Philanthropy is the White-washing of Theft

(originally published as a set of FB comments in response to some interesting ideas about the inter-relationship between AI & philanthropy)

My belief:

Philanthropy is a structural tool of colonialism and class power which have, historically been accrued through theft of land, labor, and resources.

Historically and variously, Philanthropy has functioned as a wealth signal, tax shelter, moral shield, power structure, ideological weapon, and PR mechanism for colonialism and class extraction. On a socio-cultural level, the fundamental purpose of philanthropy is to allow rich families and oligarchs to maintain their wealth — materially, their outsized control over resources and labor — while appearing benevolent.

I believe that understanding philanthropy on any terms other than these is incorrect and harmful. In other words, attempting to portray philanthropy as something which, at its root, is fundamentally benevolent or pro-social misses the structural role it actually plays. As a tool of colonialism and class power, philanthropy does not have the ability to solve the problems which colonialism and class power produce.

On Conservation

Take “conservation” as an example. I am not picking on this term specifically, but I think it is illustrative. Environmentally oriented folks in the philanthropic milieu often use the term “conservation” to describe the aim of their efforts. “Conservation” is positioned as if it is somehow a reaction to or a correction of the extractive, destructive effects of Capitalism and Colonialism upon land. But, it is a term rooted in a colonizer metaphysics of land: that the correct position of humans w/r/t land is to somehow “conserve” its value, not by understanding it on its own terms and inter-relating with it, but by protecting it from a distance. This is inconsistent with many Indigenous TEK metaphysical systems, which understand land as a beneficiary of and contributor to kind and compassionate human interaction, guided by wisdom.

The use of this term to describe the main thrust of philanthropic goals in gestalt is not a mistake. Money has the capacity to conserve: to orient labor and resources toward eliminating “threats” and preventing interaction. Money does not have the capacity to produce rich, interwoven communities of humans living in a state of inter-relation to land, guided by millennia-old systems of ecological knowledge and wisdom.

Conservation is vaguely useful. “Conserving” land arguably produces fewer negative effects than dumping a ton of harmful chemicals into it or blowing it up. But it also produces unexpected negative externalities: the proliferation of invasive species, massive wildfires, untended and overgrown forests, etc. The systems of conservation exist in Capitalism and therefore will produce the same fundamental negative externalities as Capitalism.

Iron-manning the use of the term, one could argue that “conservation” is merely a stand-in for the production of a richly interdependent system of land management and stewardship. If that is what someone means by conservation, then I am basically down with conservation. But I do not think this is consistent with either the historical or contemporary use of the term, nor with the ideologies of many “land conservationists” such as John Muir, etc.

Philanthropy functions on negative terms

My deeper and more general point is that the vast majority of materially powerful people I have met have some belief in or characterization of “good” which is defined in terms of some configuration of people, places, systems, or outcomes. Importantly, it is their definition of “good.”

Famously, the “good” of philanthropists include things like: “cure malaria” or “prevent childhood diseases.” These are often “negative evil” or “negative bad” definitions — i.e. prevent X bad thing. These “goods” are defined this way for a few reasons: they’re difficult to argue with (“who wouldn’t want to prevent Malaria?”), they are de-contextualized (“where is this Malaria? Oh, I don’t know… over there.”), and they are generally executed via destruction or prevention, which are the most easily-accessible functions of capital.

That is why I am skeptical of terms like “conservation,” when they are defined primarily as “prevention of environmental destruction,” rather than the positive creation of right relationship. The former can be done from a distance, through the use of Capital. The latter can only be done by richly interacting with a context.

So no, I am not fundamentally interested in powerful people “using their power for good.” In fact, I am actually against powerful people using their power for good, at least as that phrase is usually meant.

I am up for either:

1. Powerful people learning the deeper laws of harmony, which have to do with the balance of and inter-relationship between Strength/Power/Boundaries and Loving-Kindness, and then working to manifest that harmony.
2. Powerful people divesting themselves of power.

The problem is that the vast majority of wealthy/high-power individuals I have met have convinced themselves — and their circle of sycophants — that they are doing #1. I am usually not convinced. Therefore, I think they should do #2.

