For a concrete example, a tremendous amount of money has recently flowed into sex education advocacy, some of which doesn’t have donor names attached to it.
Organizations that aim to provide resources around things like consent and healthy sexual behavior find that courting this new money involves adopting an abstinence-only approach as a mandate. As a result, it’s hard to know if the organization you’re donating to is actually doing the advocacy work they used to advertise, and they’re not always inclined to be transparent around who calls the shots from a donor perspective.
We like to think that political money lives only in super PACs and lobbying efforts, but this isn’t the case, and in some ways this makes the non-profit situation even more insidious. To be clear, I’m not denigrating all non-profit work, there are just some major transparency issues that need to be addressed.
But more generally, there is a whitewashing going on. Look at the Sackler family, which for decades got to put their names on museums, hospitals, etc. they get to go around spreading a story about how good they are while rotting out communities with their dirty opioid pushing. They got called out, sure, but how many other Sacklers are out there with their reputations unburnished?
"Money talks, wealth whispers."
George Soros and his 'Open Society Foundation' is another example.
These problems sound like they have nothing to do with wealthy people standing up for one cause or another. The issue is that the wealth is so often created or amplified by greedily outsourcing these problems to the powerless. The wealth begets more power, and institutions that launder the story of that wealth into a whitewashed canvas of do goodery.
Look at how much more political activism there is in the US during the COVID crisis. People have more time since they're working from home, and they're able to actually participate for the first time in a long while. Imagine how many more people would be able to vote if election day was a national holiday. It's honestly criminal that it's not.
And a lot of those other issues have immediate, near-term impacts on the immediate prospects for families outside of the elites, (and without regard to divisions like race), so even from a narrow short-term self-interest standpoint don't make a lot of sense tongues as one-percenter problems even as much as political messaging from the Right paints them as elite distractions from immediate economic concerns.
Any of these problems, can directly affect your children.
Let me tell you one example, my parents generation suffered much higher cancer rate than normal. That's caused by 40 years of rapid industrialization in China.
Think about it, these issues let limbo, will very likely make your retirement miserable in 20-30 years...
I have no time to virtue signal by participating in meaningless social activism. I will help individuals where I can because that is somewhere where I can meaningfully affect change with my actions.
Maybe it's my age. Maybe I'm cynical, I don't know. I used to care about these things. I bought a crappy house in a crappy neighborhood to save gas. I wasted money on a solar panel system. I planted native plants, composted and grew my own fruits and vegetables. I was worse off for it, and no change came from it. If I managed to save any resources, they were quickly consumed by some other wasteful excess of society.
Unless your activism is effective, it is useless. It is basically religion at that point.
You are also constantly bombarded by messaging telling you not to and to focus narrowly on short-term self-interest, from the opposite side of the political spectrum.
The one you view as “pestering” is just the one you haven’t internalized.