[...] Now LSD has joined the ranks of green tea, Adderall, and various over-the-counter supplements as a mind- and life-enhancer. It has been integrated into a performance-obsessed culture that demands everything be done better and faster than it was before. The suburban kid cramming for his SATs, the startup employee faced with a weekend of coding, the wealthy stay-at-home mom managing three kids—these striving souls all want to be better, and all have the resources to achieve betterness. The tripping hippie and the venture capitalist are both trying to be better, too: one’s just sifting through time and the other’s sifting through investment proposals. The impact on America? Another rung of inaccessibility separating the commoners from the blissed-out bourgeoisie.

Over at the United Nations, whose member organization UNAIDS recently lost its deputy executive director Luiz Loures amid allegations that he sexually assaulted a female colleague, there is a similar official minuet of remorse and remonstration. Indeed, Newsweek reported in August that eight male complainants alleged that UN official Ravi Karkara sexually harassed them on the job. The quasi-Orwellian twist here is that Karkara heads up the agency’s iniitiative for the global empowerment of women—against, say, things like sexual harassment. Weary observers of the Western aid scandals can by now fill in the blanks themselves: promises to investigate, earnest assurances of better vetting to come, a pledge to bolster protocols of internal reporting, and similar refrains of collective reassurance ring through tense hallways frequented by grim-faced aid bureaucrats.

Like the organizations themselves, the recommendations for reform are thick with jargon, and billowing with vague talk of improved bureaucratic vigilance and executive transparency. All this will be carried out at great expense, and after a great passage of time—the sum of it all designed to drag out the underlying allegations until they’ve mostly been forgotten.

In this respect, aid work parallels the culture of abuse that has taken root within the private-sector world of military contracting, which also operates in a netherzone of blurry-at-best jurisdictional authority and agency oversight. And it’s long been true that the personality profile of swashbuckling Western male aid workers uncomfortably echoes that of their counterparts in the demimonde of global private soldiering—both kinds of aspiring Western savior figures share an unswerving faith in their own personal heroism and the superior virtue of their mission, while regarding the legal protocols of accountability in their host countries with a certain studied contempt.

Humanitarian aid workers are indeed deployed as the charitable equivalent of diplomatic “honest brokers.” Their broader social function is to connect those who look at catastrophe from the comfortable distance of the West and those everywhere else who must actually live amid its aftermath. The trucks full of food, tents, and medical supplies are evidence that the blessed of the world are “doing something.” In sending aid, Western governments and their citizens can feel a bit less embarrassed about their wealth and good fortune and assure themselves that they are indeed, still and forever, the “good guys.”