On Poverty

I usually begin articles with a quote, because the articles I write suggest timelessness and the sense that issues have always been the way that I describe. I read a quote from Aristotle in which he suggested that poverty was the mother of revolution and crime, which is a mean over-simplification. Sometimes the rendering of language into concepts such as "poverty" or "crime" means to ignore possible changes. If a word exists it continues a paradigm, in which tensions between more established and more vulnerable groups perpetuate. These are always going to exist, because our society relies upon competitive behaviour. The American society relies on the power of the individual and the strength of the system to allow particular individuals to excel above the rest. The position of a president is meritocratic and positions of power exacerbate and continue the trend towards a society with higher degrees of vulnerability and less chance of social mobility nearer the bottom. But this is psychological. This is mere projection of visceral that is not actually the reality which lies in the greater picture.

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.” 

― Gilles Deleuze

If the reader were to look at this situation with clarity at this moment, without distraction from either the self-perception of limited understanding or ability to look after oneself and one's neighbour. Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath directed the reader towards the displacement of families and friends from Oklahoma during the great dustbowl, and as they departed from that dust-ridden land they played each other folk songs as their communities slowly faded and bled into that same dust. The cracks within the way they saw each other, the way they attempted to seize a particular role without offering much in the way of listening, was the true reason for their fragmentation. That and the way the dustbowl made life completely inhospitable. But it comes down to one consideration after all: are we not yet living in a reality that lacks depth because of the way we have been told to think of our bodies, our time, our thought. 

Our bodies are in the hands of another and we gradually forget how simple it can be to look after ourselves, especially in an age of information and with our own developed abilities to communicate. Our time is segmented, broken into categories of usefulness and so we begin to sell moments in which we might better seek to improve our communities and develop lives which are connected and useful to a learning process. And our thought is mechanised to the extent that we see only simple solutions, not the rising levels of complexity which in fact have characterised science (more adequately called "the investigation of the gaze"). Our internships, education systems, they teach students much of what is useful but they forget that the students themselves are new and also see with incredulity what it is we live within. The strength of hormonal development is often accompanied with a frustrated effort towards independence. Frustration and alienation often occur at this point. Their is something deeply concerning about the limited way in which we look into sexual identity, drug addiction.

So, the truth: the consideration must not be how to generally treat the instance of poverty within this country, but rather secure a cultural understanding that is fostered from the inside. Whoever lives under the illusion that the distance between parents and children on such mechanical, inflexible basis was wise or useful to emotional understanding might have also identified with the hospital or prison system: that is, the hospital seeks to treat patients or prevent illness, but the diffusion of self-understanding, of creative ways to treat oneself are completely lacking. The prison system is built on a punishment complex with securing an understanding of the social tendencies towards crime, without realising that certain systemic failures such as the way a society might be hollowed out from inside, viewed from the outside as a vendor of trade and business. The people within become more frustrated as their social gains from the great wars of the twentieth century are known soon as ways of expanding markets, of a maintaining a certain friction and political power that was based on concerns with an increasingly liberal Germany. Even yet the political amendments within this country are only surface appearances, and the factory system continues though invisible.

The war continues and it is a streak of competitive behaviour amongst everyone. But Darwinism never advocated competition, only the survival of the fittest. But that is a wonderful thing, if not entirely misrepresented, that the species is in lateral formation formation with a whole range of ancient species and is allowed fertility, a space in time. The movement towards equilibrium does not occur within the species but outside of the species; we are always offered our most lasting forms of life from unexpected incidents or discoveries, or plants with symbiotic relationships with us. The only trouble is that we have not yet explored the fluidity of everything, the connectedness of what makes us. Therefore we contain ourselves within a system which is unchanging in a world that is defined by flux and overflow. We name this a finite planet but that is because of limited harvests of crops that we know. It is knowledge that is limited, not the source of knowledge. The source of knowledge is light, which is unlimited, and the diffusion of light in various and changing manners. Within a city sunshine will serve limited purpose and people will only see things which were written in another time in a new light. However, the change that is inherent in landscape is unseen. 

Vectors and displacement of time. Cities and displacement of internal cultural, social, medicinal, schooling types of understanding. Those kinds of understanding that were fluid and adapted to change, obviously displaced by an involuntary action of steam power, of burning fossil fuels, of utilising people in a manner in which they were least useful except for the purpose of creating a competitive war. The structures of containment served to narrow people's focus as personal time, personal development was conquered by greater movements. But as Tolstoy says, the development and attrition of power is not prescribed from the outside, it is a total force of equilibrium and the ignorance of people and their lack of independence is not a matter of individual guilt or susceptibility to control and power, but really just a process of history, of nature. That these can be overcome has always been held true, that truth abounds and is always around us is also true, but we must needs eyes to see, and these must centre upon a sense of connection and not of friction and hostility towards pain which is an absence of connection. So we see that the problems of poverty are problems of communication, fluidity of space and the ability to see things.

So were communities apparent in places of poverty, and a tendencies towards a non-monitored cultural space. If there was a tendency to view difficulties within society as more social ailments then there would be a better tendency towards consolidation and renewal. The absence of free cultural spaces because culture has so lately been a marketable commodity is highly disruptive to social security, and there are no financial incentives for growth that can come from the outside. All root developments must come from the community itself. If this means to involve parents and children in a relationship which means they can get to know each other, in sharing cars or the costs of transport, in creating local spaces of communication rather than that useless televisual instrument which communicates values that are so morally vacant and so extraneous to any physical humanity that everybody assumes the same of one another; that they are common and this indifference discourages spontaneity in people. The values of local theatre, of opportunities in local spaces are fruitful for a more physical understanding of self, and the diffusion of hygienal and medical understanding would lead to a much less heavy reliance on the National Health Service. 

“Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.” 

― Karl Popper

The spiritual awakening is highly distancing when it is not applicable; of course value must be seen, but it must also be understood through psychological and interpersonal relationships. We must be conveyed a sense that time is not about beginnings and ends, but many beginnings, that we are conveyed truth through relationship and knowing that we are part of an entire ecosystem and overall development. In the past we could only point to this in abstract, in a philosophical manner, but as microbiological discovery, as the discoveries of ecology and neuroscience advance we begin to see that humanity has been invented recently, and that his beginning would arise out of a concern for himself that was deeply invested in the Earth as his body. The return of which Nietzsche spoke was the ability to think within the Earth and not the recent thought of man, and to render into value the life that we consume but we do not perpetuate. 

The violence of civilisation is in how it perceives a certain kind of order that has never and probably will never exist, and that it constantly tries to revere and perpetuate that order, much to the detriment of the home in which he lives. The only way in which man kind could possibly be able to love itself and nourish itself in some sort of actual manner would be to see that all around it is potential, yet it is unseen because of counter-productive marketing, unseen bureaucratic developments, limitations of religious models. Generally, the problem is that people have become wary of thinking for themselves and are watched by autonomous governments which they criticise for not thinking or interacting with problems they have handed them over. The truth is that no system can produce such alleviating effect other than the renewing principle inherent in a natural ecosystem. 

Therefore the most pivotal point is to reclaim community links which were shattered in the midst of a capitalist utopia that was a nightmare of separation and a great loss to personal discovery. The only concern now is that culturally we must need to be very careful not to possess our knowledge and rather see it as fleeting and bound towards change. If we were to consider the simplest analogy here; if we learned how to perpetuate this kind of involvement then we would have created a perpetual motion machine, assisted by the unrestricted thought of generations to come that are not narrowed into discplinies where the overall tendency, as Hegel says, is towards synthesis and the recognition that the overall goal of culture was human value and not some sort of profound blanket of knowledge.