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I really liked this sentiment of Oscar Wilde on charity: “[Charity] is not a solution [to poverty]: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is t

I really liked this sentiment of Oscar Wilde on charity: “[Charity] is not a solution [to poverty]: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible…Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good…”

rcarrigan87 11y ago
Wow, need to read more of him.
veidr 11y ago
That quote has always bugged the shit out of me, because: those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students (who mostly didn't descend from slaves). For the actual slaves themselves, the worst slaveowners were the ones who whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value (or just for fun), those who separated children from parents, raped the women or forcibly bred them, and who killed their loved ones for relatively minor insubordination (or just for fun). It's one of those pithy cocktail party quotes that is complete bullshit。
- Retra 11y ago
  >those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students That's the thing, though: he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian. So if they are the worst for future generations, why would it be bullshit that he's claiming they're the worst? Maybe he simply isn't optimizing for immediate value, but for long-term value. And why would you be objecting to that?
  - Retric 11y ago
    What long term value? The system is already gone. If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it.
    - Retra 11y ago
      I don't understand your question. The long term value I'm talking about is that of the system being gone, so it being gone is a realization of that value, not a point that the value isn't there. That's like saying "What is the value in winning the lottery if I already have all the lottery money in the bank." >If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it. Or alternatively, it could convince people that slavery is not that bad. (Which is exactly the point he was making.) And now we're just betting on which is more likely: that nice slave owners will teach us that the evils of slavery can be hidden, or that they'll convince us slavery is not bad. But those are the same thing. The way you hide the evil of slavery is by convincing people that it is deserved and just. You say "We don't need to pay our employees more, because they are not Titans of Industry like us, they are Welfare Leeches." His point was that you can fix it faster if it is obviously evil, and that is better than living for centuries in a society that doesn't value you.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    Why should we care about a future sociologist's or historian's opinion about what was "worst"? It seems like the determination of worst would need to be made by someone who actually experienced these things, not someone who never experienced them or even saw them.
    - Retra 11y ago
      We are those future sociologists and historians. Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad? The point is that we are trying to do what we can now to make the world better later. It matters what those in the future will think of us, because they will be the ones with the resources to improve upon it after we are gone. And if we do it right, they will be better at handling this stuff than we are. Of course, if you actually believe things can't improve, then by all means: maximize your own happiness.
      - jsprogrammer 11y ago
        >Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad? Because they had a more direct experience of it than we can ever have. I think the (even if implicit) claim that it is better to physically harm, rape, and kill slaves than to be nice to them is highly questionable. Yes, both are bad situations, but adding additional physical violence doesn't make things better, only worse. Edit: I guess I should also add that we can never truly know what someone else's experience was. It is especially difficult to know if all you have left after hundreds of years is some text.
        Retra 11y ago
