So you want to do something good?*

Idiot! Arsehole! Menace! Petulant child! Fuck you! Haha! Serves you right!

The beginnings

I don't want to go into too many autobiographical details, except where it's relevant or amuses me, but, let's just say: imagine you're moderately well off in a cash-poor area of a nominally developed other-world country, and through many fucked-up adventures and bizarre incidents you've developed several mental health issues and discovered the world is not quite as just as it should be.

You still hate the poors. What? People get squeamish. the disgust sits there, fully operational. What changes is that, on a higher, non-emotional level, you work out that it's not their fault they're like this. Poverty is a machine which grinds whoever falls into it into roughly the same shape. Knowing this does not make you good. It makes you dangerous, because now you have the desire to help and a head full of contempt, and those two ingredients, mixed, produce every specimen catalogued below.

Consider this a found footage VHS tape. Nothing in it is advice. It's a warning.

The carrion

The simplest trap you can lock yourself into is a primitive kind of collectivism, where the collective mostly or fully depends on surplus from one or a few members. You pay the rent. You cover the food. You absorb the shocks. It feels like generosity, and it is, right up until the moment it implodes. It always implodes, because human psychology plays interesting tricks here.

It never works. Everyone slowly begins to resent you. The recipients resent you because dependence is humiliating, and humiliation has to go somewhere; every meal you buy is, from the inside, one more small proof that they can't buy their own. The bystanders resent you because you make them look bad. And you resent everyone, because you're funding a group project nobody else seems to care about, and you can't even say so out loud — saying it out loud makes you the bad guy twice, once for the money and once for the complaint.

Maybe there is (I'm told there is) a healthy way of doing this as a tribe, as a family, as a community. I have never seen it. All of my attempts have been in vain. I have, however, documented some of the ways to make it worse. The toxins.

Drugs. First among the poisons, because I've come to see them predominantly as a weapon of war. That deserves its own article, but in the context of charity, drugs have some very interesting effects. Suddenly your community is ingesting actual literal poison. People die. Lives are ruined. People's very identities die while their bodies live on. The poison arrives as a gift. Makes the whole thing seem almost poetic. Sometimes it even comes in pill form, with a marketing budget, from people who knew exactly what they were selling.*¹

Gambling. The drug that seeps into your very soul. Not something I've personally had much to do with — I know I would be susceptible, and I've stayed away. Great strategy, I sincerely recommend it. What I have is mostly anecdotal evidence of it tearing families and other social groupings apart. It's honestly too scary an idea to get addicted to something you can never possibly get away from fully: it's the only addiction you can feed from your sofa at three in the morning, in your underwear, while your family sleeps upstairs, and the drug itself is money, which means there is no detox. You still need the stuff to live.*² We monetised hoping.

The malignant narcissists and other degenerates. Would you believe me if I told you a girl I tried to help stole a car I was leasing and told me she drove it to Albania? That I had to explain this to a prosecutor when she tried to sell the car and the cops thought it was me trying to sell it? Of course you wouldn't, that's insane, that would never happen.

Imagine if that wasn't even in the top 3 stupidest things I've ever done.

The lesson I took from that whole period isn't "don't help people." It's worse: some people are just already broken, and you can't really help them. In many cases modern medicine and psychology doesn't know if it's even possible to help them. And it's magnetic — it finds the helpers, and the helpers, flattered by being needed, walk straight into it. Maybe I, too, am one of the degenerates, many are saying.

The naive activism

In my early 20s, television convinced me the way to change the world for the better was through online activism. This is where I met the following monsters.

The trolls

My favourite definition of a troll is "Someone who believes that nobody ever wins the lottery." It's not cynicism, exactly. It's more of a cosmology. Success is always fraud, talent is always connections, the winner always cheated. The draw of that community is obvious once you've been wronged by the world a few times: you get to show up the nepo-babies, the unworthy elites you've come to hate, and expose the fragility of the ignorant consensus about "meritocracy" in our society. Somebody has to do it. For a while, you believe it's a public service. You might earnestly believe you're a vigilante.

