Ewan Morrison’s ‘Psychology Today” piece [Hat tip @JaniceFiamengo] flows from a painfully deep reservoir of a childhood that inflicted trauma, the “unintended consequences” of his hippy-parent’s “ideals.” https://twitter.com/PsychToday/status/1119722660454387713

Should be required reading for ALL who subscribe to the Good Intentions fallacy. And voters. Outcomes MATTER!

Note:

Morrison is no ham-fisted basher of ALL good-intentions or well-intentioned idealists. Rather, he aims his scathing indictment at the lack of caution/concern common in idealistic stances, failures to examine outcomes of good intentions

AND..........

& the echo-chambered virtue-signaling that propels the rotting ship forward.

He notes; “The west’s largest attempt at declaring our good intentions on a world scale was Live Aid (1985). It pains us to question the real outcomes of that great charity event. “

He also quotes a line in Spin mag about Bob Geldorf/Live Aid’s deadly intersection w/Ethiopian dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam: “the use of the charitable money by unmistakably the world's most brutal dictator, and the naive, hubris drenched complicity of Live and [Bob] Geldof"

Reminds me of a Spiegel interview I saw at the time w/Kenyan economist, James Shikwati who said something along the line of,“For God’s sake, stop the aid you're killing us!”Shikwati spoke about the way pharmaceutical aid crushed the fledgling pharmaceutical industry in Africa.

Later that day, I ran into a nun asking for money to send pharmaceuticals to Africa.

She truly had the BEST intentions.

The hubris-drenched complicity coupled w/good-intentions connection, so integral to our media/political scape, keeps recreating cruelty. In Bolivia. In Zambia. In Ghana. In inner-cities. In schools. In families. In workplaces. In life.

Alas, as this article poses, ”And when do you ever ever hear politicians admit they were wrong, especially when they are spectacularly wrong and billions have been blown?” The same question could be posed of us all. https://unherd.com/2018/10/charity-guru-duped-world/

The other day, my daughter told me that I overly-coddled our dog, Jake, during thunderstorms such that I imparted a sense of disaster, not normalcy. She felt that an insouciant aura might convey the possibility of survival to him more effectively.

But damnit! I had the best of intentions. Truly……………….

So did Mao!