Desperate to help you

If you’ve spent any amount of time on the internet, you’ll have come across people either volunteering information or doing their best to help others in one way or the other even at a loss to themselves. You would discover something known as “open source” which basically means getting someone’s work for free, something they could charge for a fee is made available to the world completely free of charge, you could even just take it and commercialize it for yourself. The altruistic nature of humans is quite amazing and even people who don’t have a lot going for themselves still share this mindset, its amazing to say the least. Countless books written to educate people, countless philanthropes across the world donating all of their resources, countless persons sacrificing their lives to help others, countless selfless persons. I’ve also been in that position to a certain extent and today, I want to talk about my experience.

For the most part my experience has been positive, I’ve got the chance to help the very few I can and the reception has been great, I think there are many people who are in need of help and I believe much more can be done to help. There is really no shortage of evil in the world so we can use all of the goodness we can get. I think to an extent there are even people who don’t know they need help, people who’ve gone for quite a while in their suffering that they’ve given up on receiving help from anyone.

The community is made up of such a diverse group of persons and in that you can even find people who don’t want help, they see it as a sign of weakness and instead want to overcome their hardships by themselves. You can also find people who have the ability to help others but believe that everyone should fend for themselves and not rely on handouts from others.

Fairness, Equity, Equality

One thing we can all agree on is that the world isn’t a fair place, no country nor community is but I think we strive to move towards that collectively. Depending on where and when you are born your chances of fairness are already thrown out of the window, In this day and age, your skin color, tribe, nationality, social status etc all play a role in what you will be able to do in your life. Added to that there are structural and systemic barriers which limit what you’ll be able to do, where you’ll be able to go and much more. Your level of education, your access to resources, your environment all play a very crucial role in making this world unfair for you whether you want it or not. The idea of fairness, equity and equality can’t work when there are so many factors which all play a role in making this not work, even in your mind, fairness is such a foreign concept you have a hard time imagining. To make matters worse, fairness would have to be at odds with meritocracy which is another pillar we would like to keep around since it would be difficult to be fair while ignoring the work some have already put in. I could go on about all these things which make fairness in the world impossible but I think you get the point.

Now that you realize (hopefully) that its difficult for the world to be a fair place, its important that we find something to make it a little better, something which could put disadvantaged persons at better odds with people who’ve had it good all along and that’s where the idea of helping others comes into place. Its true that we have exceptional people who have been able to beat the odds and work so hard that they’ve been able to overcome all these barriers but that doesn’t make it the norm like the media and the rich try to paint it out to be.

One person who survived the lion’s attack doesn’t mean everybody else who goes in there has the same chances for survival. The problem is that the person who survived the lion attack would go out and start telling everybody else that they can do it which is utterly false.

What makes a rule, or a norm is when an experiment can be repeated consistently when the same conditions are applied, so its not because a couple of people who were disadvantaged were able to make it that it implies everybody else would.

We all need help

In one way or the other, we all need help. Some definitely need much more help than others but I don’t think there is a group of individuals we can classify as being beyond needing help. Many people who through sheer hard work alone have been able to overcome their hardships now have a hard time acknowledging the importance of helping others. They attribute their success solely on their hard work which isn’t true, at some point they did receive some help, whether its a favor they called in or a person admirative of their work and seeking to push it forward. I think their main concern is the fact that people might seek to abuse of this help and give up all together putting in the effort, they also feel a sense of unfairness given that they had to suffer and helping others would make light of all the struggles they went through. Thats why they’ll rather see everybody else suffer than let the struggle be made easier for everyone. It somehow feeds into their ego aswell.

Conclusion

Helping others is a way of making this world a little fairer for everybody, we aren’t all born with the same chances or odds and there are barriers constantly digging the divide between what we can all do. Without the active participation of others to help the disadvantaged then some people would be still very backward.

A good example of this is the work the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation put in to eradicating malaria from Africa. This is the number 1 killer disease in Africa and so you can imagine how many lives that foundation has saved through their work making treatment accessible.

Is it fair that the mortality rate of malaria in western countries is close to 0% and that of Africa was closer to 95%? No

Without help would Africa have been able to eradicate it by itself? unlikely

The help these philanthropes gave is certainly what made the world a little fairer for Africans and I think without that help they would be in a much more dire situation. We all need help because the world isn’t a fair place and I hope we get many more people willing to help others.

Thanks for reading ☺️

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