The Spiritual Warfare of the Charity Industry By Solomon Rose
“According to the Cambridge Dictionary, “Charity” is defined as the voluntary act of giving help, money, or resources to those in need. This framing is important because ‘voluntary act’ implies that there are actors and reactors – someone chooses to do the act of charity. Theoretical and practical discussion in the sector centres around concepts like “power dynamics”, “systems change” and “impact”. This belies the basic purpose of charity. The implicit assumption is that charity is designed to benefit the recipient. If we recognise that donating to a charity is an act made by the person deciding to be charitable then we must also acknowledge that it is just one of many potential ways that they could spend their money. This framing presents charity as a gracious choice or commodity rather than urgent, necessary and primarily designed to benefit another person.
This choice creates the charity market; where people can select to donate or invest in ‘charity’ like any other good. The grantmaker, financial institution, governing body or donor buys a sense of social or moral good – they are purchasing the feeling that they are a good person, who has done a good thing or who has contributed something worthwhile. Charity sanitises the moral, spiritual or material capital of the voluntary industrial actor. This rests on the belief, existence and elimination of ‘being a bad person’. The secondary purpose is to rescue or redeem the nature of the recipient. This happens through the donor peddling shame & redemption; an inherent flaw in need of improvement that only they can provide. This is the process that recreates and mimics the plantation dynamic of master/overseer and the enslaved individual.
This industrial psychological landscape exchange happens in three key ways.
1) through the saviour-satisfying/conscience-washing of individuals and the state.
2) through extractive practices that rely on those working in the charity industry glorifying their wounds in the service of capital.
3) In the divide and rule, self-serving careerist incentives are designed for the former or present industry participants to become like the ‘master’.
In the plantation/imperial economy, overseers and owners can justify their choices based on the dehumanisation and moral subordination of those they enslaved. Donors can justify themselves as superior and therefore necessary for those with less than them materially. Their presence enriches the lives of those who are not positioned. The exchange of their capital makes those who receive the benefit akin to the property of the benefactor. They become a product or investment just like any other, and in return the donor expects to feel like a good person who has made a difference.
Whilst the imperial process and transatlantic slave trade were extractive and exploitative for the purposes of material enrichment, the charity industry also extracts and exploits the emotional and psychological landscape for the purposes of moral and spiritual enrichment. How?
Charity, in earnest, is a conditional and substitute expression of love between living souls. The process of industrialisation has meant that it has become a way for individual souls to actually work through personal wounds and trauma and replace what they feel they did not receive from their earliest tribes. This becomes the reward, when and if, our work does not create the desired outcomes.
Therefore, charity funding and impact finance does not end up flowing toward greatest need, but instead flows from greatest interest in satisfying (saviour) “I am good” complexes or (redeemer-conscience) “I am bad” complexes. All charitable work exists to serve these two interests in the souls/collective psyches of the issuer of funding. Participants in this industry are the products, designed to help fulfil the desires/wants of the issuer of funds (the donor, philanthropist, government, grantmaker etc.).
This applies and relates to the recipients in the industry – the person who becomes involved in an extractive process – which trades on them magnifying, exalting, and becoming subject to their own wounds and trauma for the purposes of an investor feeling good about themselves. If a person is being paid, it isn’t exploitation, right? But what is the real cost?
Is a person forced to trade their own trauma and pain for survival purposes, or are they unknowingly sent to participate as a product of somebody else’s desire to self soothe under the guise of being helped?
This person is a prop, in a system not of their design, forced to uphold it for the exclusive benefit of someone else. If they are successful, if they can demonstrate that the donors’ act of charity generated impact, they conditionally “heal” their soul wounds – these reappear when the conditions of “goodness” are not met. If they are unsuccessful, they are discarded by those purchasing the feeling of being good.
On the face of it, the workers, organisations and in some cases, the leaders are called to solve societal problems, often have to work as ‘representatives’ of those in the greatest need, are frequently marginalised and advocate for pressing causes that the vast majority have ignored or undervalued.
