I’ve had this thought for a while now about why people have such a thing against doing good just for show. We have this weird obsession with “pure intent,” where we act like a good deed only counts if the person doing it is some kind of saint who wants absolutely nothing in return.
If someone helps others but films it for YouTube, or if they’re just doing it to look good, we call it “performative” and dismiss the whole thing. But I think this “purity test” is nothing more than an excuse to judge people instead of actually helping.
My take is simple: If you’re starving, you don’t ask the person handing you bread to pass a personality test. You don’t care if they’re doing it for likes, for tax breaks, or because their boss forced them to. You just want the bread. For the person in need, the help is real and it’s right there. The person is fed, the child is saved, the life is changed. That’s the only fact that matters, and in my view, the actual result matters way more than the person’s heart or why they did it.
If a kid’s life is saved by an organ or blood donation that was forced by the state, maybe even from a criminal, the kid is still alive.
The person who gave the organ might not be a saint, but for the kid, it doesn’t change anything. A child who needs a transplant isn’t going to say “no thanks” just because the donor wasn’t a “good person.” For the one receiving it, the help is real and that’s all that counts.
When we spend our energy attacking the motives of someone who is actually helping, we aren’t really doing anything useful. If anything, we’re just making things worse. I think it’s just a way for some people to feel superior without actually doing any of the work.
Policing someone else’s motives just creates a lot of negative energy and cynicism, which I think is way more harmful than someone doing good for the “wrong” reasons. It’s much easier to sit back and call someone a “clout chaser” than it is to actually go out and do something yourself. The “well-fed man is fed” and “perfect motivation” is a luxury that people in crisis can’t afford to wait for.
I also believe we need to move away from the expectation that a “performer” owes society an explanation or an apology for their motivations. If a YouTuber feeds a hundred people to gain wealth, I think the transaction is perfectly valid: the hungry are fed, and the performer is rewarded.
The best part is that there’s no limit to how many people can replicate this model. If we treat “doing good” as a scalable, incentivized activity rather than a rare, selfless virtue, we could solve problems way faster. Why wait for the rare saint when we can encourage a thousand “performers” to compete in doing good? If this encourages more people to help because they get something out of it, society still wins.
I really think we should stop using “performative altruism” as an insult. We should normalize it.
If we accept that helping others can be transactional, we remove the stigma that currently forces people to hide their incentives, or worse, leads them to stop helping altogether to avoid scrutiny.
A society that feeds its people or saves its kids through vanity or ego is still a society that chooses life over the ego of the person judging them. At the end of the day, I believe doing the right thing for any reason is infinitely better than doing nothing at all.
But thats just my opinion and i realize you cant really win when someone like Jimmy Donaldson still faces criticism for all the good he’s done.