In the way you think that poor people get that they should work hard, I think the people advising them to work hard get that this advice won’t apply to everyone.
I think what we need is a general acceptance that it’s ok to be poor if your priorities are in places that aren’t going to result in great wealth. I think we can say “Do this if you want to be wealthy” without going on to say “And if you aren’t working to become wealthy, you are doing life wrong”.
That sucks.
I can’t imagine why I would handle or judge a poor person by virtue of their income. By American standards, I am poor, and always have been. If they say to me, “What should I do to stop being poor?” I will probably say something like the quote you cited, though.
The poor got there themselves. We had no hand to do with it. Therefore if the poor wants to eat at the table of the rich they need to follow our systematic rigid control structure in order to be more like us.
I think most people have enough to deal with every day. Try being empathic with every poor sob you meet… and i’ll drag you down. Life is constantly overcoming and shaking off what is weak… cookie-cucker Nietzsche, but true enough.
But you’re right, that guy from the blog isn’t professing universal truth, he’s reciting some motivational mantra that worked for him. He also only human afterall, you can’t really blame him for expressing the values he believes in, like you can’t blame the poor for blaming the rich for all their misery…
He is making a claim about cause and effect.
The primary factor was no longer blaming…
and this caused wealth.
There’s no reason to simply accept this claim, and so far we do not quite even have an implict argument, just a claim.
Given the number of factors, many hard to track, in a single person moving from poverty to wealth, the claim is a hard one to back up.
So far, for all we know, he simply arrived at his conclusion via intuition.
Agreed. I don’t blame the guy, I rather like him. What rings my alarms is how it’s gobbled up w/o question by people like you and me.
Surely there are many layers of truth in his quote, but also problems. What I’m expressing is a desire to further refine it, given what’s at stake.
Because the human mind is largely a simple, false dichotomy machine, much of the world is built on unsubtle truisms.
While it’s true that his quote can help people in the right situation, and touches on certain truths, it could also hurt people,
and it IMPLIES certain embedded assumptions. We have to be aware that if you look at it literally, sure, it’s not so bad.
You have to accept that it carries lots of lethal baggage that needs unpacking, and that’s what we should be doing here.
Are we going to discuss Kant again? Maybe instead we should unpack the benign/rational truisms that perpetuate human indignity.
That’s the highest use of philosophy today. I’m not so good at it, obviously. But I know it’s the right calling.
Carefully worded philosophy can change the world. The most dangerous kind of philosophy is that which seems benign, rational
and heroic, but is in fact rife with problems nobody cares to dissect. That’s all I’m trying to do here.
Also, I’d like to highlight the concept of selective history when we talk about our own life stories. When we package them into neat little
narratives, we’re getting it wrong. This fella might think that’s what happened to him, but that’s most likely the history he chooses to
tell himself on most days, in between bouts of being lazy and blaming others, to this day. I’m rich-ish, and I spend most of my time blaming others and being lazy, i.e. being human.
I would like to see somebody instead say:
Every poor person is different. Some might be fully aware of having made poor choices, and in their case it might simply be
a matter of will power to execute better choices. For others it might feel like more of a situation that for whatever reason
can’t be rectified no matter what they do, given who and where they are, and who are we to say that’s always false? If it’s not false,
we would be damaging those for which it is false. That’s why it’s kind of important to make sure we don’t offer truisms that could further alienate and attack the self-esteem of
millions of people who, without the ability to blame the universe, are left with far less dignity and no improvement.
If I had fur, I’m sure the fur would stand straight up every time someone says poor people need to stop blaming and work harder.
It’s the pinnacle of lazy childish thinking.
I agree that unpacking truisms like this is what philosophy is all about… I don’t know if it’ll change the world, i’m kinda pessimistic about that, but maybe it can change some minds and that’s definately something. So yeah, there’s not much i disagree with here. I guess my reason for responding was to counter the idea that some amount of succes is something to feel guilty about, which is also a dangerous idea. But I see that’s not what you were aiming for…
Do what the rich do is play tennis. They have secluded tennis courts next to churches and stuff and they drive inconspicuous cars or extremely expensive ones. They have things they want to sell but don’t. They also reap the time of leisure from actual benefits they make to themselves. They are proud of their accurately placed investments. They reap the benefits of their self affirmation in the body of the day, they wake up with the sun or before and they go to bed at hours that allow them to feel … this part I can’t tell, I never fell asleep as a rich person but I imagine they feel good. Money is the root of some pretty amazing evils but wealth is a goodness on human earth like sports.
so you feel a sense of payback is due. Have you been robbed, literally, figuratively?
