Notre-Dame is a well-known beautiful gothic cathedral situated in Paris. It's building process started in 1163 A.D. and took many years to achieve it's full splendor. Construction is 130 meters long and 35 meters high (counting from ground to the roof of main hall). Well... it was that high as currently it has no roof to count the height to. The fire that took place recently (on 15th of April 2019) wasn't the first one affecting the cathedral but one of the most costly fires that happened in recent years. It destroyed wooden roof completely and eventually also many items kept inside due to collapse of it. What started the fire is still not certain. Police investigation currently concentrates on electrical installation and possible cigarettes use of renovation workers. As it is highly questionable why such a historic structure was that poorly protected against fire (lack of fire sprinklers and such) let's put away what happened that day and concentrate on what happened briefly afterwards.
Public donations made by ordinary people and billionaires have pledged at least €750 millions (around 835 000 000 USD) in just ten days. That amount of money should be more than enough to completely cover the renovation costs of the cathedral. And here is where political point of view arises. It obviously looks like people are eager to help by themselves without any obligation. It wasn't the forced taxation that helped, it was just human's will to help. Obviously that will might have been dictated by the opportunity for the promotion of the donator, just good PR of well-known figures, but still - the money is there and figures don't lie.
Is it negating the socialist point of view? Yes and no. In general socialists claim that developed society has to contain centralized power that forces all of the community participants to share some of their income to help others. As long as it's not related strictly to public services but just to social programs and benefits for the poorer we call it social goods redistribution. A forced one, the one that libertarians call "stealing". ;) Socialists claim that without it nobody would help those in need voluntarily because people are greedy and bad in nature. As the opposite libertarians claim that people's greediness actually stimulates the market and growth (everybody want's to earn) and doesn't affect being good and willing to help others. In fact libertarians think that forced redistribution systems are making people more likely to ignore other's suffering as people gain the tendency to think that there are always some authorities to help the others and they don't have to act directly. Comparing this to case of Notre-Dame donations it seems the socialist point of view weren't fully right or at least it doesn't apply to that case. Even though having high taxes people are still able to perform spontaneous money collections for various purposes. Does it mean that people are better than even libertarians think? In general maybe yes, but we need to hold our horses in this single case. First of all it's all matter of publicity. Fire in Paris will always go viral way faster than an old anonymous woman begging for money in minor European city. Money spent on viral things is a good way to go viral as well. But wait, isn't this just a matter of making helping others viral? In fact - yes. And we've seen that very many times. While the majority of Internet users spent time on looking at cat's pictures some are working towards publishing stories of people/institutions that need help and popularizing them. Some even go far further and donate themselves directly or actively volunteering their physical work. We don't hear about those much though because they are too busy acting to be popular the same time. Also popularity isn't their motivation very often. Maybe we should make such people popular our self to promote such behaviors?
So how is Notre-Dame still different? Well two reasons. First of all it's iconic. It always was. There wasn't even a need to promote it after the fire. Secondly it's a religious structure. Some people may have additional very strong motivation to help in that case. Some may even thing that donating to church-related objectives will make them benefit in their after-lives. So knowing that maybe it's not a good example to start political reasoning we should still be aware that our one-sided thinking may not always be correct and it's good to validate it with what we see in our surroundings. And in the Internet era this surrounding is in fact... the whole world. In political researches don't forget to seek for facts that disproves your point of views, don't only look for facts that confirm it. And that is the main message I wanted to put in this little click-baiting article. ;)
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