When rights of others are old fashioned ideas

I was having an argument with a someone yesterday, the premise of whose argument went something like this –
Individual right is a western concept, and therefore it is best if the West or the Developed Countries do nothing to help stabilise a human-ist govt. in parts of world where human rights are less available than more.

I found this argument so wrong, and so logically wrong, that it might have been actually fun tearing it apart, if it wasn’t so scary. This, to make it slightly worse, was coming from a person whose organisation motto involves – removing poverty and achieve sustainable development…

I will not get into the whole discussion of “developed countries” for that is outside the point I want to make. But I thought it was fairly obvious that if your lifestyle is unsustainable if everybody in the world lived like you; then there is a system in place that deprives a lot of people of basic needs, so that you can live the way you do. This system, in other words, causes inequality and poverty. And this system, if you manage to open you eyes and look, is one that requires bullies in place, bullies that deprive all of their population of basic needs so that they can have a small number of luxuries. That the western governments and multi-national companies have nothing to do with putting these bullies in place, or at the very least, strengthening their power, is a laughable idea if you read any short history of the world.

I am not into providing solutions at the moment, because I sincerely believe it is the quality of the people and not the quality of a system that makes things work. But to think that if more than half the world is having a hard time, but that has got nothing to do with you is a lie – and well, you are a selfish ungrateful b if you can’t even see that.

PS: To say individual right is a western idea is like saying literature is an English idea, just because you have never read literature in any other language except in English.

PPS: If you say helping isn’t helping, then the idea is to replace bad strategy with good strategy; and not with no strategy!