Or are you just an animal with no empathy. You can’t steal money, you wouldn’t sleep at night.
barbarian:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
I’ve been both, and you might find it interesting that the wage-slave mentality doesn’t go away the second you have money. The scary truth is that the wage slave mentality is so traumatic that it scrambles your brain. If you’re going to make enough money to achieve escape velocity up and out of the rat race to an early retirement, here’s what happens.
In order to fully give yourself to the money-making opportunity and climb the latter, you have to convince yourself that you like the activity. This is a brain-scrambler, a mindfuck harder for some than others. For me it was really hard, because senior year in college I was studying Bach and Camus, and at 23 I was sitting in a cubicle writing (if you call it that) the best possible combination of words to sell carpeting via 1800 number TV. More accurately, fishing for a combination of words that would keep my paychecks coming. So it took a big painful process to give in to this. It’s like getting used to jail. You come in a raving beast. And within a year in Alcatraz, after getting your ass beat, the convict in the movie starts reading, takes up religion, maybe even gets a pair of those round glasses. He learns to love the prison life. need it, even. So that’s what has to happen in wage-slave land. And it does, if you’re smart, because the alternative is the hole. You get your bagel. Then your coffee. Then you surf. Then lunch, then chat, oh, and you do the stuff you’re paid to do, and you kinda get into it, b/c it’s a game, see, you’ve decided to play this game, you little gamer, you.
You get close to the masters. This is hard, b/c the instinct is to get far from them. Punch your clock and GO. Away, far away from them and to the cocoon of TV and couch land. Or into sweet freedom land with your guitars and bongs and friends, concerts, sex, your car, hiking, whatever. Temporary respite – but the enemy of escape velocity. Instead, you get in with the masters so you can learn what they do. This is like the prisoner kissing up to the warden to gain more power. It’s enough to make a good man’s stomach turn, but the rewards are pretty obvious. More power, more stability, more privileges, and the glimmer of hope of a new kind of freedom most can only dream of.
The big risk: you make the leap, quitting, stealing customers from your old master, doing all the things he taught you, and maybe in a more fleet footed way. You’re small, nimble and you can make it on your own, you insist to, it was your plan all along, you’d die sooner than be a slave forever, just a means to an end, sooner the better. It’s invigorating, b/c for the first time you might not be a slave anymore. At this point you start to think you might be forgetting truly what it was even like to be a wage slave. (You’re not. It’s just insidiously buried.) You’re an entrepreneur now. The master is still the enemy, and your independence is your bulwark against him, you will never have to beg and scrape and clock in again or kowtow to his/her insane ego-driven OCD bureaucratic small-minded hand job blarrggggh again. You may very well have to work much harder though. But you feel spiteful, superior. FUCK the world, I’m boss now. I do what I want. It’s 2pm on a tuesday and i’m at the xmen premier. Coolness. But why is my phone buzzing during the third act? It’s making my fuckin milk duds vibrate.
You begin to realize your clients are your bosses. You went from having one boss to many bosses. You may be able to call your own hours and shots, but the fact is you are more reliant than ever on the whims of your wage payers, your clients and customers. And this time you have no automatic regular paycheck or paid vacation. Options, work even harder, rinse and repeat. Or…
Hire your OWN wage slave. Or two. Maybe five. Aw, fuck it, ten. It’s like buying office equipment, you discover. The metaphor is you buy a printer for $30, it churns out documents you can use to generate $30,000, and so on. As long as you service it, replace the ink, etc. You now own people. They are slaves, but to get them to willingly be slaves you have to push a kind of corporate culture to them. “We’re making the world a better place.” or “Our work is a source of pride. It’s what we are.” When really it’s all 100% about making the owner money while you do all the work servicing his (my) pipeline of revenue/customers. The owner fights hard and long and smart to find the oil and build the fucking spigot with conduits and spit & bubblegum and flamethrower, and then he hires the hungry to work the well and refinery while he sits back. And does…what now?
