It's sort of like a recast economic version of colonial white savior ideology—"educate" the primitives—"donate" to the impoverished, all while ensuring the inequalities and social division persist.
In doing good, Mr Beast bring to light the uncomfortable lack of support we provide as a society.
one time payments need to be used strategically, and we know from lottery winners that many don't know how to do that.
if we want to help people we need to work on changing systems that allow them to raise their income or lower their monthly expenses or carefully guide them to use one time payments to fix a problem in their life that will have a long term benefit.
Keep on working on fixing our system, but it doesn’t make sense to complain that others aren’t when you are extremely unlikely to succeed.
the question is not, who is doing more, but whether what anyone of us is doing has any lasting effects. so it matters how the money is used. most of what i have seen from MrBeast is giving random amounts of money to individuals, which sometimes can be helpful, but often only provides short term relief. his recent examples of paying for eye surgery or funding an orphanage are an improvement over that, and if that is where MrBeast's philanthropy is heading, then i am all for it.
I also find his videos uncomfortable to watch for many of the same reasons stated here, but I don't find them harmful, and I can appreciate how he's helped these people.
Who then would pay for their pimp-mobile and bling, and the upkeep of the ho's?
We have agency. Anything could be promoted instead but instead we get this nonsense. Over time of course all this gets lost and we just pretend this is all organic.
The issue is if he was to instead start using money to tackle systemic issues then it moves beyond philanthropy and it becomes political. "I paid for 1000 people to have cataract surgery" as a video hits a lot differently to "I lobbied congress to make cataract surgery free"
Systemic change is hard and a lot of people won't want to engage with it. It is easy to look at an altruistic act and say "this is a good thing" a lot harder to question the underlying causes that necessitated the act.
There is a famous quote "When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist."