Charity is not a universal value throughout history and the idea of giving to those outside your kin is mostly a Christian one. At one point charity was a very personal affair, you gave directly to those in need or to an organization to which you were an active participant like a church.

The gift was particular to your community and you knew the people it helped. As society scaled up and massified this work was mostly handed over to large bureaucratic institutions which were no longer accountable to specific individuals or communities. People who wanted to feel good about fulfilling the Christian impulse for charitable giving but could not be bothered to actually participate in a community with those in need could instead donate to a third party who would touch the unclean for them.

This separation between the giver, the organization, and the community it served introduced the principle-agent problem and made these organizations subject to Robert Conquest's second and third laws. Without direct individual or community accountability the power stored in these organizations both monetarily and in social credit was up for grabs.

The intermediaries managing these organizations became less and less interested in the stated purpose of the institutions and instead became obsessed with growing the power and size of the charity, which in turn increased their own power and importance.

The best way for these managers to grow their prestige and influence was to align themselves with the direction of the political zeitgeist. By linking themselves to the state, charities could become large beneficiaries of taxpayer funds when their allies were in power and havens for personnel and policy when their enemies won elections. These non-profits could also wield their power to circumvent constitutional restrictions on formal government branches. When their friends in government needed to push for censorship in social media but were restricted by the first amendment, they could instead funnel massive amounts of money into non-profits who would apply the pressure for them, all while maintaining the moral shield of charity.

Thus non-profit charities became an integral part of the regime while maintaining the moral and legal protections their status afforded. The artificial separation of the public and private sectors that has been erected in the American consciousness also allowed them to act as an arm of the state without constitutional restrictions. This is how the Total State is born. Managers assemble power across public and private institutions which they network to circumvent the ideas of limited government and checks and balances. The personal becomes the political because every private institution is in actuality a vehicle for tyrannical state power.

When you see Mackenzie Scott donate $640 million she is not giving it to the needy, she is giving it to the regime. She is pledging her support to the Total State.

All the world knows that I never did begin a war with the two Houses of Parliament. ….for I do believe that ill instruments between them and me has been the chief cause of all this bloodshed. I have forgiven all the world, and even those in particular that have been the chief causers of my death……For the people; And truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever, but I must tell you, that their liberty and freedom consists in having of government; those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government that is pertaining to them; A subject and a sovereign are clean different things, and therefore until you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves. Sir, it was for this that I am come here. If I would have given way to an arbitrary way, for to have all laws changed according to the power of the Sword, I needed not to have come here, and therefore I tell you….that I am the martyr of the people. I have a good cause and a gracious God on my side.

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to donkeys. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks.

Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,” Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to the times,” he said.