Begging and the Guilt Trip Destroys both the Beggar and the Giver
There is a script. It has been rehearsed across generations, passed down through communities that were systematically stripped of the economic infrastructure that would have made it unnecessary, and it goes something like this: you locate someone you know vaguely or remember distantly, you invoke the thin thread of shared history as a substitute for actual relationship, you manufacture an emergency large enough to produce guilt but small enough to seem solvable, and then you ask for money with no terms, no timeline, and no intention of returning it. When the money arrives, you vanish. When it does not, you also vanish. Either way, the transaction is complete.
This is not a character flaw. It is a survival technology with colonial fingerprints all over it.
“I am not your ATM Machine”
A friend from Kenya told me about a woman she went to high school with. They had not spoken in over twenty years. No calls, no letters, no social media messages, not a single point of contact across two decades of adult life. They know nothing about each others lives. Then one day, the woman appeared out of that fog of silence with a story about how proud she was of my friend’s accomplishments and, in the same breath, a request to borrow five thousand dollars. Yep, boldly, USD$5,000. No collateral offered. No explanation of what the money was for. No discussion of repayment terms. Not even an acknowledgment that my friend, who had three children and was the primary earner after a bad divorce, might have her own financial obligations. The high school classmate never even asked if she could afford to give away some of her money. She could care less. The premise was simple: you have made it, and I know you have made it because I stalk you online and see some successful photos of you on social media, and therefore some of what you have is mine to ask for. The relationship being invoked was not real. It was a prop, assembled from the leftover materials of a shared childhood and weaponized as an entitlement.
The last time I spoke to my estranged father really stayed with me. I was trying to reconnect one day, so I called him. I was unguarded. He didn’t even perform the relationship first. He went on about my success recognition, like the situation with my Kenyan friend. It was not a prelude to reconnection. It was a prelude to the ask. He effectively told me, in the second paragraph of a conversation after twenty years of silence, exactly what the calculus was: I had made it, and the children he had with other women, whom I have never met, are my responsibility because he recognize my success and invoke it as obligation.
I told him I had a meeting I had to go to and I had to go. We have not spoken since then in 2015. I still hear about his welfare from other family members.
The recognition of someone’s success is never neutral in these encounters. It is always the trigger. Nobody contacts you after twenty years to say you have done well and ask nothing. The compliment is always instrumental. It’s the first move in the script, the one that is supposed to soften you before the ask arrives. Once you see that pattern, it becomes very hard to unsee it. Every unexpected compliment from a long-silent connection carries a small charge of suspicion, and that is a real cost of living in communities where the script is common enough to have been normalized.
Money moves cleanly inside real relationships, ones built over time with genuine mutual knowledge and care. Outside of those, it doesn’t flow cleanly in either direction.
“It must be nice!”
I have had more of my own versions of this. A man from my village, someone I do not speak to with any regularity, texted me some months after throwing what by all accounts was a lavish wedding in New York. He had a surgery in New York, he said. He needed help with the bill. I told him to send me the name of the hospital and the payment office details, along with a copy of the bill, and I would make a payment to it directly. I mentioned, in passing, that I was in the middle of a divorce and needed to account for every outflow of money because my ex-wife was contesting alimony. None of that was true. Neither was his surgery. I never heard from him again. When I subsequently saw him in person, he did not mention the incident and neither did I. The silence between us was the only honest thing about the exchange. He was running a variation of the script. I ran a counter-script. Nobody was embarrassed because nobody had to admit what had actually happened.
My high school girlfriend sent me a message on Facebook Messenger asking me to help pay her rent. She pleaded that she did not want to lose her apartment. A text! Not a phone call, not a considered conversation, a text on a social media platform from a woman whose life I know nothing about, whose circumstances are invisible to me, who knows nothing about mine. I have never seen the apartment, nor do I know if she really lives in an apartment. She does not know my income or my expenses. She does not know if I am homeless or live in a cave. I thought about the logic of it. If she cannot pay her rent this month, she will not be able to pay it next month either, and the month after that, and the question of repayment does not appear anywhere in the request because it was never part of the design. Had I been in that situation, I would have found a roommate, moved in with someone I trusted, renegotiated the lease. I would not have asked a married man living in another state to cover my bills. The request, stripped of its emotional camouflage, was an assumption: that my visible success created an obligation to her invisible distress.
“You must show gratefulness by helping me”
My wife had a similar encounter. A woman she had known vaguely in childhood, someone she had not exchanged a real word with in over thirty years, appeared asking for money. She came equipped with a menu of payment options: Zelle, CashApp, Venmo. The payment infrastructure was ready before the relationship was.
A bit more context: She was approached as a potential business partner, responding to a professional outreach. That’s the entry point. Since she had nothing to offer on the actual proposition, so instead of saying “I don’t have any business to offer” she immediately reframed her lacking an asset: “I know people.” Unverifiable, almost certainly inflated, and structurally irrelevant since someone who has been in the business for over 20 years without producing an output is not someone with a deep active business network. She’s describing her social adjacency to an industry, not real capital she can deploy.
Then comes the pivot. The conversation moves from what she can offer to what she needs. Bills. Phone. And then the audacity, mount it with a subscription plan of ~$500 per month ask is genuinely worth stopping on. She is pricing a job that doesn’t exist, from people she knows nothing about financially, with a recurring monthly fee attached to an activity that produced zero results in the conversation where she was supposed to demonstrate it. Despite asking for a business proposal, she can’t even bring herself to provide that because she would have to actually put in effort beyond the con. That’s a tribute structure dressed in professional language.