        I guess my own position is tainted by the belief that slavery is fundamentally wrong as a restriction of freedom, not as a matter of being beaten. So if I were a slave, though I would personally prefer not to be beaten, I would also prefer slavery be seen as a vile practice, and if I have to take a few beatings to make that be known, I would take them. The alternate of nobody being beaten, but still being slaves where everybody is waffling and unsure about whether slavery is bad because nobody is being beaten seems to me a bit like a losing proposition. It's the same reason we can't do effective political reform today: people will choose their own convenience when they're not facing a visible evil as a group. The last thing I would want is for people to think I got beaten because I'm a "naughty slave" or because my owner was a particularly bad guy. No, the reason I got beaten was because I couldn't choose my path. Because I was a slave, and slaves can't choose not to be beaten, even if they would prefer it. When a slave gets beaten, he or she is beaten by slavery as an institution, not by some violent individual. How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people? Heck, if we had ended slavery 100 years earlier, maybe we'd be 100 years closer to managing global warming. We don't have time for evils to fester in the margins pretending to be nice. I remember a couple years ago there was some politician saying we don't need minimum wage laws because companies already pay more than that, so the law is redundant. And in the name of "small government" declared that we should remove the law from the books. All because his favorite corporations are "nice slaveowners" who don't beat their slaves, he thinks that there's nothing wrong with destroying a very important institutional protection.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    > he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian. Then he's optimizing for his value. Which is a really narrow-minded way of looking at the situation. One would hope for a sociologist/historian to be more broad-minded than that. But I'm not sure to what degree Oscar Wilde was really a sociologist or historian. He was mostly an author, and he specialized in saying things that were counter to society's values. I'm not sure to what degree he believed all of the things he said. But in the quote in question, his position essentially is "do evil so that good may come". That's a pretty dubious sense of morality.
    - Retra 11y ago
      His point isn't "do evil so that good may come", but rather "it is better (for us) for those who do evil to do it openly so we can unite against it, rather than for it to be done with subtlety so that we remain unable to combat it."
- angrow 11y ago
  The Soul of Man Under Socialism (the source of the quote, if anyone's curious) gave me the distinct impression that Wilde enjoyed bugging the shit out of people. Who would have guessed?
- thesimpsons1022 11y ago
  That's not quite true. I feel like you missed the whole point. The audience is their contemporaries. "Good" slave owners gave an excuse to their contemporaries to allow slavery to exist. If other people only saw "bad" slabs owners his argument is slavery would've ended sooner️.
- bostonpete 11y ago
  I think it's obvious from the context that he means "worst" from a macro perspective. I don't really see why it bugs you so much -- the fact that any given person likely prefer a "kind" slaveowner, or prefer that the rich be charitable seems to go without saying.
- dikdik 11y ago
  >"whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value" This sounds like the US medical industry. We can only save you, if you work another few years of your life to pay down this debt.
meej 11y ago
This puts me in mind of Slavoj Zizek on charity. http://www.vice.com/read/youre-single-because-there-arent-enough-men-253 http://www.vice.com/read/youre-single-because-there-arent-en...
- wordbank 11y ago
  I think you meant this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g
  - meej 11y ago
    weird, i wonder how that happened. thank you.
analyst74 11y ago
That's a silly notion. If all slave owners treated their slaves really well, provide them with decent housing, gourmet food, education, social activities and entertainment, vacations, and etc, with the condition that they have to work, then there is probably not going to be a rebellion, and we'd still have slavery today. Oh wait, did I just describe the condition what most of us live in? In the end, rebellions happen when people don't have basic security. If in a future society, where the 1% people countrols 99% of the wealth, but even the poorest people get all the food, shelter, entertainment etc they need, I don't think there is going to be a rebellion like we see in history books.
- Adlai 11y ago
  Vonnegut disagrees in Player Piano. It's an interesting read for programmers, since he got the details of automation wildly wrong, but "the story is true".
- plonh 11y ago
  If all the 99% actually had the comforts you imagine, they wouldn't be so mad at the 1%
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
MisterBastahrd 11y ago
Oscar Wilde was completely out of touch with the realities of the impoverished. He was a Kardashian with literary talent.

