I phone banked on two Sanders campaigns. This didn’t start with Trump or even in most of our lifetimes. Both parties, and yes most voters of both of them, would rather set the country on fire than have anything resembling economic equity or someone having their basic needs met without a subjective judgement of “deserving” it. We could have ended homelessness inexpensively at any time under any administration, we could have made prison rehabilitative, it would have literally saved the country money to invest in both, yet I’ve heard more Democrats and Republicans speak of such desperate populations as the problem instead of the society that put them there.
This collapse was a choice we made over and over again.
Yeah I think there is a lot of harm coming from that none-altruistic sentiment of having to “deserve” anything good in this world.
Just like the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” or how the saying goes and of course the capitalist propaganda myth of the “dishwasher to millionaire” thing.
It all links the basic need of money in our society (=to be able to exist) to personal effort, and as we judge ourselves very harshly by that standard, we are even worse to others. Especially because we never see their full picture, only pieces of the puzzle they call “life”, and we fill it up with the worst projections because that’s just what we presume: the other people made this or that because they are dumb or evil - the first thought I observe in conservative or extreme right minds in my vicinity. And maybe more people in any political spectrum, don’t know.
And maybe that is telling a lot about myself as well, maybe I project all that onto the society I observe.
But either way, without altruism we will never reach that Star Trek life without money and with so much unity ^^