This been an irritating week and a half. There are several causes, but one of interest is the aspect of charity. One where I’ve come to the conclusion people perhaps believe they have more of a stake in the giving of charity than political ideology may realize, particularly when it comes to collectivist thought.

It begins with the fact that POWA is running their 16 days of opposition to women and child abuse, while there was also recently a concurrently running AIDS day. Both seem particularly noble and are highly relevant matters to this country. They’re also being promoted in part by the group of companies I work for.

Similarly the department I work for within this group of companies recently won an award of cash for being the best performing one in the group this year. The amount was decent but split between all of us within it wouldn’t really amount to anything special in our lives.

It was at this point that the point was pushed by some of the senior female staff to contribute the award money to this POWA campaign. Others murmured disapproval but the stereotypical effervescent types among us got their way.

Yet, I found myself feeling upset over all of this. If my portion was to have gone to a charity I wanted to pick the charity – specifically I felt that I wanted to give it to some animal rights and/or conservation movement. I realise that a moderate-libertarian with a bit of an environmentalist bent sounds as contradictory as coining a phrase like ‘Communist leaning Capitalist’. But if past photo’s of Cheetahs, Rhinos, Crocodiles and other assorted beasties on this site are any indication, that’s my bent.

In any event I found out that I wasn’t alone in this aspect and others had their own ideas of where they’d wanted the money to go. Even if the political correctness of the event also pressurised many of us, male and female alike into silence (if anyone had openly dissented they believed they would have been unwittingly condoning violence through such actions, making it a no-win situation).

It further grated both those same dissenters and I that our contributions had gone to an anonymous corporate sponsored charity promotion, one which we’d never receive any real credit for and which the company would attach its name to. The fact that the Promotions and HR Managers in turn got the equivalent of a big pat on the back from upper management for our monetary contributions, and would appear at the handover ceremony was seen as another insult.

And never mind that upper company management were demonstrating ‘Dilbertesque’ understanding by unreasonably expecting other employees on the lower rungs to contribute to a charity they had chosen – while having given them sub-inflation increases this year. It stank of insincerity and upper management unwittingly caused bad blood.

In all a lot were upset that they lost the individual ability to select the charity and the contribution amount to then make to it. And even if some of the female staff pushing the agenda were trying to curry favour higher in the corporate hierarchy for future promotion as we suspect, it perhaps shows that even when giving away resources in whatever form, we do expect something back from it and have unavoidable bias when picking our causes. Even further beyond that, great collectivist notions about anonymous charity with directors at the top claiming the credit of contributions made to causes or ideals one doesn’t feel interested in, or at the neglect of others one does feel are deserving creates dissent.

Ultimately, what was particularly odd was how even though we were giving up something for nothing, in all its seemingly Socialist behaviour, we were behaving with a Capitalistic bent. There then certainly seems to be something greater at play than altruism and selflessness when it comes to ‘giving’.