From Fake Philanthropy to Real Change

The main purpose of philanthropy is to make rich people feel less guilty.

The entire world is in a state of severe crisis. The sources of these varied crises are mainly political. We know how to distribute enough food, medicine, and shelter to everyone on the planet, but our violent tendencies make it impossible to do so. The problem with most philanthropy is that it tries to be apolitical, but political problems require political solutions. Moving some trivial amount of money from one bank account to another will not solve the core problem of certain groups hating other certain groups and trying to kill each other until the end of time. It amounts to nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Millions of people have spent countless hours identifying problems in our societies, but many of these problems are so complex that there is no one solution that will work to solve them. Each major problem is bound up with many other major problems and there is no easy way to disentangle them.

One main political problem is power differentials between and within societies. Some societies implemented varying kinds of democratic decision making in order to reduce the power differentials between kings and commoners. But our representative democracy has largely failed to constrain our violent tendencies.

That does not mean that we should give up on the idea of democracy. If to goal is to reduce power differentials, democracy is probably the best way to do that, the problem is that our democracy has been fundamentally flawed from its beginning.

Fixing democracy's flaws.

Fixing everything that is wrong with our conception of democracy will take a lot of time and experimentation. No one has all the best solutions. Here is one major thing we have yet to experiment with: using the internet to improve group communication and group problem solving. This has worked for us fairly well in the scientific realm, but not in the political realm. This is because our decision-making bodies are structured around what we thought was workable centuries ago. Now that it's 2025, it's time for a big update.

Creating new decision-making bodies that are both real and democratic as well as effective will require them to exist partially online but mostly in the real world. In order to adhere to the principles of equality and human rights, every single person in the world regardless of nationality should be able to join and participate in this new democracy.

If you build it, they will vote.

Building a new partially online democracy will take the efforts of many people over some period of time. Building a website to manage it will be the easy part, compared to the real work in the real world we will need to do to make real positive impacts.

Somewhere around 50 to 500 billion dollars would be a good amount of seed funding for the project of building a global democracy where everyone will have some kind of voice in how the money is spent.

I'm not going to start asking 100 million people that are struggling to make ends meet to donate for the funding of this kind of project, that would be beyond absurd. Instead, I will ask the 10 wealthiest people in the world to fund it because just one of them could easily afford to spend $50 billion, which is unfortunately also absurd that any one person would have that much wealth.

So, to the Zucks of the world, if you ever read this, ask yourselves, what use will your business empires and fiat dollars be once Trump has destroyed everything that made the USA a nice place to live? Eight years ago, I warned you all about the impending disasters of global warming, possible meteors hitting the earth, and violent strife that would continue to immiserate vast swaths of the globe. Netflix tried to warn us with Don't Look Up, now the disaster is here, and you have done absolutely nothing at all to materially improve human social relations (though you have managed to do immense harm), or human physical relations with the planet Earth. Since every billionaire clearly has no idea how to improve society somewhat, but only make it worse, it's time for them to let go of their money and let a democratic body manage it for the benefit of all life on Earth.