My mother-in-law gave her money in the past. So, the woman has evidence that she can generate money from the family ecosystem. My mother-in-law gave her money when she was not financially comfortable herself. That prior transaction is now being used as a credential and a lever simultaneously. It tells the woman: this family responds to emotional pressure. My wife’s refusal would feel like contradicting her mother’s generosity, even though her mother’s generosity was itself likely the product of the same manipulation.
My wife’s fear of what this woman might say in their shared community is real and understandable, but it needs to be examined for what it actually is. The implicit threat is: “If you don’t pay me, I will disparage you.” That is extortion. And the thing about that threat is that executing it would expose the person making it far more than the person being targeted. “She wouldn’t give me $500 a month for work I haven’t done yet” is not a story that damages my wife. It’s a story that reveals the teller.
The cleanest protection for both the relationship and the business is to keep the answer structural rather than personal. “The business doesn’t have an acquisition budget. My personal money is tied up in the business. I have no control over these things.” When it does, there will be a formal contract. That’s a business answer, not a rejection of the person, and it closes the door without creating a grievance that can be weaponized socially.
Psychology of this behavior
To understand where this script comes from, it is necessary to understand what colonialism actually did to the psychology of entire populations. Frantz Fanon documented this in detail: colonialism does not simply steal resources. It reorganizes consciousness. It creates societies in which the relationship between those with means and those without is structured as petition and dispensation, where the colonized subject learns that the only available posture before power is supplication.
What recent scholarship describes as the Colonial Psychological Complex is the set of internalized logics that cause colonized and post-colonized peoples to reproduce dependency structures long after the formal colonial apparatus has been withdrawn. The petitioning posture survives the petition’s original object. When the colonial power leaves, or rather when it reconstructs itself as economic neocolonialism, the supplicant does not disappear. The supplicant finds new targets. And the most accessible target is the person from the same community who managed to escape the structural trap.
The diaspora member, the person who built a life abroad, becomes a proxy colonial power in the logic of this dynamic. They are imagined as having unlimited resources, as living in an unbroken stream of affluence, as having made a clean exit from the scarcity that remained. The details of their actual life, their debts (bills, student loans, rent, mortgage, taxes, credit cards, medical, business expenses), their divorces, their obligations, their children’s tuitions, their need to eat, do not register because they are not relevant to the script. The script does not need an accurate picture of the target. It only needs the assumption of surplus.
The psychological mechanics that make this work have been mapped with considerable precision. Robert Cialdini’s research on reciprocity established that humans are powerfully conditioned to feel obligated when a gift or connection is invoked, even when that gift or connection is manufactured. The script manufactures connection, the warmth of remembered shared history, and activates the reciprocity norm against a relationship that does not actually exist. Susan Forward’s framework for emotional blackmail captures the rest of it: Fear, Obligation, and Guilt are the three levers. The fear of being seen in the community as someone who would not help. The manufactured obligation of the thin shared history. The guilt of having succeeded while others have not.
There is also the savior dynamic. Some people give not because they believe the story but because giving confirms something flattering about themselves. I am generous. I am a good person. I come from humble beginnings but I have not forgotten where I came from. The giving is not really about the person asking. It is about the self-concept of the person giving, and the request provides a low-cost opportunity to affirm it. The professional beggars understand this intuitively. The woman I saw outside a grocery store, dropped off early each morning in a Mercedes, sometimes with a dog as a prop for the animal-loving neighborhood, sometimes with a child for the family-oriented crowd, was not performing random desperation. She was performing a precisely calibrated appeal to exactly this psychology. She knew her audience. When a coworker followed her at a distance one afternoon, the Mercedes reappeared midday, a well-dressed man collected the earnings, and she went back to work.
There is a way to help
But here is what I think is worth sitting with underneath all of this: the anger it produces on both sides, the contempt and the shame, the way the whole transaction leaves everyone smaller than before. My wife describes it as “feeling icky, from the whole affair”.
The person who gives money to a stranger or near-stranger with no relationship and no terms does not feel like a hero afterward. They feel used. They feel like a mark. They feel, correctly, that they were not seen as a person but as a resource to be accessed. The person who asks, if they carry any part of their own dignity into the transaction, must also feel something corrosive. To present yourself as helpless before someone who barely knows you, to perform emergency for an audience who has no reason to believe you, to invoice a relationship that does not exist: there is a cost to that. Dependency learned as a survival tactic does not stay tidy. It eats into the parts of the self that have nothing to do with survival.
This is why the terms matter. This is why relationship matters. There is nothing wrong with asking for help. Help is a human thing, extended across genuine bonds, remembered and returned when circumstances shift. What is wrong is the extraction of money from obligation, from manufactured guilt, from the weaponization of community reputation against people who have earned what they have. Genuine need and genuine relationship can coexist with dignity. One person’s real emergency, brought to someone who actually knows them, who has context for their life and trust in their character, is a different transaction entirely. It is mutual. It is humane.
What the colonial script produces is none of those things. It produces a cold exchange dressed in warm language, a business model marketed as kinship, and an aftermath in which everyone involved has been quietly diminished. The person who falls for it knows they were conned. The person running the con knows they have traded a piece of their dignity for rent money or phone credit. And the systems that created the conditions making either role seem viable continue undisturbed.
That is the part worth being angry about.
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