To Deserve As Both Poverty and Wealth: Understanding How Different Paradigms Comprehend the Same Function

“Everyone deserves this.” An individual surveys a swath of lush land. Purple buds characteristic of the springtime are blooming by a lake. The hills are covered in grass possessed of a proud and self-claiming green, and water rushes out like an enthusiastic child freshly let outdoors. Light filters down when the needles of the pine find permissible, and then ooze in liberated spotlights to mobile circles of fluctuating gold.

“Nobody deserves this.” A concrete slab. On the regular, a screaming robotic sound of the prison doors opening and closing, like a horrifying industrial organism attempting to conduct a symphony far too unpopular with the musicians. Grey meat shoved through doors in a get-it-over-with manner more analogous to lint than nutrition; shower curtains lowered purposefully to humiliate and rob actual, respectable beings of privacy. Even light is scarce; kept weak and dying behind some sort of plastic slit. A hand is drawn on it.

“Everyone deserves this.” The same prison, but a man comes in, smug and smiling. He eats his grey, linty confinement meat with a noble’s airs, smirking to himself all the while. He even eats, spine perfectly taut, with his wrists at an angle only an artist could perfect. “We’re all criminals.” And he truly believes his own lie to comfort his lack of basic remorse. He is so lonely he looks forward to prison with excitement, finally someone to talk to.

“Nobody deserves this.” A sick elderly old man huddles under a bridge, coughing and spewing some sort of phlegm. He has untreated cancer, yet he lights a cigarette anyway. Nobody hates the outdoors more than him, he has been doing this for six months now. At night he begs, “please just let me die.” Yet, in the morning, he wakes up, harassed by sunbeams. Luckily today it was the simple silence of the photonic prison-keep who harassed him first, and not the local overzealous mother or quota-hunting police.

So what does deserving and undeserving mean? Taken in the punishing sense, deserving is the right to inflict pain. Taken in the positive sense, deserving is the right to accept that which did not already exist within one’s realm of existence. “Deserving” means that which we receive has reached its best location, whether or not that reception had a negative or positive incoming direction.

Here, we can explore the theme of poverty as refugee and poverty as prison. In the understanding of poverty as refugee, one is constantly up against the clock to acquire the next fix of capital. One must reach the sales quota by a certain deadline, one must stay healthy not for oneself but to have maximum capital extracted. Performative joy is a requirement, and yet, everyone is performing. The wealthy class simply look for their semblance as solace in the forms of those who can only afford to mask into it, and enraged, take off the mask to see the true pain, grief, and hatred of the working class for their mirror-engorged taskmasters. The working class runs from apprehension, pulls themselves up by their bootstraps, and like a home office mercenary, struggles day in and day out to hit each target. Drawn in by demand and various push and pulls, the individual experiences chronic housing disruption, running away from a poor opportunity to a better one, repeatedly and consistently. The “floating rate” of indecisive demand feels more like the drowning rate of a tumultuous tidal wave of black water one must steer around and through for the rest of their lives.

We can also understand poverty as prison. In poverty as prison, we understand pathological adaptations to adverse circumstances can cause an individual to be set up to fail. For instance, an individual adapting to the above — the various tosses, turns, and quick grabs to survive — has to know when to keep and leave things in the short-term. Yet, as the individual becomes a master of memory, incisive detail noting, and recording — collecting moments and measuring each moment up to the goal until it is reached — they lose the skills they may need in more abundant times such as to settle down, regulate their nervous system, think deeply, and hold an investment long term. Struggling to make ends meet, they lose the energy to think, and losing the energy to think they fail to save money and drive themselves into more debt and less savings. We can see then, without outside intelligent and generous input, that the energy and support imbalances cause poverty to be like a prison.

So, what one may understand to be freedom, another individual understands to be chronic disruption. And what one individuals understands to be stability, another person understands to be inflexibility and deathly structuralism.

A final critical point to make is that, for the chronically displaced impoverished, what is best described as hitting the target consistently in order to survive in a closed system with unforgiving exteriors (a precarious CEO position of a wealthy company with lots of employees, housing and eating enough protein to survive a harsh winter) may often be the foundation of addiction thinking. When each target must be hit to make the quota, and the quota is required to stay basically afloat, capitalism instills in its constituents the framework of an addiction. Here, the life-possession force itself (a dire one) is directly tied to efforts and labors to receive the necessary amount of material to get to the next day. Each day, one must cross these concerns off or forward motion is not possible. The pull and gravity of the poverty as prison loop becomes more sinister and strong. This itemization of forward fuel is, in itself, the framework of addiction.

What, then, is the solution?

• Everyone deserves respect and some individuals have more knowledge of the world than we may ever know, we simply missed out due to our prejudice. If you can’t call it empathy, call it “thinking like a criminal defense lawyer”. (You might be more effective then anyway.)
• An understanding of rhythmic cycles of deficit accumulation in energy economics is required to fully understand its prevalence.
• Effective cognitive structuring and supports for moving people from short term survivalist mindset to a long term one with the adequate material supports to do so during this time as well ($500/mo food stamps for example, housing, safe relationships and communities, mental health practitioners and health practitioners.) We will be publishing a piece on this type of thinking coming up soon.
• A focus on the positive regard deserved as opposed to the negative shame deserved. By focusing more there, even if we must fairly create a 5:1 ratio of positive regard to accountability, we encourage more abundant, long-term and insightful perspectives on the situation to emerge that will aid in solving it long term.