Mindless helping does it damage?

Is helping people mindlessly without thought to relative advantage/disadvantage actually a bad thing?
It seems that all my life I have seen do-gooders who believe that mindlessly helping people/ even if in my opinion the wrong people, makes the world better.

I believe that much harm has been done in this world by do-gooders.
Some of them are more insidious, and want simply to get as much as they can for their group: but represent it as being for the common good. If say people were to help people of minority races, and not disabled people, do you not create a bigger handicap in the world for the disabled? Have you not caused more harm than good?

If you agree that this mindless useless attempts to help without a plan is harmful, then how do we stop these mad damaging do-gooders, or are we all destined to in some way suffer at their attempts to help people?

You might want to do a better job of defining "help". If you help someone by buying them a sandwich, I don't see how that can be doing any harm. If you help someone by giving them a car, even though they can't drive, you may be killing a pedestrian or another driver.

Let no good deed go unpunished is going to be the new set of laws.

Help somebody save their life. What if they are worth more to their family dead?? It's just not right that you interfered.

Interfere with someone who might get disiability what are you thinking.

Stopping a robbery !!! That's the persons business your interfering in $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Yup the lawyers rule the world.

Worlds a crazy place then the lawyers have taken over.

Why do you think there's sooo many disability commericals on tv

Helping, when it prevents someone who would normally stand on their own, and hinders their attempts to do so, is when you have a problem.

Its something I Struggle with in my new area, Portland seems like a town where its Okay to be homeless, like thats an acceptable alternative to moving out is just bumming it at the parks and pan handling.

Never have I seen so many well dressed, Young able bodied homeless, its very hard for me to give hand outs to people that look well fed and well clothed.

reply to post by werewolf99


If someone is down on their luck and someone helps them in their time of need, it will be returned in the end.

There are too many people on the planet that are in their time of need. There are also many people on the planet that are needy and take everything you give for granite.

Sometimes you have to take the good with the bad.

To answer the OP's question, the national park service regularly posts signs warning park goers not to feed the animals lest they become dependent. Why can we not see that the same applies to people? If you keep giving unearned handouts to people, they will have less motivation to take care of themselves. Eventually, you have a situation like we have now where 47% of the population is dependent upon the government to rob from their fellow countrymen in order to give to them. Robbing Peter to pay Paul only works until Peter runs out of either money or patience or both.

reply to post by werewolf99

If you agree that this mindless useless attempts to help without a plan is harmful, then how do we stop these mad damaging do-gooders, or are we all destined to in some way suffer at their attempts to help people?

If I agreed with your proposal, I would have to report you for the same offense you are filing against others...

Dang... 8 billion plus people with unique opinions of their own is a pain in the booty, huh? lol!

Cheers

What is you help someone more fortunate than another person. Say you help a person who convinces others that their failures is other peoples fault. This may negatively effect a person who truly is disadvantaged: say a person disabled, who has worked hard and would have moved up and been successful, if it had not been for a do-gooder helping someone more fortunate than they are.

If you were to help the most disadvantaged working your way down to the least, then all would be well. But does this really happen? I think people are guilted into helping, or simply help those that shout the loudest. There people who would succeed who do not because of people helping people more fortunate than them.

How terrible it must be to be on the brink of great success against the odds of great disability , to have it snatched away by people helping a person less talented because they think they are helping.

We are creating a world where the likes of Professor Stephen Hawkings may not get through: because his disability would be classed as too severe for people to want to deal with, and instead may choose to fulfill a quota based on race, sex,.....

This is what will happen when do-gooders help people at random. They are destroying what fairness the world has.

Where is this coming from? What happened to you? What perceived injustice were you the victim of?

I saw an article about a homeless man who had been barred from the local homeless shelter because after 35 years he's still living off of the shelter and hasn't tried to provide for himself at all.

I guess the fact that a person can let someone else care for him for 35 years without actually taking any steps to change could be considered mindless helping.

Now he's even less likely to try to support himself than he was when he was a young man.

I think it goes back to the idea of teaching a man to fish rather than giving him a fish.

Sometimes we just enable people who hurt themselves.

reply to post by Tearman


Stop diverting the issue. Why is it so terrible top say that mindless helping people makes things worse. It strikes me that the idea that many people are not deserving of help offends you. Why should a person be further disadvantaged because of mindless do-gooders helping people more fortunate than he or she is?

You obviously perscribe to the, it's the thought that counts school of helping: the same school of thought that has put countless trillions into Africa without solving a single problem, it has.

Maybe it would be more clear if I said take money off the poor and give it to the rich: we have helped someone but the world has been made less fair and a worse place. So why is it wrong to say that people should only be helped in order of the most disadvantaged down. Why mindlessly add to the worlds problems due to, the it's the thought that counts philosophy.

reply to post by werewolf99


I like the gist of this OP because one thing I know for a fact is that mindlessness can cause as much damage as intentional harm.Of course when that lack of forethought has been put into helping others then a percentage of that help is bound to be beneficial,some will be less so.

