Absolutely feel you, kinda similar situation at work atm. What frustrates me the most is that none of the IT personnel understands my frustration because most are not in that kind of IT community and don’t share the ideas behind all that. Just here to earn a dollar, whatever system we’re working on. No intrinsic desire to make the world better or at least more secure, none of that. Just robots and bureaucrats.
Yeah I think there is a lot of harm coming from that none-altruistic sentiment of having to “deserve” anything good in this world.
Just like the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” or how the saying goes and of course the capitalist propaganda myth of the “dishwasher to millionaire” thing.
It all links the basic need of money in our society (=to be able to exist) to personal effort, and as we judge ourselves very harshly by that standard, we are even worse to others. Especially because we never see their full picture, only pieces of the puzzle they call “life”, and we fill it up with the worst projections because that’s just what we presume: the other people made this or that because they are dumb or evil - the first thought I observe in conservative or extreme right minds in my vicinity. And maybe more people in any political spectrum, don’t know.
And maybe that is telling a lot about myself as well, maybe I project all that onto the society I observe.
But either way, without altruism we will never reach that Star Trek life without money and with so much unity ^^