For today’s Provocative Question, Fandango asks:
Is it more important to you to be able to help yourself, help your family, help your friends, help your society, or help the world?
I think this is another question which has different answers, depending on context.
You’ll often hear it said regarding health that you’ve got to get yourself sorted out before you can hope to be of use to anybody else. For example, I had to get myself well. to the point where I was able to get myself ready, get out of the house, onto the bus etc. etc. to the hospital, before I was able to help any patients at the hospital.
On the other hand, you can imagine scenarios where that might be far from true. Elected politicians, for example. Helping themselves, their family or their friends should be the last thing on their mind (I’ll leave you to ponder that one!), but they are elected to represent society, so you could argue that that should be the priority.
The interesting thing here is that I haven’t yet mentioned the “world” level, and I think that maybe comes in at a personal level, what we consume and who we spend money with. The first challenge there, of course, is to determine exactly what the world’s interests actually are – generally if you’re helping one person, you’re harming someone else
Mister Bump 
Well posited brief. If more politicians served more their consitituancy and the greater good. World service, you are right though, that’s going to take some serious thought. I must remember to not let my ideas on what’s good for me influence what I think good for the world. Good poke, sir.
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Very well said.
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Thanks, Sadje, looking forward to your’s!
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Thanks 🙏
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That last sentence is interesting. I guess I never thought of it that way.
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“…generally if you’re helping one person, you’re harming someone else.” So you view life (and the world) as a zero-sum game: you win, I lose and vice versa, huh?
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Give me an example of helping someone.
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An example would be helping my son move furniture from his old house to his new one.
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Well, any time you give your time to somebody, you’re taking it from yourself. Or the CO2 produced making the journeys you wouldn’t otherwise have made. That’s the kind of thing I mean.
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Your last sentence is quite intriguing. I can see there are times when it’s very applicable. Here in Canada, where natural resources abound, we regularly face these issues.
Yes, there’s quite the mix. Often it’s “Jobs” versus “Pollution” and/or “Exploitation.” If I consume paper products, I’m creating jobs but the paper mills are cutting down forests and polluting the air in paper mill towns with those stinking sulphur fumes. (Been there–smelled it!)
Years back the city of Detroit built a super high smokestack for their incinerator so that air pollution would drift away from the city. Even American environmentalists warned: we’re getting rid of the air pollution for Detroit, but sending it right over Canada. Acid rain was a bad problem in Ontario because of coal burning factories in the US — factories that provided jobs for many people but claimed air “scrubbers” on their smoke-stacks were too expensive. Tough, Ontario.
People and workplaces consume power. think of a ballgame lit with flood lights. Most power comes from hydro-electric dams, which must be built by flooding land, often forest, and building roads, clearing strips for pylons, etc. Nuclear power has proven a financial and possibly environmental disaster, especially to Ontario that went into it big. Wind turbines kill large numbers of birds.
So there you go. We like our good life; someone somehow has to pay the price.
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Interestingly our PM last week heralded nuclear as one of the ways out of the climate crisis. Short memories.
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Heaven help you!
Electric rates in Ontario are about three times as high as the other provinces — even with Niagara Falls on their side! That’s largely the result of nuclear power plants with their maintenance and costly waste disposal.
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Funnily enough, I am working my way through an audiobook on this very subject, by a Canadian author called Naomi Klein. It is tough going, but only really because she presents lots of facts and figures, which are difficult to take in audibly.
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