Here said I! is your lot, in this space if space it may be calld, Soon we saw the stable and the church, & I took him to the altar and open'd the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which I descended driving the Angel before me, soon we saw seven houses of brick, one we enterd; in it were a

number of monkeys. baboons, & all of that species chaind by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but witheld by the shortness of their chains: however I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with & then devoured, by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk. this after grinning & kissing it with seeming fondness they devourd too; and here & there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off his own tail; as the stench terribly annoyd us both we went into the mill, & I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotles Analytics.*³

The downside is exactly the troll fallacy. Your fellow trolls do not believe being exceptional is even possible. At best, it's a self-help group of losers; at worst, it's a toxic crab bucket and snake pit. A crab bucket isn't malice, by the way. The crabs genuinely cannot imagine a world in which someone gets out, so every escape attempt reads to them as proof of cheating, and they pull the escapee back down for his own good.

"My hobby was essentially sadism," I told a therapist once. It did not go over well. Because there's a part of this that's hard to say out loud: trolling feels good. Not the arguing — the landing of it. Someone dumber than you, wrong on the internet, publicly, forever. I did it for years before I noticed. You cannot spend that long hunting for the stupid in everyone without starting to find it in yourself, and after a while you can no longer tell the difference between punching up and just punching.

A subset (possibly identical to the superset) of this is people with a superiority complex. Feeling superior to someone is always part of the trolling, but many of the online posters I see who are addicted to arguments and quarrels don't even realise that they're trolls. They believe they're the cleverest person in every comment section they enter. Statistically, most of them aren't, and the ones who might be are rarely the ones telling you.

The fame- and power-seekers, the social climbers

Viscerally hate those. They have no interest in furthering the cause; they're in it for the fame, for the power, or for status. The cause is content. Soon enough, everyone who showed up to change the world is now doing unpaid moderation for a brand with one employee.

The red-brown menace

And then there's the political wing of the whole operation, where the monsters put on uniforms.

The nazi dimwits are the most despicable of the lot. Most are people so devoid of any self-worth or merit that they derive it purely out of their national or "racial" identity. Some simply hate the poor, but do not realise how racialised poverty is in the United States — 17.9% of Black Americans were poor in 2023, against 7.7% of non-Hispanic whites*⁴ — so they end up believing in the mythical "n***er."

And you wouldn't believe how many online groups have been co-opted by them. One day you're doing pranks, the next day you're on a list of extremist organisations, because some dipshit had a grievance and nobody else actually wanted to put any effort into organising a prank group.

The 15yo "anti-imperialists." Self-loathing western kids who believe the USSR has never done anything wrong. Give it ten years and half of them become the thing they spent their teens apologising for. The other half become liberals and pretend it never happened.

The millionaires. Formerly known as liberals. Formerly known as social democrats."The problems are bad, but the causes? Their causes are very very good."

The populism-enjoyers are the least monstrous of the lot. Simply hopelessly naive and deluded. They think they're the cynics in the room, which is adorable. Every election it turns out that the silent majority is in fact even worse than the regular median voter, but it's always because we haven't doubled-down on the populism enough, again.

They hate themselves and each other. People with an ideology that is either transparently self-serving, or simply refunds their grievances.

Charity

Now the respectable options, which are worse, because these are the ones people thank you for.

The volunteer

The least controversial path here, and the one I believe to be most pernicious. This is essentially a tax that only good people pay.*⁵ When you're a piece of shit, you don't have to do any of this — the whole apparatus of need is invisible to you, or at worst an inconvenience to route around. The good person pays it in weekends and guilt. The bad person pays nothing. And the net effect of the arrangement is that goodness is made more expensive than uselessness. What a marvellous design.

And it gets worse at scale, because the piece of shit can structure a government budget so that the "good person tax" has to go up. Cut the services. Gut the councils. Then praise the volunteers for picking up the slack, and before long volunteering stops being a choice and becomes the wall between your neighbour and starvation. Keep this up for a decade or two and you get the modern day island of Great Britain, a country that looked at record food bank use and decided it was a sign of community spirit rather than an indictment.*⁶

Note what this does to the good people. It converts their decency into infrastructure. The moment your unpaid labour can be counted on, it will be budgeted against. At which point it's an involuntary subsidy from the kind to the cruel.

The Freemasonry

Every conversation about charity eventually produces a man in an apron, so let's get it over with.

