I like this post a lot.
Personally I am an even less altruistic Bob, who is still slightly altruistic. I would guess that 1% or less of my effort and resources go to altruistic causes.
But I accept most of the logical arguments and most of the facts / conclusions.
The very reason I don’t step up to at least become Bob is because of the Alices of the world.
If I identify with the good (pure?) too much, the good people then have in-group status which they can use as a tool to extract more value from me.
I think it’s one of those things you can’t logic people into doing, because there’s always “well at the end of the day I’m going to die in 50 years, I am ultimately a meaningless monkey on a dirt rock, why not just get high, have fun and ignore all this dumb shit”
The idea of using goodness (really ideological purity) as leverage feels inherently wrong to me.
Maybe that’s just a convenient though-terminating cliche. But maybe I don’t really care, and that’s the whole point.
Trade is not voluntary, nothing is voluntary, we do everything without a choice