A Gnawing Worm
Governmental aid policies, both foreign and domestic, are as much designed to foster gratitude as to alleviate any woes or sufferings. The problem is that, just as they consistently fail to end the woes and sufferings of the recipients, these aid program fail to generate any gratitude in those recipient as well.
This is to be expected. Charity rarely, if ever, breeds gratitude; it breeds resentment instead.
It’s not as if this wasn’t understood for a long time – well over a century, in point of existential fact.
Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 93
Say what you want against Nietzsche – and there’s a lot to say against him – but he had a good and solid understanding of the baser instincts, reactions, beliefs, and behaviors of Man.
At a purely unconscious and visceral level – bermenschen they’re not – even the Liberals understand this basic truth. That’s why they couch their program in terms of “entitlements” and “rights.” They seek to deflect the anger of those their supporting unto their enemies by projecting the indebtedness onto those they seek to force to fund such largess.
Charity perforce spawns indebtedness and this will almost always result in the gnawing worm of resentment in the receiver which, like all infections, will fester and grow. One can, like the Liberals and Progressives, deflect it for one’s own gain but one cannot change the underlying sad truth of it.
Until this is fully realized, the government will continue, both foreign and domestically, through good money after bad to no beneficial effect beyond possibly keeping their own jobs for another term.
Tags: Charity | Debt | Hate | Nietzsche | Philosophy | Pity | Politics | Society
February 22nd, 2012 at 2:44 pm
God is dead….Nietzsche ………..Nietzsche is dead…..God.