It's not a waste of time , except that you are working against nature and reality and so your ideals will always live on in your mind only, figments of your fantasy and imagination, while the doers are out there already doing worthwhile things, achieving for themselves and their families.
Logic and critical thinking skills are very important and do merit their own course(s). Learning how to dig a bit deeper, clarify the assertions, identify the premises, test the premises, spot fallacies, these are essential skills. Relying on them to be picked up "accidentally" through only the study of history, sociology, economics, literature, religion, etc. is completely unnecessary, there is time enough for at least a single course.
You see it's not about that at all. There are very few people who would not help a fellow human being in distress even if such aid does not benefit us directly. For example, I have given my share of charitable contributions to individuals and organisations who needed it for various reasons, from medical transplants to sheltering the homeless. I don't like to see people suffer and there are very few people in this world who do. However, I recognize that my individual contributions differ from that when applied to society as whole. The mechanisms that govern individual behavior are not the same psychological pinnings of the masses. I can give freely my resources with no expectation of return but when applied to society at large, you start to disincentivize economic workings. Economics is not often intuitive. When you start to substitute rational thinking for emotional impulses, you will understand.
but if society as a whole, through its government, decides to offer a certain amount of help you say screw them,let them die? sounds a bit emotional to me. "When you start to substitute rational thinking for emotional impulses"
Sure I do, but you and I may not have the same definition of "know". How can you convince a narrow-minded blind man that there's a mountain and a rainbow far in the distance? He wants to "perceive" it and for him, perceiving means touching, smelling, tasting or hearing. Not seeing, because he can't fathom such magical powers and thinks that the believers of the faculty of sight are all either fools or con artists. Pseudo-scientists are trying to convince the world that the only way to know is through concrete, here and now, tangible, logic-driven, replicable-experiment proven evidence that everybody agrees to (which they call objective truth, a clear impossibility). No wonder that in their world there's no love, hope, happiness, redemption, music, painting, dreaming, free-form creating, or relating to God.
Nanny State, aka buing votes with the tax money earned, for the most part, by those who want to work and create as opposed to living on the dole.