Assia, perhaps you’ve read it already, but I think you would enjoy this post which I wrote about two years ago. It’s received a lot of compliments for being eloquent, and I think describes a world you would recognize: http://alamanach.com/2010/01/08/expats/#more-543.

SodStar, if you like learning on the human level, then please read this post: http://alamanach.com/2008/07/01/high-tea-in-kandahar/. More than one person commented on the “humaness” on that one, if that is even a word. I think you’d like it.

Fr. Ted, I know what you mean about people only listening to themselves. it seems like that problem has only gotten worse and worse lately. Thank you for your kind words concerning intelligence. You’ve reminded me of something I’d meant to include in the original post, but forgot, so I’ll link to it here. If anyone out there, for some reason, really does need to increase their intelligence, it can be done. To do it, read better books: http://alamanach.com/2009/06/23/read-better-books/.

Ominously, I can’t rule that out. If that’s the strategy, though, I’d say it’s backfired. One of the biggest aid programs out here, for example, involves a lot of agricultural initiatives; they’ve been giving away tractors and rebuilding raisin drying houses, all for free.

A traditional raisin drying house is made of mud brick and has extremely thick walls, with numerous narrow slits cut in it for ventilation. Thanks to evaporative cooling, the temperature is much lower on the insides than on the outsides, and the resulting raisins are nicely yellowed, and very valuable on the market. This other aid program barged in with a “better” idea, tearing down old houses and erecting new ones, built of conventional brick. They’re slick, they’re sturdy, and who, knows, maybe they’re easy to build– but they get too hot on the inside, and the resulting raisins are black and worthless. A lot of wealth has been destroyed due to conversion to these new raisin houses.

The Afghans here hate that other aid program, and we happen to know that there was a bombing attempt on their offices some time ago. Farmers have sworn that if they are ever given a tractor by these guys, that they’ll set it on fire. I’d tell you about the body count this organization racks up due to all the people it sends into harm’s way, but I try to keep this blog family-friendly. In short, they are a disaster.

A lot of what those guys do keeps the Afghans poor and dependent, but the Afghans hate them for it. Were that program to ask for a favor, they’d get a punch in the face. If we want, Godfather-like, to get Afghans indebted to us, the answer is to do things that actually help them; to build them up, not to hold them down.

Unfortunately, though, you might be right. the calculations being made in the capitals of the world may just be that cynical. It’s sad, because cynicism, while emotionally gratifying, is rarely useful.

Thanks for the historical elaboration about Plato. It’s always nice to have a more complete picture. Marx himself did use the phrase, and here are his words:

“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

That comes from a document titled The Critique of the Gotha Program, which you can read here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Critque_of_the_Gotha_Programme.pdf. The part I quoted appears on page 11.

Whether we’re talking Plato or Marx, it’s a formula that doesn’t work. Plato presented his vision as an ideal, and for him, as an ideal it stayed. Marx and his followers tried to put their model into actual practice, and ended up with the very opposite of what they were striving for. Funny how that works out sometimes…

First, from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs was a Platonic ideal, not a Marxist construction. It did not imply that people did not work, incidentally. It did, however, presuppose that there were philosopher kings running the utopia in questions — something that is far from the case in the real world. In fact, you could argue it has never been tried, given that the so-called Marxist states were clost to fascism.

My question, though, is do you think that part of the reason this kind of project has not been widely implemented is because the underlying philosophy is to keep the recipients of the aid indebted? In other words, if the recipients did too much work, then they would consider the aid something they earned, rather than something they owed and thus it would be harder to call in a favor later? I am not saying that idea is correct, but just that it might have been underneath some of the thinking. A Godfather philosophy — “One day, I’m going to ask you for a favor….”