line of shame

"Thousands upon thousands are yearly brought into a state of real poverty by their great anxiety not to be thought poor." --William Cobbett (1763 – 1835)


Lost causes are my secret love. Erasing the dividing line between the rich and the poor is my favorite. But, what am I talking about?

Hardly anything is as difficult to define as the line that separates the poor and the rich. Tell me what it is exactly, where you think this ominous line is located, and I am confident we won't find a second human being who agrees with you.

That is one third of the problem.

The second problematic part is that some individuals insist on the existence of a poverty-wealth chasm, and they are determined to alter its position toward equality. Something we cannot define is supposed to be moved from one mythical location to another.

The possible consequences of such endeavor make me shudder. Nothing useful can come from it. On the contrary, well-intentioned help often helps the helper more than anybody else, and it fosters "the very culture of dependence [it] so desperately needs to break." (Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, in a recent article "To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid")

Oh, you mean equality can be defined and it is not a vague concept at all? True, but that's not the kind of equality the noble equalizers have in mind. Remember Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." People love to share other people's money but, when that is gone, they loathe sharing everybody's lack. Taking money from "the rich" and giving it to "the poor" never includes the money of those who ask for such preposterous transactions.

At any rate, here is the worst portion of the tricky rich-poor dilemma: talking about both the rich and the poor is a form of discrimination! All notorious consequences of prejudice are included. "The poor are..." Go ahead and fill in the blanks. "They should..." "The rich are..." "They really ought to..." Whatever you say, it'll be a generalizing label and as false as the numbers on your last lottery ticket.

Seasoning one's speech with rich-poor remarks--to support the poor by taxing the rich, for instance, or to elevate poverty to a status of moral superiority--means one of three things:

a) For the purpose of the greater good, naturally, you expect to gain political mileage from evoking cheap emotions in your audience. You don't hesitate to shamelessly exploit those you claim to defend and, since you recklessly accuse random bystanders of being culprits, you have no real interest to improve the status quo of those in need.

b) You are a faithful of the zero-sum religion and secretly you believe the earth is flat.

c) You are channeling your mom.

Incredibly arrogant accusations? Yes. But accusing people of being poor or rich, the notion that governments should decide how poor or rich a person is permitted to be, and the demand that the law must intrude and change those individuals' lives--now THAT is true arrogance!

Hey, I am not interested in becoming a language Nazi. What do I care about your use of four-letter words. Be my guest and keep 'poor' and 'rich' in your preferred vocabulary. The problem I see is the underlying meaning, its inflation, or the utter lack of meaning.

How can the lack of meaning be dangerous? Think of mantras: repeat them a couple of hundred times and their original meaning disappears, giving way to the perfect trance. It's the same with 'rich' and 'poor'. Drop those words and anyone who is listening snaps into a trance and heads begin to nod. It hardly matters what you say after inducing the trance. Nobody will question your motives or the content of your utterances.

It is impossible to use the word 'rich' without triggering a bunch of connotations: awe, jealousy, guilt, disgust, respect, anger,... The list is as endless as it is individual: everything you say about the so-called rich or the so-called poor is your personal projection. Conversations about the poor and the rich are disconnected from facts and reality. They solely revolve around the beliefs of the participants, and the purpose of such discussions is self-righteous masturbation.

Talk about someone's living condition, her illnesses, a person's level of education, achievements, or about an individual's bank balance. It can be done and facts support broad agreement. Is there Malaria? Yep, it's a sad fact. Malaria can be objectively diagnosed. HIV infections and starvation? Unfortunately, yes.

Is there poverty? That is more or less subject to personal judgment, uniquely manufactured in one's mind.

Are there people who generate an annual income in excess of $10 million? Sure there are. Are they rich? If you think so. Do you believe a guy who makes a million bucks a year thinks of himself as rich when he compares himself to an individual who makes $80 million per annum? Doubtful.