The wannabe-Knights-Templars. Why does this organisation keep a lodge for politicians, founded in the late 1920s, convening in Westminster to this day?*⁷ It doesn't seem like their intentions are quite as pure as the charter would suggest. There's a type that wants to be thanked for power while wearing the costume of service: the charity dinner, the grand title, the handshake that means more than a handshake. I don't believe there's a conspiracy. Conspiracies require competence. What there is instead is a LARP with excellent real estate, staffed by men who found in ritual the recognition they couldn't get from voters.

The trash-collector gets an honourable mention, because he is the exception that ruins my theory, and I genuinely respect him and feel he deserves my gratitude. There is a man in Manchester who collects trash and turns it into gold. I know at least one member of the Freemasonry is a patron. So it's not all a LARP or a conspiracy to hold power. Just mostly.

The Effective Altruists

The rationalists. I believe this part deserves its own article/post. Let's just say I also had a phase, when I was a teenager, when I thought I was Very Intelligent, but was actually Too Smart For My Own Good, callous, deficient in empathy and not very wise. Autism is not, in fact, a "superpower," but you can teach yourself to overcome its worst pitfalls, and you don't even need to join a gang.

The reason this movement attracts that type isn't only the spreadsheets. It also provides a convenient loophole. Everywhere else, wanting to do good costs you something and exposes you to ridicule. Here, doing good is a proof of intelligence: give the utilitarian answer, and the respect and trust are yours by right of reasoning. Which is how you end up with people who believe they are owed respect and trust purely on the basis of their stated intentions.

And then there are the predators. Someone with an elastic mind, quick in wit but short on experience, is such easy pray to an old shark. Then there are some who are themselves on the spectrum, but have just enough self-awareness to be dangerous and are malignant enough to try*⁸

One of the EAs wrote a while back that he would love to know why effective altruism, of all things, triggered the mad conspiracy gene in so many people.*⁹ The obvious answer is Sam Bankman-Fried, and there is something to it: he handed every man who believes "a bad person liked x, therefore x is bad" is an argument a licence to sneer at malaria nets.

The burden of proof, I say, should sit on the philanthropy: show that it does more good than its supporters and proponents do harm. That is, almost word for word, what effective altruism promised it would do. No points for intentions, only outcomes, audited. And that is the actual tragedy of the movement: it keeps failing an exam it set itself — not because the arithmetic was wrong, but because the people kept being the harm. Which leads me to..

The gamblers - a very funny failure mode, especially since it's happened twice already. Sam Bankman-Fried*¹⁰ and Leopold Aschenbrenner.*¹¹

For the uninitiated: SBF was the movement's patron saint, a man so committed to expected value that, according to his ex-girlfriend's trial testimony, he'd have happily flipped a coin that destroyed the world on tails so long as it doubled the world on heads. Then he gambled with customer deposits, and now he's a few years into a twenty-five-year federal sentence with an eleven-billion-dollar forfeiture order on top. Aschenbrenner, the other boy genius of the movement, got himself fired from OpenAI over an alleged leak, declared himself "Situationally Aware", bet the farm on AI going vertical, and — this year's news — his hedge fund is now melting down. Coincidence? Or does a movement that ranks being right above being honest keep producing men who just can't stop themselves betting all on red.

A swivel-eyed maniac who thinks the ends justify the means is supposed to be the parody/caricature of your movement. Why does it keep happening?

Here I feel obliged to note, that I do, also, see a lot of sincerity in some members of the movement, but it's hard to tell if they're not simply human shields for the most egregious sociopaths amongst them.

The conclusion?

Accelerationism

Where does that leave a person? Join the barbarians. Let the red-brown menace reset civilisation and start over. Roll the dice again.

No, not like that. The acceleration I'm rooting for is: maybe the superintelligence the billionaires want to build will become their own undoing. Maybe this technology revolution will finally be enough, unlike the ones that came before it, to overcome human nature. This is my current escape hatch. I haven't had a convincing one in a long time, let me have this one.

This post was crated with minimum AI editing, as I was trying to produce a sample of my own writing. Some style and grammar corrections have been applied and sources were fetched by Kimi K2.8.