Divestment + Mutual Aid instead of Phiilanthropy

Instead of relying on systems or technologies to “actually win” the endless fight for good — which is the argument used by fascists and utopians alike — wealthy people could simply:

1. Join existing communities.
2. Divest their money into those communities without strings attached until their net worth is approximately on par with other members of those communities.
3. Incentivize other wealthy people to do the same.

This is far simpler, and only requires on the order of a few thousand people to orchestrate. There are roughly 3,400 billionaires and approximately 400,000 members of ultra-high-net-worth families (Waltons, Carnegies, Al-Sauds, Hermès, etc.) in the world. That is a much smaller domain for solving a mass-action problem than trying to orchestrate systems and solutions across the actions of 8 billion people.

My underlying question/provocation is: why is the focus of philanthropy always on solving the symptoms of capitalist extraction from labor and colonial violence (a problem which covers approximately the entire planet and affects approximately the entire human population) rather than simply targeting the relatively small group of people who are perpetuating the systems of violence and class extraction themselves?

(I suppose we may disagree that the majority of human suffering stems from the actions of a small group of people hoarding almost all of the wealth, land, power, and resources. But I believe that an honest reading of history reveals that this is precisely the source.)

Example: there are thousands of living heirs of the DuPont fortune, collectively owning ~$18 billion. This fortune was built by poisoning the air and water of Delaware, leading to untold negative health consequences and ecological damage. I.e. this was wealth generated through arbitrage into negative externalities. I.e. it is theft: wealth stolen from the people and ecosystems of Delaware, used to build palaces and walls to protect those palaces.

Should any of the DuPont heirs be trusted to use their power for good? No. Therefore, they should divest themselves of power.

The main problem is that they will not give up their billions voluntarily. But this is a problem we only have to solve hundreds of thousands of times — maybe not even that many, if we do it effectively.

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This is where I think AI becomes interesting. Not because AI will allow philanthropy to do philanthropy better, but because AI could potentially help us contextualize, map out, and solve the real problem: the concentration of wealth, power, land, and resources far beyond the moral, spiritual, and practical capacity of the people holding them.

Wealth Capacity

I am not fundamentally against the accumulation of power. But, it is the case that my moral standards scale exponentially w/r/t how much power, wealth, and/or resources someone has access to. In my book, someone with $10M in equity has to be 100x more ethical and effective than someone with $1M in equity. Someone with $1B must 1,000,000x more ethical.

My observation from my study of world history is that most humans who have outsized power and access to resources disproportionately use those resources and that power to protect their — and their kin’s — power and access. This generates a lot of violence and a lot of problems.

Many people call the underlying reason for this “greed.” But, I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think the reason is more banal, which is encouraging because “greed” cannot be solved, but the real (and boring!) underlying problem can be.

The underlying problem stems from the fact that each individual person has only so much time, energy, and cognitive capacity: the effective use of money, representing material wealth and access to labor, uses these finite capabilities. I call this their “wealth capacity.”

What happens when someone accrues wealth beyond their “wealth capacity?” To understand this, we need to break away from Capitalist ideology which conceptualizes wealth and capital as a pure good, and instead understand it as having a burdensome nature. Here are some of the negative aspects of owning wealth:

1. People and organizations will try to take your wealth from you, so you have to protect it.
2. If you don’t use your wealth, people will become angry at you, and your overall social capital and standing may fall.
3. Inflation causes your wealth to decrease in value over time.
4. You have to keep track of your wealth.
5. Your wealth makes you a target for sycophants and folks who want access to you and who gain that access by playing off of your insecurities and relationship to temptation.

There are certainly others, but I hope you get the picture.

To restate the underlying problem: as the amount of wealth someone has grows, they increasingly face the negative issues above, and the most common response to those issues is violence: creation of walls, hiring of guards, hiring of lawyers, separation from society, etc. This is theoretically true and also appears to be true in fact: the rich build bunkers, hide behind palace walls, and hide their wealth in the Cayman Islands.

Now, I am not trying to shit on people trying to be kind and good and altruistic. I am sure there are philanthropic projects doing genuinely useful things. I am also sure that some wealthy people do sincerely care. But sincerity is not the same thing as structural innocence. A person can sincerely care and still occupy a violent structural role.

Instead, I am trying to say that: hoarding any resource beyond one’s capacity to work with that resource harmoniously brings squalor, violence, and death. Philanthropy is the mechanism by which the rich attempt to white-wash the violence which is necessary in their continued maintenance of wealth beyond their personal capacities.

Is there good wealth?

I think the deeper question we might try to answer is: what does “good wealth” look like, if it can exist at all?

My answer is that divestment must be part of it. “Good wealth” (which I would prefer to re-label as “Harmonious Wealth”) knows its own limitations. Money is a burden. A benevolent soul with “too much” wealth will fight this burden and generate negative karma. Instead of fighting the burden, just let it go. So yes: step #1 of having “good” or harmonious wealth is divestment.

After an appropriate amount of divestment (mostly defined in terms of inter-relationship to community, i.e. has the benevolent rich person divested enough money that their interactions with the community are no longer distorted by sycophancy, dependency, fear, deference, etc.) the question remains: what is harmonious use of the wealth one has.

Again, this must be understood in terms of the relationship of the individual with the wealth to the community/world. What gifts does the individual have besides outsized wealth?

The truth for many wealthy people is: not a lot. Either because they have been rendered fragile and weak by their proximity to wealth and by not being held to high standards, or because they are simply mediocre people. The children of the wealthy are notorious for having squalid, wasteful, youths and then old age marked by “philanthropy.” This is not something they are eminently capable of, but rather a societal configuration ultimately bulwarked by the enforcement of private property laws at the point of a gun (i.e. the police and legal system).

But, for some, they do have the ability to see reality at an altitude, and with a philosophical and moral purity, that enables them to take Big Actions harmoniously and effectively (I think the most common group in this category are folks who started with little and built fortunes by learning how to lead with wisdom and kindness — not a common archetype, but it does exist).

This is where I think AI could actually help.

First, we can create a standard set of metrics for individuals which characterize them in terms of their “wealth capacity,” and use AI to evaluate those metrics. For instance, it is obvious that Elon Musk’s wealth capacity is far, far lower than his current level of wealth. It is also obvious that the wealth capacity of many people — especially historically marginalized people — is well above their current level of wealth. We can then create reports which publish these metrics. If you want to solve a problem, you have to measure it, and AI gives us the ability to measure spaces which have historically been “purely qualitative.”

Second, we can work on systems to drive re-equilibration of wealth toward a more reasonable wealth capacity. In other words, we can help individuals understand that if they are holding wealth above their capacity, it is harming them and doing harm to their communities. If they can’t come to that understanding, we can work to re-equlibrate the system through use of stronger and more forceful mechanisms. The wealthy are addicted to their wealth and, like other addicts (though far more dangerous and harmful), sometimes a strong-handed intervention is necessary.

Third, and only then, when the largest form of direct harm is ameliorated, can we think about positive, collaborative, inter-related constructive action. I think this should likely take the form of taking “wealth-equilibrated” individuals and connecting them to already-existing, already-established mutual aid systems to help scale those systems. This would have the additional benefit of co-opting structural roles of government — protection, food distribution, monetary policy, welfare, etc. — so that we can decrease the total amount of violence-driven governing that happens. (An additional benefit of large-scale divestment of wealth is that there is less necessity for a powerful police + military force to protect said wealth).

To me, this is the faster route to worldwide harmony. It has one main downside: the people who are currently in power would no longer be in power. But, as I mentioned, there are only ~500k of them, and there are ~10B of us.

That is why I am skeptical of philanthropy as philanthropy. If the whole economy is producing the problems, and philanthropy is the moral/financial mechanism by which the winners of that economy launder their power into legitimacy, then philanthropy cannot be the solution.

The real question is not: how can AI help rich people give money away more effectively?

The real question is: how can AI help us identify, measure, and correct the pathological concentration of wealth and power itself?

Or, more personally: what is your wealth capacity? Do you have more or less wealth than your wealth capacity?

For me, right now, I think mine is somewhere around $1M–$5M, contextualized by the Bay Area. Above that, I think I would be dragged into temptation, get distracted, be sued or attacked, etc.

And I think this is the kind of question every person with wealth should be forced — morally, socially, politically, and eventually structurally — to answer.