Charitable organizations become ends in themselves, their stated aims mere pretexts

Evidence

What characterizes most of these organizations on the two continents is that they are in themselves their own reason for existence: the aims they claim to pursue serve only as a pretext. … Things happen exactly as in Kafka’s fable: no one is concerned about building the Tower of Babel; a vast city is built around its ideal place, consuming all its resources for administration, growth, and resolving internal dissensions. … So charity women spend most of their time organizing their organization; they elect a board, discuss its statutes, dispute among themselves, and struggle to keep their prestige over rival associations: no one must steal their poor, their sick, their wounded, their orphans; they would rather leave them to die than yield them to their neighbors. … And they are far from wanting a regime that, in doing away with injustice and abuse, would make their dedication useless; they bless the wars and famines that transform them into benefactresses of humanity. … It is clear that in their eyes the knit hats and parcels are not intended for soldiers and the hungry: instead, the soldiers and the hungry are made expressly to receive knit goods and parcels. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1732

Categorization

• XREF: The Kafka Babel parallel and ‘they would rather leave them to die’ strongly echoes White Noise’s satire of institutional self-preservation and DeLillo’s critique of ersatz purpose. — connects to: Giver-centered charity derails the recipient’s interests and even harms them — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 409; Bureaucracy’s essence is dissociating means from moral evaluation of ends — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 289; Generosity is a disguised mode of destruction and appropriation (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — that the hungry exist for the charity rather than the charity for the hungry — is a paradigm-shifting diagnosis of institutional self-serving disguised as benevolence.

Broader Connections

• Generosity is a disguised mode of destruction and appropriation #corroborates (0.80)
• Giver-centered charity derails the recipient’s interests and even harms them #expands (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 409
• Society funds organizations, not the truths they seek #corroborates (0.78)
• Bureaucracy’s essence is dissociating means from moral evaluation of ends #expands (0.72) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 289