Your Philanthropy

How do you tell whether your philanthropy is real or not?

How thoroughly do you question yourself about reality, politics, philanthropy, and yourself?

What do you believe you need to know at present, and why? 

How reasonable is your authentic self, and how do you know?

And how do you attempt to maintain ethical authenticity with adequate consistency?

How do you identify possibilities for the improvement of something?

How do you assess the usefulness of originality?

How do you distinguish between a skill and a talent? 

How are you involved in events to prevent suffering and other problems?

How do you know when changes in routine and/or the consumption of substances and/or experiences of ill health cause people to behave unreasonably?

How do you distinguish between your political philanthropy and your other philanthropy?

When, if ever, has your reputation been sullied by other people's ill-informed opinions and outrageous biases?

Philanthropic activities always cause resentment.

Philanthropy is an expression of freedom.  It is an expression of power.  If it is genuine, it is also an expression of compassion.  It may even be an expression of empathy.

People without freedom tend to resent those they perceive to be experiencing it.

How does your philanthropy give people freedom?

People without power tend to resent those who express it, especially when that expression of power causes harm.

How does your expression of power prevent harm?

What power do you have to thwart psychopaths, and how do you use that power?

If you have no power to thwart psychopaths, why is that the case?

If you do nothing to thwart the power of psychopaths and you have the power to do so, you are likely to be a psychopath yourself, or a coward.

What do you believe to be the philanthropic relationship between authentic freedom, authentic power and authentic courage? 

How do you distinguish between essential disobedience and mindlessly following crowds?

Unreasonable ideas about faith and loyalty are strongly associated with fear.  They are also associated with distracting attention away from fear, through attempts to deny its existence, or relevance.

That is often how bullies gain and retain power.

What have been your experiences of the denial of needs and feelings?

What has happened when you have attempted to turn a bully into a non-bully?

How do your expressions of freedom, power and courage prevent bullying and other causes of suffering?

What do you encourage, and why? 

What have been your experiences as a mentor?

What have been your experiences as a recipient of mentoring?

How elegantly do you attempt to prevent deception?

How thoughtfully do you attempt to prevent mental illness, and other forms of illness?

How do you tell the difference between reasonably maintaining privacy and unreasonably keeping secrets? 

How do you tell the difference between healthy competition and unhealthy competition?

How do you tell the difference between healthy co-operation and unhealthy coercion?

How do you define a health service?

Perhaps you usually associate health services with filling in various forms for administrative purposes whilst waiting in pain for someone to take notice of your suffering.

Perhaps you have never been in such a position, unlike millions of other people.

Has your mental health relied on the keeping of secrets and/or has it been eroded by secrets?

Has the maintenance of your family relationships depended upon the keeping of secrets?

Do you keep secrets to yourself instead of sharing them with people you consider relatively close to you, whether those people are relatives or not? 

How do you assess the closeness of relationships?

How do you establish visible and invisible exclusion zones in relation to your needs and values?

How do you establish visible and invisible inclusion zones in relation to your needs and values? 

How do you attempt to address emergencies, and how soon after you first notice them?

What have been your experiences in relation to such matters?

How do you attempt to prevent emergencies from arising?

What do you know about managing a household and planet properly? 

As any real philanthropist knows very well indeed, clear definitions are vitally important.  This is doubly the case with political philanthropy.

And the best way to compose clear definitions is through asking and answering relevant questions.

How do you tell whether a question is relevant or not?

How do you define relevance in various contexts?

What are your views about quality satire as philanthropy? 

How do you ascertain the relevance of satire in relation to the achievement of worthy goals?

How do you assess aims and claims?

One of the most important purposes of satire is to help people notice problems they have previously ignored.  It is therefore an important tool in the practice of political philanthropy.

How do you assess your priorities?

How much of a priority in your life is your philanthropy?

How do you attempt to use your influence for good in the world?

There is no point in attempting to express intelligence without an adequate sense of priorities. 

Aimless intelligence has a tendency to be mistaken for ignorance, and possibly even arrogance.

How do you think about cultural matters in relation to low intelligence and high intelligence? 

How are you contributing to an intelligently kind culture, and how consistently, in various aspects of your life? 

Are you sure you are willing to support an intelligently kind culture with adequate consistency?

Besides satire, what is a powerful tool for good in the world that is often used inappropriately, if at all?

How do you assess appropriateness and inappropriateness?

How are you currently involved in continuing the survival of yourself, other persons, and other species?

How do you distinguish between psychologically compatible activities and grandiose delusions?  

Who takes little interest in whether you live or die, and why?

What have been your experiences of loneliness? 

How do you know you are looking after yourself properly, especially if other people have ever made unfair demands of you?

