... down a hole.

you can't help anyone until you help yourself. i knew this beautiful girl from my philosophy classes. she was stunning and intelligent at the same time. anyway, one summer she went off to africa to volunteer at an orphanage, and the other summer she raised another $6000 through some online pledge thing to send herself to another orphanage to volunteer, this time in russia. i remember asking her after both times what she experienced, and all she really said was how it was very different from here, and how it was "very sad". oh, and another mildly attractive girl i knew briefly took a trip to new orleans to help build homes; but she ended up of course using this experience as something on her resume to talk about as something altruistic she did. i bring up these cases because they show how, in the grand scheme of things, their 'acts of kindness' were ultimately trivial and for themselves, so that by experiencing how "terrible" it is elsewhere, they can appreciate how well-off they are here. will they continue to do things or try to improve the world? do they genuinely care? as far as i could tell, in at least these two cases, they will keep it up and they do genuinely care. but how will they truly affect a "change" without enough resources? and is just caring enough? oh, and of course the kicker: what makes them think they need to make a change?

from a cynical perspective such as mine, i'd say: caring means nothing; creating a change means nothing. again, just like you said, it's all about control and power. it's ultimately done for selfish reasons anyway, based on background assumptions about how things SHOULD be from the altruist's perspective. the altruist thinks people need basic necessities like food, shelter and water, and the altruist is right. but why is it the altruist's responsibility to intrude into NATURE if these basic things, like food, shelter and water, are not readily available or readily sought after by those who need it? so it's pretty funny how there's an asymmetry going on here: people of the "first world" economies live in enough abundance and comfort to have the leisure to concern themselves with the welfare of others on other ridiculously barren continents, so much so that they (like the girl i mentioned above) will jet-set across the globe to
volunteer their time and love; but hell, not everyone in these "first world" countries are well-off, such as the whatever millions who are impoverished in the U.S., so why is it not the case that people of the third world are concerned with the welfare of poor people in rich countries? if the assumption is that we're all human relatives to one another, and so we all care about each other, that assumption is false, because the altruists in the first world care for those in the third world, but not the other way around, because those in the third world are struggling just to provide for themselves. so perhaps all this caring really is trivial when you zoom out and look at things at the macroscopic view. who notices? who dictates these moral principles? who cares? Nature is indifferent to the struggles for survival and reproduction because the struggles for survival and reproduction are natural mechanisms. Why try to interfere? oh right, the illusion of control and power.

another friend of mine, the only person i really ever philosophized with while at sd, pointed something out to me that had a major impact on how i saw things thereafter, so maybe it will do the same for you: he said there are generally two kinds of people---on the one hand, there are the ones who profess to care for others, and who "have a good heart" and want to genuinely improve the world but cannot actually do so, because they're lacking in skills and resources necessary to do so, and on the other hand, there are those who have the engineering, scientific or mathematical skills needed to create medicine, divert water sources, and build technology, but are mainly "drones" who are good at just doing the computational work as they're told to do. my friend then said how it's those very few individuals who have both traits that actually get anything done.

but again, we're left with the question: who gives a damn about "making a change"? one possibility is that this "change the world" attitude springs from the selfish desire of fame and recognition for one's accomplishments anyway. another possibility is that we're all just confined and determined in a time-asymmetric single direction, such that we desire "progress" towards the "future".

ever watch Three Kings with Clooney, Ice Cube and Wahlberg? if so or if not, there's this one scene in which Clooney's character asks "what's the most important thing in life?" and when the others give him answers he rejects, he says quite simply that it is "necessity," elaborating: "As in people do what is most necessary to them at any given moment." i like this scene because it's a clear

So your friend was saying that a baby with a hand grenade is more dangerous than a baby without one. Of course I agree. However, a baby with a good heart AND a hand grenade is likely to share it with someone else, as opposed to monopolizing it, which only increases potential damage, or as the metaphor goes, potential 'change,' which I would just as soon as call interference. Where is wisdom (the greatest director of will) in this equation? Wisdom is god, god is wisdom, the prescience of how, when, why and what. Of these four dimensions, it's the of change (interference) that concerns me most, because it's the what of change that resonates the farthest in human affairs and is the hardest to predict. Morality (goodness) has proven an awful director of human will; the only reason it is consistently chosen over wisdom is surely because it is more easily attained and influenced.