(Un)Helpfulness

Over the past few years and months and weeks and days there have been many opportunities for people to be helpful. And I am sure there will continue to be. I have nothing against being helpful. Even I have been known to helpful - though very probably not as frequently as I should. However, I really question the motives of some of these ‘helpful’ actions. There are the obvious ones that needed questioning - invading Iraq. Was that helpful? Yes - if you were an arms dealer, but evidently not so much for anyone else involved.

I heard recently about Investors suing Tesco for damaging the profitability of their shares. In amongst the various fines, investigations and acute competition from other high street retailers - namely Lidl and Aldi - in what sense is this activity helpful? Will the shareholders recover their losses? Will Tesco perform better? Will it even survive? Could this action prevent similar activities in any other company trying to protect it’s image? The answer to all of these questions is no. So who does it help? Actually, the only people likely to come out ahead on this one are the lawyers. Lawyers can fulfil a need, but this cynical action is mostly self serving and probably no benefit to anyone else.

On a more personal level it is surely necessary to examine our own motives when we intend being helpful, as much as we should carefully examine the possible consequences of our ‘helpfulness’. A recent Grauniad comment made the excellent point that flying out to help in Nepal was not necessarily any help at all. Unless they had certain specific and immediately useful skills, cluttering up the place with purposeless do-gooders exacerbated the problem. Unprepared, unqualified and finally useless they are a drain on much needed resources and divert attention from the most needy. So, this is merely an exercise in self gratification and self importance. 

In a similar vein, the amount of unsolicited ‘helpful’ advice flying around is astounding. Take a well tested example; divorce. Plenty of advice to be thrown around here. But really, if advice is not sought it should most probably not be offered. Friendship is not about growing our own egos at the cost of someone else's discomfort and pain. Who benefits here? The advisor or the person advised? There is an aphorism - “the empty vessel makes the most noise” - and when it comes to offering advice, my experience to date is that this is most frequently the case. Furthermore, walking away leaving a trail of chaos and destruction for someone else to manage whilst proclaiming “I was only trying to be helpful’ very keenly demonstrates how unhelpful those actions actually were.

So finally, on helpfulness, the key question is, and always should be, who benefits? After some thought, if the answer is not absolutely the person being offered help, then what is actually taking place is unhelpfulness. The world could certainly do with a whole lot less of that.