How do you know whether your expectations of anything or anyone are adequately related to usefulness and importance?

What is your preferred approach to investing in understanding, and hope?

What experience have you had in successfully investing in better communities, and how have you measured that success?

How do you know you have been consistently expressing enlightened benevolence through appropriately humane principles, policies and practices?

How, if at all, are you involved in the development and maintenance of relatively non-hierarchical organisations of considerable reasonableness, usefulness and effectiveness in addressing the world's most pressing problems?  

What do you believe to be the world's most pressing problems to be, and why?

Perhaps you find pressing problems depressing.

Perhaps those problems cause you anxiety.

Perhaps you actually feel powerless to address the problems.

Perhaps your philanthropy is actually a fantasy.

You may be aware that many unreasonable persons inhabit mainstream, orthodox and established, unjustly dominant groups, institutions and organisations.

Overly privileged individuals even reach positions of considerable influence within those social structures and systems.  Yet they rarely give adequate attention towards the prevention of suffering.

The alleviation of suffering is necessary, of course, but it is primarily a sign that the prevention of suffering has failed.

How do you define mainstream culture and the problems associated with it?

What is normal, in your view, and why?

What did you perceive as normal when you were younger, and why?

How do you distinguish between your preferences and your options? 

When have you most urgently required a change of scene and a new perspective on life?

How often do you ask yourself the above questions in relation to your philanthropy?

How do you distinguish between your philanthropic activities, your charitable activities and your economic activities? 

How carefully do you reflect upon your options, particularly about politics?

Perhaps you are unaware of your unimaginative habits and the unhealthy, and otherwise unreasonable, aspects of them.

Quality philanthropy is always suitably imaginative and adequately based on evidence.

Quality policies are always suitably imaginative and adequately based on evidence, too.

When have you previously found it necessary to answer many questions before answering a bigger one?

What are the big questions you are seeking to answer through your philanthropic practices?

What, in fact, are your philanthropic practices?

How, for example, do you conduct philanthropic research?

How do you provide philanthropic information and education?

How do you try to inform the public about good careers and other wonderful possibilities?

How do you identify the vocational aspects of careers?

How do you identify the avocational aspects of careers?

Perhaps you usually define careers in economic terms rather than political and philanthropic terms.

How do you currently assess whether a person is experiencing the ongoing effects of psychological trauma?

How do you know whether or not you are experiencing those effects personally and/or vicariously? 

How do you define the meaning of emotional support?

How do you ascertain true kindness?

What do you understand about your own existence, and how did you acquire that understanding? 

How do you usually respond when you encounter cruelty, arrogance and/or obfuscation?

Better communities are always associated with the development and maintenance of reasonableness, through good evidence.

How do you distinguish between the extraordinarily good and the extraordinarily bad? 

How carefully are you investing in good relationships?

How carefully are you investing in yourself? 

Ideas of taste have often been associated with triviality rather than justice.  Yet good taste can help to calm the mind and raise consciousness towards the consideration of higher purposes. 

What are the highest purposes you are attempting to pursue?

Is there such an entity as a good organisation in reality?

Are all existing organisations inevitably bad organisations?

Any organisational structure, in societal terms, is merely a set of interactions associated with particular people, assets, resources, goals, expectations and values.

What do you believe to be the best ways to cope with the world's problems, and why? 

What do you believe to be the best ways to address the world's problems, and why?

What do you know about the development and maintenance of good relationships? 

How do you define a good relationship, and from whose point of view?

What is your acquaintance with the parallel world of the second Age of Enlightenment? 

How, if at all, have you been investing in the continuity of justice, beauty and understanding, and in which contexts, and why? 

How do you usually ascertain competence in relation to creativity?

 

You may or may not associate simple living with solving the world's problems.

Are you sure you know the difference between simplicity and squalor?

Are you sure you know the difference between simplicity and ignorance?

Are you sure you know the difference between simplicity and blandness?

Are you sure you know the difference between simplicity and an excessive desire for orderliness?

Is your current way of life compatible with a simple yet comfortable and suitably authentic existence? 

 

Living a simple, gentle life never involves coercion or confusion.

 

How do you tell the difference between curiosity and creativity?

 

How carefully are you investing in simple living, if at all? 

How do you know when imaginative simplification is likely to improve one or more aspects of your life?

How can you be sure you have a healthy and imaginative approach to simple living?

 

How do you know you are a good person?  

 

Simplifying a way of life appropriately depends on the improvement of relationships between people, wherever possible.

 

Being able to assess whether a relationship can be improved or not is one of the most important skills anyone can possess.

What is the moral basis of your relationships?

What are your talents and when did you first become aware of their existence?

