedies, selfless, self-interested, calculated, even poisonous and double-edged.

Does this mean we should look at MrBeast videos like this cynically, as always motivated by self-interest? Not necessarily. As Derrida saw, we have multiple overlapping, sometimes contradictory motivations. But we should always try and demystify what those motivations are. MrBeast is not solving a homeless problem. Homelessness will never be solved this way. In fact, wha’ts commercialised in videos like this is our fascination with just how unlikely this is to happen. Of course we can’t help clicking on a video like this, of course we’re curious, because it’s such a singular event, such a one-off, so astronomically improbable that we just have to see the reaction.

But when it comes to widespread, structural, social issues like pollution, homelessness, poverty, and hunger, philanthropy like this doesn’t cut it. The gifts, when caught up in a web of PR, misdirection, and whitewashing, have the same effect as placing a little band aid over – just enough to mask it, just enough to boost image, to make everyone involved look good, without ever addressing the underlying problem.

In The German Ideology, Marx wrote that ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas’.

Of course corporations with deep pockets want to be associated with fun youtubers who won’t ask too many questions, of course they want to look like they’re solving problems and acting benevolently in everyone’s interest. Capitalist mythology creates a kind of modern priestly figure – a feel-good entertainer, a generous big man, crafted by profit, image, PR, and spectacle – someone that ‘gets stuff done’, that doesn’t need the government or the community and could do it all for clicks, views, and likes. The new philanthrocapitalism creates the impression that the elite, their flashy robots and technology, have everything under control.

In his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes comments on the French priest Abbe Pierre, who became a famous household media figure in France in the post-war period.

Barthes wrote that he was interested in the enormous consumption of media about him by the public.

He said the public ‘no longer having access to the real experience of apostleship except through the bric-a-brac associated with it, and getting used to acquiring a clear conscience by merely looking at the shop-window of saintliness; and I get worried about a society which consumes with such avidity the display of charity that it forgets to ask itself questions about its consequences, its uses and its limits. And I then start to wonder whether the fine and touching iconography of the Abbé Pierre is not the alibi which a sizeable part of the nation uses in order, once more, to substitute with impunity the signs of charity for the reality of justice’.

Michael Edwards, a former executive of the Ford Foundation, has become a critic of the new philanthrocapitalist mentality. He argues that, amongst other things, it’s eroding support for government spending on public services. And it’s simply never going to replace us coming together to solve problems democratically.

In 2020, the Gates Foundation – of course, the biggest of them all – spent $5 billion. The US government budget is almost $7 trillion.

In fact, there are 1.4 million registered non-profits in America. Most of them – about 73% – have budgets under $500,000.

McGooey writes that Edwards and other outspoken critics ‘point out that private philanthropy is no substitution for hard-fought battles over labour laws and social security, in part because philanthropy can be retracted on a whim, while elected officials, at least in theory, have citizens to answer to’.

On the one hand, wealthy PR departments support entertaining videos, ad campaigns and spend a fortune on lobbying, while on the other they precise over an economy that by many measures is getting worse. Today, the share of young people running their own business has fallen by two thirds since the 1980s. Low wage work has declined. And the income of the bottom half has stayed exactly the same while the rich have gotten immeasurably richer. Health outcomes for many groups are declining, mental health problems are becoming an epidemic, and there’s a stark divide between wealthier cities and left-behind rural areas.

Angel Gurría from the OECD wrote that elite figures like to focus on convenient issues that side line ‘rising inequalities of income, wealth and opportunities; the growing disconnect between finance and the real economy; mounting divergence in productivity levels between workers, firms and regions; winner-take-most dynamics in many markets; limited progressivity of our tax systems; corruption and capture of politics and institutions by vested interests; lack of transparency and participation by ordinary citizens in decision-making; the soundness of the education and of the values we transmit to future generations’.

He says that they’ve found a variety of ways to ‘change things on the surface so that in practice nothing changes at all’.

Giridharads writes in his book Winners Take All that the elite charade that they’re changing the world ‘improves the image of the winners. With its private and voluntary half-measures, it crowds out public solutions that would solve problems for everyone, and do so with or without the elite’s blessing’.

And money loves a man-of-the-people-image, a self-made man, that through grit and hard work can make it in the same system they’ve made it in. You can see the same logic playout on Fox News, which has styled itself as the defender of the working class.

To be associated the authenticity of MrBeast, his everyday Davy Crockett appeal, is, for corporations, priceless. Add to that the feel-good factor and viewers come away with the impression that they’ve helped enact change, that in helping others we can have our cake and eat it too.

Political theorist Jodi Dean has talked about how many types of online ‘participation’ like petitions, likes, surveys and social comments become depoliticizing because they create a fantasy of participation and change. She writes that ‘weirdly, then, the circulation of communication is depoliticising, not because people don’t care or don’t want to be involved, but because we do! Or put more precisely, it is depoliticizing because the form of our involvement ultimately empowers those it is supposed to resist’. As Michael Sandel puts it, other values, other solutions, other forms of organisation, get ‘crowded out’.

But the ethics of helping others, the difficult work of addressing hard problems, and the dry deliberation and research of politics, cannot be reduced to an exchange for entertainment. Morality does not arise from a positive sum exchange. I don’t give a homeless man a penny and expect a little jig. Philanthropy is difficult, it usually comes at a cost, in time, effort, money, and if everything gets turned into a marketable exchange, a commercial venture, motivated by profit and material reward, what happens to the issues, areas, people, and ideas that aren’t polished and content worthy? When we uncritically leave philanthropy in the hands of big tech moguls, Youtube personalities, oil barons, and Clintons, we get shiny robots and a few planted seeds, we get distraction and halls of mirrors, we get spectacle and entertainment, we get empty libraries and more foodbanks and lower wages, we get whitewashing, greenwashing, pinkwashing, funwashing, and youtubewashing.

Sources

David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Linsey McGoey, No Such Thing As A Free Gift

Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of the Market

Heale, M. J., The Role of the Frontier in Jacksonian Politics: David Crockett and the Myth of the Self-Made Man

Sharon Kettering, Gift-Giving and Patronage in Early Modern France

Stasja Koot & Robert Fletcher, Popular Philanthrocapitalism? The Potential and Pitfalls of Online Empowerment in “Free” Nature 2.0 Initiatives

Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All

David B. Sachsman and David W. Bulla, ed., Sensationalism: Murder, Mayhem, Mudslinging, Scandals, and Disasters in 19th-Century Reporting

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