Cause of Poverty: Greed or Ignorance?
Posted on June 16, 2006 in thoughts.
One of my friends recently asked me:
What do you think is more responsible for poverty, greed or
ignorance? And no cheating and saying greed is a form of
ignorance. :)
If the question is, what causes poverty, we first have to start by defining what poverty actually is. Broadly speaking, there's material poverty, emotional poverty, and spiritual poverty.
Material poverty: Per Maslow's hierarchy of needs, most people work with the assumption that without a certain threshold of material prosperity, rest of the questions are immaterial. So, let's consider hunger. As Amartya Sen's Nobel work shows, famines are overtly related to the governance; people go hungry not because of lack of food but because of lack of distribution mechanisms. In the West, you have the flip issue: people are obese, not because of access to food but because of policy that makes resources like corn cheaply accessible which in turn, allows for Double Big Macs to be 99 cents and Double Big Gulps to be 79 cents. Likewise, the case can be made for other material quality-of-life metrics. So, I would say that material poverty is a result of policy based on greed (not just for money, but for power/security).
Emotional poverty: Everyone realizes the importance of positive emotions in their life, although it's hard to quantify it. Something like 80% of all donations in the US come from small amounts (not Bill Gates!) given on impulse, women vote for Clinton because he "looks" trustworthy; anti-depressants are a mega billion industry because people don't "feel" good. Feeling good is important to people, yet it's shocking that so little of humanity's "research" is curing this rampant dis-ease. I think it's because we haven't figured out the root cause of emotional poverty -- isolation. Before making decisions, Native Americans would traditionally assess how their decision would affect the seventh generation down the road; now-a-days, we aren't even worried about our how our late-night music will affect our neighbors. Losing the link of inter-connection with people, nature and all life is, I would say, the main culprit behind emotional poverty.
Spiritual poverty: History shows that mankind makes dumb -- ie. Self-destructive -- decisions. Again and again. Why? Because we don't see the consequences of our actions. We all know that smoking is bad for us and happy thoughts are good for us, but that doesn't stop the smokers or the anger tantrums. If people got punished -- not in heaven or hell but here and now -- for each thought of anger, or ego, or ill-will, we would never have any wars, disparity between rich and poor would cease, and we would respect nature. So, then, how do we experience the results of our ignorance, how do we deepen our awareness so we can reduce the gap between the cause and effect, how do we listen to the truth of each moment so we function in harmony with that nature? These are fundamentally spiritual questions. Not having experiential answers to these questions is spiritual poverty. And it is caused by, I would say, ignorance.
Back to our original question -- what is responsible for poverty? Material poverty is created by greed-based policies, emotional poverty is caused by man-made machinery (institutions, technology, drugs, etc.) that isolate us from life, and spiritual poverty is due to ignorance of the consequences to our actions. Furthermore, I think that spiritual poverty is the subtlest and hence the most potent; i.e. solving that question will naturally solve the others.
Practically speaking, how do you become-the-change if you want to eradicate poverty? Make decisions based on love instead of fear, build systems and technologies that connect us with all forms of life instead of isolating us, and act consciously to deepen our awareness of every interaction we have.
I spent yesterday afternoon standing at the intersection of Van-Ness and Lombard, holding up a sign saying, "Spare a Smile?" I'm hoping that eradicated at least some poverty in the world. :)
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