Okay so you did it, escape velocity. Now what? You are finally FREE. But you are unhappy.
We imagine they feel good. Why wouldn’t they? They’d have to be insane not to be happy. They know this, too. Which is why they are terrified about not being happy. They throw everything at it, tennis, you name it. And they practice a beatific relaxed expression. The imperial way they carry themselves, the confidence and grace. But it’s a lie.
The self-made wealthy don’t know how to be free. They are miserable. Moreso b/c they shouldn’t be. Remember that brain scrambler in item #1? They have a lot of unscrambling to do. They have to scramble their brain again. It might take awhile but eventually they’ll get into public service, support or start a charity. Maybe start or fund another business. Or go right back to work – and that’s when you’ll see the really smug grin. The mask of insanity, them telling you they do it not for the money, but because they love it. That they’ve always loved it. And that’s not an unscramble. That’s a rescramble. Will they think about Camus, Bach? Who? More likely, they will doggedly pursue juvenile childhood interests, collect shit, and be jolly king to their princely spawn. They might invest in a wine cellar or build a gym in their house. They might all of a sudden care about cars. This is akin to insanity, as they grasp, like quivering sows, to the uberconsumer afterlife promised to them by their money God. Freedom? That’s just dour college rubbish. Freedom is now about things. And things can never fill up a person. And deep down they are broken and sick and they kind of know it.
The neurons that fire together, wire together, and what has been firing like gangbitches is wage-slave life for twenty years, pushing down who you are, for some far future payoff. Meanwhile, the universe has been altered. What was once vistas of artistic exploration and gorgeous possibility has been rendered cold and mercenary. The world isn’t what they thought back in college. It’s brutal. And it took a big ole bite out of old rick corey. And what you see, what their friends and loved ones see, is the cauterized version.
The idea, to him, of others suffering and still being slaves and used as equipment, or even unemployed, shamed, paralyzed, is so awful to consider, so confusing and threatening, the rich man must rationalize that those poor masses (even his friends and family) somehow deserve to be poor. He must believe there is justice. Rich man will now refuse to admit it was luck on his part, or fear or craven cunning and self-interest or insecurity that drove him, weakness, to leave the gorgeous universe of his virgin mind behind, far behind, a dreamy and ornate cavernous bubble of love and possibility wafting listlessly in space, blessed node, nary a motive for profit in it save the only true profit in mans lot, just the full expression of itself to itself; it floats and shimmies in the expanding cosmic wind, away, forever, away, maybe to be discovered on his deathbed, not maybe, a wisp of memory come back through wormhole to haunt and admonish him for a crime, THE crime, and usher him to hell or wherever 1800 numbers are forged in eternity.
The grotesque final step, saving step, is to come to believe that “anyone can succeed if only they could be of self-possession long enough to do a few simple things that anyone can do if they weren’t so lazy or cowardly.”
Or, you can go into a cave, do a lot of shrooms and emerge back to normal, if a babbling fat 50 year old talking about connected consciousness and dancing naked is normal, and actually go back, as Fuller advises, to what you were thinking about before someone came along and told you to make a living.
Postscript:
And what of the lovable clock punchers, you know, “into sweet freedom land with your guitars and bongs and friends, concerts, sex, your car, hiking, whatever” and all that good stuff? Sad to say, they don’t fare much better. Their living on the fence between freedom and subservience rends them half wise, and they only ever become half of either side. This is okay if your whole was never much anyway. But when I talk about that guy, whose whole is not much to begin with and who cares if it’s halved, that guy, we know, is not YOU.
So what’s it going to be? Escape velocity? (Maybe.) Halved whole? (God forbid.)
Is there a third option in this clusterfuck gridlock consumer-based media-saturated virtual environment economy hell we now live in? I wouldn’t know. I’m all the way over here on the other side of never, baby. You tell me.