Such random,not targeted help probably won't be the downfall of society or rip apart the fabric of our modern world but in this world where everything has to be analysed,subject to time and motion studies where efficiency is paramount.There wiill be do~gooders out there who could be applying their generousity of spirit in am much more cost effective manner.lol

The thing is how do you decide who is worthy of help and who isn't.Who makes the decision,on what basis because if you start defining the type of people who can and can't be helped then it starts to become institutional,Then it's not help but soon becomes an entitlement which is a completely different thing.

I tend to think what really matters is that the person being helped genuinely needed help and the spirit the help was offered in.Many,many do-gooders help others because of how they think it reflects on themselves of makes them feel about themselves.

I always remember the mother of someone I knew that ran a homeless shelter for her church,feeding them and giving them a place to rest and warm up for a while.She barely concealed the disgust and smugness that radiated from her.Disgust at the low-life it was her cross to bear mixed in with a dose of smugness in the knowledge she was so much better and more worthy than they,The majority of her self-satisfaction came from her firm conviction that god beamed down on her for the work she with the dregs of society,,her place in heaven was assured and you could almost sense that she believed she'd worked damn hard to buy her spot with the almighty.

To me that kind of help,although it may give some immediate benefit to an old alkie down n out and probably doesn't constitute mindless it's certainly soulless or even heartless.Help should be given freely with no expectation of getting a personal return for it (in this life or the next.lol).That is coming from someone who has no religion or belief in or time for god

Of course,where the OP is hitting the nail on the head is where somebody,good intentioned or not,helps somebody who can and should be helping themselves.There's too much expectation and sense of society owing something these days and less and less importance placed on personal responsibility.When somebody is forever helping,doing and picking up after people who are perfectly capable of looking after their own life they are definitely NOT helping that person out.Sometimes the safety net,the stabiiser bars need to be removed and people left to take responsibility for themselves !!!

Yes, mindless help can be damaging.

A prime example of this is Volunterism and Orphanage Visiting.


In Cambodia a popular thing for tourists to do is to visit an orphange. Children are not tourist attractions. This has resulted in an epidemic of fake orphanges. There is a lot of money to be made from innocent tourists, who truly want to believe that they are helping. In most cases they are not, they are just creating more "orphans".

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

reply to post by deessell


That's an interesting point.I remember hearing somewhere about this sort of volunteer tourism and I can easily believe there's plenty of unscrupulous types out there that will go out and 'provide' the orphans for the rich western do-gooders to salve their prickling guilt with.

Again,I think that ties in somewhat with what I was saying about the spirit behind the help.A lot of these volunteer holidays in the third world are about people wanting to make up for their comfortable lives by doing two weeks in Cambodia.Or another one is giving £3 a week to a charity,that way they can say they did their bit.It's so much easier than trying to make a difference,however small in the place where you live,on your own doorstep !!

reply to post by werewolf99

What would you say would be a better way for people to help others? More importantly, what should be the goal of our efforts?


Also I believe the harm caused by good-doers, mindless or not, is insignificant in comparison to the harm caused by those who just don't give a damn, or activily seek to cause damage to others, often in an effort to enrich themselves. I just wonder what specific injustice led you down this road of anti "mindless" do-gooding. Although I have to agree with you, any good-doing ought to be well thought out. There isn't any doubt that people should strive to do good though.

I disagree mindless do-gooders can do as much harm as those who wish to do harm on purpose. Really if we think of how we should help in terms of our own countries it is quite simple:
1. We use statistics to rate and rank the various forms of disadvantage.
2. We reduce these to a set of variables and can reduce the whole thing to matrix.( mathematical way of calculating
sets of things]

These steps would really be quite easy and straight forward. The reason it would not be done is that it would not allows people to mindlessly help others.

Or alternatively and even more straight forward, Rank those that are disabled first? to me actual disability comes before most other disadvantages( but does not mean they need all types of help: they should get what they need)

After that the very poor.

But people won't agree on what counts as a real disability. They also wont agree on to what degree it is a disadvantage. To isolating every possible disability to gauge its relative degree of disadvantage, and thus to determine how much effort should be expended to counter-balance it... well that just sounds impossible to me.

Or I could be misinterpreting what you meant.

I think the main disabilities are easy to agree on: a person with cancer is disabled, A person with autism, also. The main ones would be easy to agree on. I think the problem is it would groups lobbying for more than they are entitled to. There are people out there who make huge sums of money based upon being part of a large group. An obvious one which comes to mind is race: there are people who make huge sums being on the boards of groups who want more and more for people based upon their race.

If it was decided how much if anything a person was entitled to because of race they would effectively make no money out of it. I will be open and I say I think a person or area should be not be allowed anything in terms of increased chances or money given to: becaus of the persons or dominat race of the area. This is part of the problem where areas get given greater funds to develop, or comunity projects, or racial quotas: these things are part of the problem in the UK.