 

How do you know whether insight is one of those talents?

 

How do you attempt to identify and understand your various talents and foibles if not in a meditative, insightful way?

 

What is your preferred approach to meditation, mediation and moderation?

 

How do you ascertain the limits of reasonableness in various situations? 

 

If you regard yourself as a genuine philanthropist, how would you feel about being interviewed about that practice, particularly if the above questions were asked of you during the interview experience?

 

Perhaps your answer to that question would depend upon whether the questions were asked by a social researcher, in a relatively confidential way, or by a journalist, in a relatively public way.

 

If you are a social researcher, what are your philanthropic practices?

 

If you are a journalist, what are your philanthropic practices?

 

Whether you are a social researcher and/or a journalist and/or another type of person in pursuit of knowledge, do you sometimes mistake briefly perceived popularity for importance? 

 

How well do you document important occasions, and for what reasons?

 

How do you define importance in relation to events?

 

How do you know when an event is important, and from whose point of view?

 

How well do you question assumptions, and how do you know?

 

If you usually associate usefulness and/or importance with helpfulness and/or influence, how have you formed the associated conclusions?

 

How do you usually assess connection between intentions and incentives?

 

What is your usual approach to assessing your ethics and values?

What do you know about ethics in relation to rarity and exclusivity?

What do you know about luxury in relation to rarity and exclusivity?  

 

Perhaps you regard philanthropy as a luxury.

 

What do you regard as very necessary news, and why?

 

How do you distinguish between necessary changes and unnecessary changes, from various points of view, through various practices?

 

What have been your contributions to the improvement of journalism?

 

What have been your contributions to the improvement of social research?

 

What have been your contributions to the improvement of public policy?

 

What is your usual approach to improving manners?

How have you been attempting to improve your immediate surroundings, and for what reasons?

How have you been attempting to improve the planet, and for whose benefit? 

What is your acquaintance with the enlightened being of political kindness? 

There is much fake kindness in the world.  It is expressed for selfish reasons.

Real kindness is expressed for philanthropic reasons.

An intelligently kind culture has never existed as a factual reflection of society.  

Such a culture may always exist only in fiction, primarily as a reflection of the philanthropic desires of authors, or as an expression of utopian fantasy.

What do you know about the kindness industry and how it is funded, and what it achieves?

How is the state meant to protect the kindness industry in relation to purportedly free markets?

How do you tell the difference between an investment, a gamble and a scam?   

How, if at all, do you regard your philanthropy as an investment?

No investment is adequately informed and suitably ethical unless well-informed kindness happens to be its central, most essential feature. 

Of course, some people own far too much private property of the physical sort and/or of the financial sort.  They are obviously greedy and therefore incapable of well-informed kindness, regardless of their boasts of 'generosity'.

Genuine generosity is never associated with the disposal of surplus goods and/or surplus money.  It is about having proper priorities.

What does your political philanthropy attempt to improve, and how? 

How do you usually assess the compatibility of ways of living in relation to their associated locations?

 

How have you assessed the appropriate of your way of life?

 

You may find evidence-based insights into your way of life quite surprising, especially when those insights have been acquired in a longitudinal way through a well-informed, independent, comparative, global review process over various years, decades and centuries.

Do you often feel overwhelmed by the truth?

Do you often feel confused about what is true and what is not? 

Do you often need a refreshing change of scene when your work, or life in general, overwhelms you? 

 

The truth is merely the truth.

 

Interpretations of the truth are another matter entirely. 

 

What do you regard as your way of life at present?

How may that way of life change over the months ahead of you, and how do you know?

If you enjoy your current way of life, how will you prevent it from changing?

How have you documented the changes in your way of life over various years and decades?

What do you consider to be a natural life for people and other species?

 

Much exploitative marketing happens whenever money can be made from ambitions, and anxiety, and narrow experiences of life. 

What is the narrative of your existence?

How do you attempt to provide yourself with a succinct summary of its plot?

How would you describe your upbringing in terms of justice and injustice? 

With whom do you usually compare yourself, and why? 

Who have you admired at particular times in your life, and why?

If you have ever wished you were someone else, what have been the qualities, experiences and/or relationships you believed you lacked?

Have you ever felt like an outsider anywhere, or been treated as one, even if you have lived in an area for many years and were possibly even born and bred there? 

Selfish marketing thrives on the fake solidarity of fake kindness and fake success.

Tabloid journalism is a form of selfish marketing.

Where, though, is pleasant journalism, if anywhere?

What do you know about quality citizen journalism as political philanthropy?

How does your philanthropy support quality citizen journalism, and professional journalism of quality?

In your view, what is public interest journalism?