Lately, McDonald's has been heavily advertising their Ronald McDonald House program, which funds housing for families of sick kids who are in hospital. Of course, is easy to be suspicious of such ads, since it's a corporation spending money to congratulate itself for spending money, and you wonder how much more they could have done with the money they spent telling us about the money they spent. Okay, in this case you can justify it because they're encouraging people to give to the cause themselves, by putting their extra change in the little box by the till.
How many customers do put money in there? I've had a few people warn me quite seriously that all those donations just go straight to McDonald's profits. Personally, I find that hard to believe. I'm no fan of corporate America, but I doubt they'd try something like that.
The negative publicity if found out wouldn't be worth it. And it would require the complicity of so many people; I can understand a few sociopathic executives making an amoral decision, But not the number required here.
But what I find interesting is the huge amount of cynicism that goes into the belief that McDonald's is so corrupt. I'm reminded of something I read about philosophy profs once. It was a kind of BS detector for extreme philosophical views: ask how the views affect their actual lives.
Sometimes you'll hear a philosopher suggest something radical: say, all of reality is in our imagination, or language doesn't contain any information. So ask yourself, does the person expressing these views act like a person who actually believes those views? If you truly believe that reality is an illusion, you wouldn't navigate society the way most of us do. You'd probably cower in your bedroom yelling at the delusions to leave you alone. Or at the very least, you wouldn't let it bother you when the fictional grocery store is out of the figment of collective imagination that is cookie dough ice cream. But usually, these radical thinkers go through the same actions in their everyday lives. If their beliefs don't affect the way they see the world, you have to wonder if they really hold those beliefs, or they're just trying to sound smart or maybe shocking.
I'd apply the same technique to cynicism. If you truly believe that the world is so corrupt that McDonald's steals from its own charity, that's going to affect the way you act. After all, there are countries where such corruption is rife, and the people there act accordingly. For one thing, if you believe everyone around you is on the take, you'll want your piece of the action. You'll assume you have to pay to get things done. You won't have trust in others.
And if your faith in humanity doesn't extend to Ronald McDonald House, then there are plenty of other things to mistrust. You don't even have to leave your local McDonald's to see examples. For one thing, how can you even trust the food? Do you let your kids into the Play Place? Do you trust their debit machine? See, it's just not logically consistent to live in our world which is based so much in trust of those around you, then pick out one thing and claim an absolute lack of trust.
Yes, I know the folks bad mouthing the charity box are really just trying to justify their own cheapness. But I think that opening yourself to that kind of extreme cynicism makes you vulnerable to some bad decision making. If you occasionally and arbitrarily ignore or avoid parts of society, you'll miss out on a lot. This same kind of isolated cynicism-when-convenient contributes to the post-fact situation we're experiencing. If you're in the habit of using outlandish excuses to reject entire institutions when it's convenient, then it becomes easier to understand how you break from accepted consensus.
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