Let's see if we can move this to some other
kind of arena... how about charitable donations?

Ok, so once upon a time there was this very
greedy miser. He liked to get everything for
himself. He heard about these charitable donations,
and was very skeptical. But then he heard somebody
mention that giving to charity made them feel
good about themselves.

Now he was all about feeling good about himself.
So he decided to give it a try, and wrote and sent
out a $5 check to a charity he had heard about.

But that night, he tossed and turned in bed many
times. He kept thinking of his bank balance
of several millions, and how the $5 would
be gone _forever_ from it. He even got up
around 1 AM to try to raise his banker to
put a stop payment on the check, but then
he realized the bank would charge for
the stop payment.

So he decided he didn't like this charity
thing too much. But he didn't want to feel
bad about it, either.

So he argued thus: People who give charity
are evil. They give only a little bit of what
they have. If they gave everything they had, many more
people, whales and things could have been saved. But
because the charity givers gave only a little bit and
not everything they had, many people and whales and
so on that could be saved didn't get saved. They
even died, which was clearly a result of the
actions of the charity givers. Some of the money given
to charity even ended up in the wrong place or was
misused for the wrong things. So it was all the fault
of the charity givers. They were killers,
who simply didn't realize that the ultimate result
of their actions was evil.

There was no way he was going to join such
evil people.

Thus having come up with his clever argument,
he felt very good about not joining
the evil charity givers.

Others of his type liked his argument, and
rallied around him.

Though after a little bit of this, normal people
saw through him and decided he was worth only
ignoring, and thereby mostly ignored him.