"The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity"

A barbed irony runs through the statement, exposing how privilege scripts a role for the poor to soothe its own conscience. The wealthy narrator presumes a “function” for others, as if human beings were tools in the moral drama of the fortunate. By claiming the poor “don’t know” their purpose, the speaker doubles the condescension: the poor lack both means and awareness, while the rich claim insight and authority. It’s a portrait of paternalism so stark that its cruelty becomes impossible to miss.

The jab is existential and political at once. To assign someone a function is to deny their subjectivity, to reduce them to objects that certify the giver’s virtue. Generosity becomes performative, a mirror that reflects back an image of goodness to those who need absolution for the very structures that create deprivation. In Sartrean terms, this is bad faith: a flight from freedom and responsibility, where one hides behind roles, Benefactor, Philanthropist, instead of confronting complicity in an unjust order. The poor are drafted as props on a stage where the drama is the redemption of the rich.

Such generosity corrodes into spectacle. Charity becomes the currency of moral display, the social theater of banquets and press releases, while material conditions remain intact. The problem is not giving but the economy of meaning attached to it: need is preserved because it justifies the giver’s identity, and dependence is curated because it proves benevolence works. The result is a loop where alleviating symptoms replaces transforming causes.

The ethical demand is to recognize other people as ends, not instruments. That means moving from charity that reassures to justice that risks; from episodic relief to structural change; from gazing at poverty to dismantling its production. Real generosity would hasten the day it is no longer needed, even if that erodes the flattering story the privileged tell about themselves.