rcarrigan87 11y ago

Wow, need to read more of him.

veidr 11y ago

That quote has always bugged the shit out of me, because: those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students (who mostly didn't descend from slaves). For the actual slaves themselves, the worst slaveowners were the ones who whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value (or just for fun), those who separated children from parents, raped the women or forcibly bred them, and who killed their loved ones for relatively minor insubordination (or just for fun). It's one of those pithy cocktail party quotes that is complete bullshit。

Retra 11y ago
>those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students That's the thing, though: he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian. So if they are the worst for future generations, why would it be bullshit that he's claiming they're the worst? Maybe he simply isn't optimizing for immediate value, but for long-term value. And why would you be objecting to that?
- Retric 11y ago
  What long term value? The system is already gone. If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it.
  - Retra 11y ago
    I don't understand your question. The long term value I'm talking about is that of the system being gone, so it being gone is a realization of that value, not a point that the value isn't there. That's like saying "What is the value in winning the lottery if I already have all the lottery money in the bank." >If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it. Or alternatively, it could convince people that slavery is not that bad. (Which is exactly the point he was making.) And now we're just betting on which is more likely: that nice slave owners will teach us that the evils of slavery can be hidden, or that they'll convince us slavery is not bad. But those are the same thing. The way you hide the evil of slavery is by convincing people that it is deserved and just. You say "We don't need to pay our employees more, because they are not Titans of Industry like us, they are Welfare Leeches." His point was that you can fix it faster if it is obviously evil, and that is better than living for centuries in a society that doesn't value you.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  Why should we care about a future sociologist's or historian's opinion about what was "worst"? It seems like the determination of worst would need to be made by someone who actually experienced these things, not someone who never experienced them or even saw them.
  - Retra 11y ago
    We are those future sociologists and historians. Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad? The point is that we are trying to do what we can now to make the world better later. It matters what those in the future will think of us, because they will be the ones with the resources to improve upon it after we are gone. And if we do it right, they will be better at handling this stuff than we are. Of course, if you actually believe things can't improve, then by all means: maximize your own happiness.
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      >Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad? Because they had a more direct experience of it than we can ever have. I think the (even if implicit) claim that it is better to physically harm, rape, and kill slaves than to be nice to them is highly questionable. Yes, both are bad situations, but adding additional physical violence doesn't make things better, only worse. Edit: I guess I should also add that we can never truly know what someone else's experience was. It is especially difficult to know if all you have left after hundreds of years is some text.
      - Retra 11y ago
        I guess my own position is tainted by the belief that slavery is fundamentally wrong as a restriction of freedom, not as a matter of being beaten. So if I were a slave, though I would personally prefer not to be beaten, I would also prefer slavery be seen as a vile practice, and if I have to take a few beatings to make that be known, I would take them. The alternate of nobody being beaten, but still being slaves where everybody is waffling and unsure about whether slavery is bad because nobody is being beaten seems to me a bit like a losing proposition. It's the same reason we can't do effective political reform today: people will choose their own convenience when they're not facing a visible evil as a group. The last thing I would want is for people to think I got beaten because I'm a "naughty slave" or because my owner was a particularly bad guy. No, the reason I got beaten was because I couldn't choose my path. Because I was a slave, and slaves can't choose not to be beaten, even if they would prefer it. When a slave gets beaten, he or she is beaten by slavery as an institution, not by some violent individual. How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people? Heck, if we had ended slavery 100 years earlier, maybe we'd be 100 years closer to managing global warming. We don't have time for evils to fester in the margins pretending to be nice. I remember a couple years ago there was some politician saying we don't need minimum wage laws because companies already pay more than that, so the law is redundant. And in the name of "small government" declared that we should remove the law from the books. All because his favorite corporations are "nice slaveowners" who don't beat their slaves, he thinks that there's nothing wrong with destroying a very important institutional protection.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  > he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian. Then he's optimizing for his value. Which is a really narrow-minded way of looking at the situation. One would hope for a sociologist/historian to be more broad-minded than that. But I'm not sure to what degree Oscar Wilde was really a sociologist or historian. He was mostly an author, and he specialized in saying things that were counter to society's values. I'm not sure to what degree he believed all of the things he said. But in the quote in question, his position essentially is "do evil so that good may come". That's a pretty dubious sense of morality.
  - Retra 11y ago
    His point isn't "do evil so that good may come", but rather "it is better (for us) for those who do evil to do it openly so we can unite against it, rather than for it to be done with subtlety so that we remain unable to combat it."
angrow 11y ago
The Soul of Man Under Socialism (the source of the quote, if anyone's curious) gave me the distinct impression that Wilde enjoyed bugging the shit out of people. Who would have guessed?
thesimpsons1022 11y ago
That's not quite true. I feel like you missed the whole point. The audience is their contemporaries. "Good" slave owners gave an excuse to their contemporaries to allow slavery to exist. If other people only saw "bad" slabs owners his argument is slavery would've ended sooner️.
bostonpete 11y ago
I think it's obvious from the context that he means "worst" from a macro perspective. I don't really see why it bugs you so much -- the fact that any given person likely prefer a "kind" slaveowner, or prefer that the rich be charitable seems to go without saying.
dikdik 11y ago
>"whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value" This sounds like the US medical industry. We can only save you, if you work another few years of your life to pay down this debt.

meej 11y ago

This puts me in mind of Slavoj Zizek on charity. http://www.vice.com/read/youre-single-because-there-arent-enough-men-253 http://www.vice.com/read/youre-single-because-there-arent-en...

wordbank 11y ago
I think you meant this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g
- meej 11y ago
  weird, i wonder how that happened. thank you.

analyst74 11y ago

That's a silly notion. If all slave owners treated their slaves really well, provide them with decent housing, gourmet food, education, social activities and entertainment, vacations, and etc, with the condition that they have to work, then there is probably not going to be a rebellion, and we'd still have slavery today. Oh wait, did I just describe the condition what most of us live in? In the end, rebellions happen when people don't have basic security. If in a future society, where the 1% people countrols 99% of the wealth, but even the poorest people get all the food, shelter, entertainment etc they need, I don't think there is going to be a rebellion like we see in history books.

Adlai 11y ago
Vonnegut disagrees in Player Piano. It's an interesting read for programmers, since he got the details of automation wildly wrong, but "the story is true".
plonh 11y ago
If all the 99% actually had the comforts you imagine, they wouldn't be so mad at the 1%

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

MisterBastahrd 11y ago

Oscar Wilde was completely out of touch with the realities of the impoverished. He was a Kardashian with literary talent.