Your first responsibility is to take care of yourself, so you won't be a burden to other people. If you don't do at least that, how can you be so arrogant as to think you can help others? You make progress by adapting to your own nature. In Rabelais' Gargantua the Abbey of Theleme had the motto: Fay ce que vouldras, or "Do as you will." Rabelais (unlike the Book of Judges) treats this in a very positive light. The implication is: Don't go seeking after some ideal far removed from your own needs. Don't get involved in some crusade to save the human race--because you falsely think that is the noble thing to do--when what you may really want to do, if you are honest with yourself, is to stay home, grow vegetables, and sell them in a roadside market. (Growing vegetables is, after all, real growth--more so than some New Age conceptions.) You have no obligation under the sun other than to discover your real needs, to fulfill them, and to rejoice in doing so.

In this approach you give other people the right to make their own choices, but you also hold them responsible for the consequences. Most social "problems", after all, are a function of the choices people make, and are therefore insolvable in principle, except by coercion. One is not under any obligation to make up for the effects of other people's decisions. If, for example, people (poor or rich, educated or not) have children they can't care for or feed, one has no responsibility to make up for their negligence or to take on one's own shoulders responsibility for the consequent suffering. You can, if you wish, if you want to become a martyr. If you are looking to become a martyr, the world will gladly oblige, and then calmly carry on as before, the "problems" unaltered.

One may, of course, choose to help the rest of the world to the extent that one is able, assuming one knows how. But it is a choice, not an obligation. Modern political correctness and prostituted religion have tried to turn all of what used to be considered virtues into social obligations. Not that anyone is expected to really practice what they preach; rather it is intended they feel guilty for not doing so, and once the guilt trip is underway, their behavior can be manipulated for political purposes.