From the perspective of 95% of the world's population, the poorest mountain hick in America, driving a 30-year old pickup truck, is a rich guy. A 30-year old Chevy truck is a fact and so is a $30 million dollar mansion. Both can be discussed. Poverty and wealth are elusive: before you can make your point, the fact-supported parts of your subject will have slipped through your fingers.

The infinite power of the invisible:

Homo Sapiens is in awe of everything that can neither be empirically demonstrated nor disproved. God(s), Satan, angels, demons, the soul, love, peace, the hereafter, etc. Wealth and poverty are members of this exalted group of invisible yet infinitely powerful forces, realms, and entities. It's not real power that I am talking about, but imaginary power within a person's mind. Too many brains turn into mush when confronted with that sort of stuff.

Over the millennia we have given power to the meaning of 'poverty'. We even believe we can "see" poor and rich people. I am sorry, but fighting poverty cannot eradicate poverty. It is more like tilting at windmills: "Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. ... For this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless." Don Quixote fought windmills that he imagined to be giants and we fight poverty and against the evil rich simultaneously.

Starvation and Malaria can be successfully fought, and I am ashamed that we haven't made much progress yet, while poverty cannot be overcome. One thing that invites us to hold on to poverty and to our imaginary solutions for the poor is our--equally misguided--idea of the rich: the rich are the reason for and the antidote to poverty, in our mind. The poor don't have money because the rich have it in their pockets. Simplistic zero-sum thinking, or nincompoop economics.

As generous as we are with the invisible and the vast powers we ascribe to the rich, as stingy are we with visible matter. If it is--"it" being money, goods, food--over there, it can't be here. Easily we dismiss the fact that we can indeed produce food for 12 billion people, for twice the current population of planet Earth. Distribution of food or money, etc. is not the solution but rather the reason for disastrous circumstances in developing regions.

It is unintelligent to say that the rich have money because the poor do not. Individuals and corporations who enjoy making money can only make more money off of people who have money themselves. Wal-Mart would love to open a thousand stores in Africa. Bill Gates would be delighted to sell a copy of Windows 7 to every child in North Korea. BMW has planned to set up a dozen dealerships in India by the end of 2010 and have them sell 10,000 cars per year. Don't you think they seek to increase those numbers?

Only complete dorks believe that individuals with money have an interest in others being penniless. Blaming the rich for the poor being poor is no more intelligent than blaming the healthy for the sick being sick.

Here is the problem:

You can't become an activist and expect to eliminate poverty during your lifetime. You could try, but you won't be the first or the last who will fail.

Here is my proposition:

End poverty today! Don't label any human being as poor. Stop referring to any individual as being rich. Make the disgusting line between the poor and the rich disappear. Nothing is easier than that because this shameful line was never existent and only imaginary.

That would be convenient for the rich to get off the hook that easily? No: if you drop your mental and emotional investment in the existence of poverty and in the idea that people can be thought of as poor, you are making room for the freedom of practical creativity and for a rational approach of actual problems.

What do you have to gain from "healing" the world from the poor and from the rich at once? It will purge an unproductive heap of clutter from your mind. The deliberate termination of an outdated idea of wealth and poverty, of poor and rich people, gives way to fresh experimentation. The fear of dying poor ends as well as the fearful hope of striking it rich (and ending up as one of "them").

Discrimination of any kind stifles social and economic development. When people stop being obsessed with each other's differences, they are free to do more of what they want, allowing others to enjoy increased freedom as well.

It takes guts to declare poverty as non-existent, and I don't blame you if you hesitate to do so. But if you don't end poverty today, it will never happen. The rich and the poor may have played important roles in tales of Robin Hood, in Charles Dickens' novels, and in Karl Marx's 'Capital' (Das Kapital), but the whole idea is ripe to be mothballed.

There is nothing to be lost and a world of freedom to be gained: nobody is poor, nobody is rich, and the fateful line between us is gone.

Egbert Sukop



"When I was growing up, our town was so poor our rainbows came in black and white." --Robert D. Cowan