Relieve the white burden and get involved in economics
Philosophy
2021
There is a systemic trap called “shifting the burden to the intervenor”.
It can also be called addiction. A corrective feedback is not doing what it is supposed to do and the troubled outsider sees a problem and tries to fix it. However as Meadows says
“Then the original problem reappears, since nothing has been done to solve it at its root cause. So the intervenor applies more of the “solution,” disguising the real state of the system again, and thereby failing to act on the problem. That makes it necessary to use still more “solution.”
Sounds a bit like aid, right? Aid can be described as white people giving money but in many cases ending up receiving more than they give.
Breaking this white burden is painful because it means facing up to the real state of the system. It means focusing on the root cause, an economic system that creates local and global inequality. Civil society organization don’t have to give up what we are doing, they just have take
“the focus off short-term relief and put it on long-term restructuring.”,