Behind this face, charity relies on its participants' exploitation of their wounds, in order to meet the needs of the industry. Workers, leaders and volunteers are asked to exploit their soul and psyche wounds to benefit those who can afford to pay people to heal their own similar wounds.
Careerism is additional evidence of plantation/imperial economics. The biggest incentives for “successful” and “model” charity industry workers or community leaders are to become what the donor, philanthropist or investor requires; to mirror their behaviours and ultimately, receive the brand of approval. It allows the funder to separate the changemaker and change-recipient by setting terms and conditions of investment and creating incentives for the changemaker to get so good at meeting those conditions that they extract trauma and resources from the change-recipient. The change-recipient becomes the change-maker’s product offer.
For the changemaker, professionalised establishment prizes, recognition, awards, commendations and validation for our work becomes the end goal. Being regarded as heroes and icons within our own communities becomes the objective. Creating a legacy that outlives us and has people remember who we are long after we are gone becomes our highest reward. Feeling superior to others’ ruining the planet or doing work that exacerbates inequality, becomes the greatest consolation.
Was the goal to honour our communities’ trailblazers and leaders by walking in their footsteps? Or was it to receive the acclaim, respect and admiration from society that they received?To prove ourselves worthy where we had previously been problematised due to our specific intersectional blend of identity.
What draws people to this work is a deep-seated question of our soul. We are born into established contexts (families, communities, nations etc.) and we arrive with questions of these contexts. The inner child of those motivated to work in this sector ask their tribe “who am I meant to be?” and “Am I good?”
Author and Academic, Dr Brené Brown, defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love…”. Without this intensely painful feeling, the charity industry could not exist. It must be present in both recipients and investors. In the enslaved and the owner.
If we accept this definition of shame then we recognise that at its core, any attempts to eradicate shame are actually attempts to gain love and feel loved. Love of self and Love from our fellow person. When our conditional declarations of love are not met we feel shame (as highlighted earlier this is the basis of the charity industry).
All charitable acts are designed to bring our souls closer to the concept or feeling of love. We use labels such as power, belonging, inclusion - all to translate the request to give and receive love from our fellow human. We have so lost hope in the possibility of this love from each other that we have dedicated ourselves to living lives adjusted to its impossibility.
The problem with this is it relies on the idea of the absence of this love. The Charity Industrial Complex mirrors the plantation because it must convince its participants that they are missing something innate. Beyond survival, this is the same process that keeps somebody seeking the authority of a master or overseer.
We must ask ourselves in what ways can we as individuals disrupt as an intervention, build the community, environment, family and home that we want to replace the plantation. Rather than centring on dismantling or eliminating it: How can we live with the knowledge that the successful realisation of our changemaking goals – will likely not be experienced in our lifetimes?
If we can identify how we are externalising the desire to love ourselves or internalising the shame narratives that we have been sold, we can become the people our community actually needs. We can identify the problems that actually need solving. When we remove self-worth from work, wounds and problem solving; we can remember our innate, unconditional humanity.
No person is an island; help and support is a very human need. It is the nature of that help that might require deeper reflection. How do we interact with our neighbours, the people in our local community, our colleagues, with those on our commutes, our relatives etc? How can we strive for higher ideals in the relationships with each soul we meet? At whose feet do we place our pain when it feels too much? What assumptions are we making about humankind that we believe keep us safe and valued? What can we do to challenge these assumptions daily and ultimately move to a higher state of social interaction?
We no longer need to use charity work to earn the right to feel good. We do not require somebody else to validate that we have made them feel good or made a difference in their lives, we know by virtue of seeing them flourish that we have left a positive mark. We can function without the plantation logic, heal our wounds independently of external factors and be the person we are asking our fellow citizens to be.
Charity begins at home.
References
Fanon, F. 2008. Black Skin White Masks, London: Pluto Press.
Millerd, P. 2022. The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story for Work and Life, Paul Millerd.
Sennett, R. 2003. Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality, London:
Penguin Books.