The two stories depicted here (and linked below) illustrate just how profoundly people who have benefited the most from capitalism don't have a clue about what it really means to be human, any more than they understand deeper metaphor, and symbolism.
Saying that "poverty is a state of mind," for instance, not considering that perhaps the state of mind of highest priority here is not in the mind that people of privilege might suppose it to be. Perhaps the most tragic poverty in play here is the one where you have become deprived of any kind of deeper understanding; not only about how human nature works, but also about how human value can't be calculated only by abstract notions of output per hour, or profit and loss. Simply put, it cannot be about just counters, and being able to hold onto more of them than the other guy.
It's this other kind of poverty that makes seeing what ought to be obvious math very difficult for it. That's because this math resulted from investing in a simple human need, food. And doing it, heaven forbid, by simply giving it (or at least the ability to acquire it via counter substitutes) away.
"My god. Simply giving it away... Are you crazy? That's something for nothing! That's just paying people to be layabouts and drags upon the more productive. You can't do that. We won't stand for it. And most importantly, even if there are numbers to indicate that helping people in need can actually be objectively beneficial, it goes against our common sense so the metrics presented must be bogus..."
Or something like that in the mind of such "alternative" poverty. And of course they can do that and still think nothing of giving themselves big tax breaks (to pay for as little as it takes to keep things going as they possibly can), or pass their counters on to their children so that they can stay privileged because they have numbers that be crunched, just by existing, into more numbers for further crunching, and greater counts, ad nauseum. Never really producing anything but more privilege.
Obviously some people are willfully lazy, even if we can accept that this is for a host of complex issues. But the thing is, both sides of the "poverty" question prove that concept. And another important thing is that being willfully lazy, or any other kind of thief by another name, are not normal human aspirations. Normal humans want to be meaningful contributors to their immediate families, and their communities. They want to prosper, but not by edging out the ability of someone else to do so, but cooperatively so that as many as possible can do so at the same time.
And let's be clear here. One of the most basic tenets of Capitalism is scarcity. So by that very fact alone the number of people who sit at the table of "success" must be limited. Because, after all, how can being at that table have any value (by Capitalism's lights) at all if nearly everybody is sitting there?
We have to get out from under both the mind set of Capitalism, and of the institutionalized detriments that have been put in place to separate us from working towards a balanced way of achieving the full spectrum of human need; that hierarchy that they used to teach within the social sciences that started with the basic physical requirements and went on from there to the higher needs of what are both animals, and something that aspires to be more. Detriments that have put so much shit into our heads because human need had to be hacked into, and subverted for the new needs of moving mass quantities for mass consumption, in a now mutated model of commoditization, and abstracted exchange. So now we have ever increasingly electrified fantasies going to keep the crazy energy pumped up. Which is, by the way, what we're all running on now. The result of which, of course, becoming ever more difficult to ignore.
Some more for you to think about. As always, you better be quick about it.
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