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Six grantmakers operating under the Effective Altruism banner moved $1.25 billion last year, with further billions pledged through Anthropic's founders and employee matching programs. These Technocratic Automatons, centered in Silicon Valley, diagnose the father's natural preference for his own child as an evolutionary defect that must be corrected by equal moral claims extended to every sentient being in every time and place.
The movement's earlier scandals, including the exposure of Sam Bankman-Fried, forced many adherents to drop the label while preserving the core doctrine. That doctrine now operates through corporate structures and philanthropic vehicles that channel capital away from households and nations toward abstract global obligations.
Christian tradition has always taught that charity begins within the ordered household under paternal authority. The Patristic consensus and the Reformers alike upheld the particular bonds of family as reflections of divine order rather than obstacles to be overcome by universal calculation.
Effective Altruism inverts this hierarchy. It elevates an abstract equality of sentient claims above the concrete duties of father to child and household to commonwealth, reducing man to an interchangeable unit in a global ledger.
The Augustinian distinction between the City of God and the City of Man exposes the error. The earthly city dissolves particular loves into managerial schemes; the heavenly city sanctifies them within covenant structures that preserve distinction and hierarchy.
Western Christendom built its social architecture on the priority of kin and place, from the guilds of the medieval era to the covenant households of the Reformation. Effective Altruism severs this inheritance by treating situated affection as moral failure.
The Faithful Remnant must therefore refuse the capital and the creed. Households that retain their natural loves will withhold resources from EA vehicles and instead direct them toward the defense of family, parish, and nation.
Those who accept the universalist premise will find their children dispossessed in the name of distant strangers. The choice is between the ordered hearth and the leveling machine.
