It is a common thing in the modern world to see people pretending to be the savior of some group or other. There are several commonly given reasons for this which have some explanatory power. They want to feel important. They want the power conveyed by some group trusting them. They want to be in charge. They want to cosplay the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

In any complex thing there are often multiple causes which work together, no one cause being solely responsible, but I recently came across a simpler and less historically contingent explanation: these people are consequentialists. (Consequentialism is the moral theory that there are no principles such as “stealing is wrong” but that every act is good or bad solely based on its consequences. For why it can’t even work in theory, see my video Why Consequentialism Doesn’t Work.)

Here’s why that matters: for a consequentialist, if he pretends that he’s working for the betterment of a mass of people it justifies everything he does at the individual level. Even a fairly minor benefit, to a million people, will outweigh almost anything he can do to a single person. The thing is, For virtually all of us, life is lived at the individual level. The result is that average consequentialist who pretends to be working for the betterment of the masses can do whatever he wants for twenty three and three quarters hours per day. (The fifteen minutes is for pretending he’s doing whatever it is he thinks he’s doing for the sake of the masses; he will need to dedicate some time to this in order to convince himself.)

This helps to explain why such people are often unpleasant if not downright nasty. That’s the point. They don’t want to improve, and they’ve found an excuse to avoid it.

This also explains why they never seem to be effective: they’re not actually trying. Plus, on some level, they probably intuit that if the problem that they’re pretending to solve goes away, so does their excuse for how they behave.