BY SOFO ARCHON
This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.
Billionaires have found a brilliant way to fool people, and that is philanthropy.
Many people think that billionaires donate so much of their money in order to benefit the world, when in reality, billionaires donate their money in order to benefit themselves, and they achieve that in different ways.
The first is that, through philanthropy, they’re able to present an image of themselves to the world as generous, loving, compassionate, and caring, in order to distract people from the fact that they have accumulated and hoard a monstrous amount of wealth.
In normal, healthy circumstances, people would not accept billionaires; they would shame them, they would not respect them, because nobody needs to have billions of dollars. And when we consider that billions of people are struggling to survive, that so many people don’t even have bread to eat, billionaires represent apathy, not empathy. Somebody who really cares, who is truly generous, would not be a billionaire.
Through philanthropy, billionaires also distract people from the ways they made their money in the first place, which is usually by exploiting people who are placed in very unhealthy working conditions and paid very low wages, as well as by causing damage to the planet—by over-extracting Earth’s resources or by polluting Earth. This is how most billionaires earn their billions.
Another thing worth mentioning is that most of the money billionaires donate goes to education, the arts, sports, and other cultural pursuits, and very, very little ends up in the hands of the poor.
I was reading about a study that was done a couple of years ago that showed that, in the U.S., only one-fifth of those donations go to the poor, and in the U.K., about two-thirds of those donations go to education. And when I say education, they go to elite schools and universities that the super-rich themselves usually attend, such as the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Now, you might say, “Well, it’s their money—let them do whatever they want with it!” But is it really their money, when you consider that they made it by exploiting laborers to the extent that they did, or by causing tremendous environmental damage?
On top of that, charitable donations in many countries around the world, especially in the Western world, are tax-deductible, which means that those “philanthropists” can pay less in taxes by making donations while donating to causes that are personal to them and not necessarily to the public. So, they are avoiding taxes this way. Taxes that would—ideally—end up with the people, who could then decide collectively how they should be spent. So, in a sense, part of the donations that billionaires make are being subsidized by the common people.
Even when billionaires try to alleviate poverty, they do it on a symptoms-level. They might give money to the poor—which is a very good thing—but they don’t address the root causes of poverty, which are inherent in our socio-economic system. And they don’t do that because that system is what supports them in the first place. It is that system that rewards them, that made them billionaires. So why would they want to change it?
As you can understand, billionaire philanthropists are not really philanthropic. The term “billionaire philanthropist” is an oxymoron. You cannot be a philanthropist while hoarding so much money that you don’t need, while billions of people are suffering and struggling to survive. So, keep that in mind when you hear about billionaire philanthropists again. And do your part in spreading awareness about the truth behind billionaire philanthropy.
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