The Many Forms of Poverty
(Excerpted from The Goldilocks Zone of Integral Liberty)
We should define what, precisely, the variations of poverty that interfere with liberty look like using the criteria we have assembled so far from these different perspectives. I believe they would include the following:
Poverty of existential security – lack of food, shelter, clothing, safety from harm.
Poverty of access or opportunity for advancement – being “in the right place at the right time” never seems to happen, no viable pathways out of one’s current situation seem available, no amount of effort seems to change these conditions, and barriers to access and opportunity persist.
Poverty of spaciousness – lack of discretionary time, quiet, solitude.
Poverty of justice and equality – experience of social prejudice, disruption of ability to obtain competent legal representation, inferior treatment under the rule of law, unequal treatment in the workplace, etc.
Poverty of economic freedom – disrupted ability to generate disposable income or access desired goods, lack of opportunity to trade, disruption to development of desired skills and abilities, lack of employment opportunity.
Poverty of trust and social capital – experience of alienation or disenfranchisement, lack of access to supportive social networks, consistently encountering closed doors rather than open ones.
Poverty of self-reliance – disrupted capacity for confidence, and lack of access to tools or experience that support a belief in own self-efficacy.
Poverty of education – disrupted ability to think critically (i.e. carefully evaluate new information, challenge internalized assumptions, relax cognitive bias, escape conditioned habits), learn valuable skills, or gain a well-rounded understanding and appreciation of the world through diverse, interdisciplinary learning.
Poverty of common property – lack of resources held in common, or lack of access to those resources.
Poverty of physical or mental health – poor nutrition, excessive stress, unhealthy family dynamics, genetic predispositions for illness or substance abuse, subjection to psychologically incompatible or physically harmful environments.
Poverty of perception and awareness – disrupted ability to see past the spectacle, perceive or process things multidimensionally, or maintain a neutral holding field while assessing complex information.
Poverty of emotional intelligence – disrupted ability to interpret social cues, facial expressions, emotional content of interpersonal exchanges, or to empathize with the experiences of others.
Poverty of knowledge & information – lack of access to established knowledge, or to accurate and independently verified new information.
Poverty of spirit – disruption of connection with higher Self, spiritual insights and gnosis, and/or relationship with divine mystery.
Poverty of holistic perspective and vision – disrupted ability to comprehend the bigger picture, cultivate a guiding purpose and intentionality, or to keep these in mind throughout the trials of daily life.
Poverty of moral development – disrupted ability to mature past an egoic, tribal, or individualistic orientation (I/Me/Mine or Us vs. Them).
Poverty of love – disrupted ability to develop compassionate affection for self and others, or experiencing a consistent lack of compassion from others.
Poverty of self-expression – lack of opportunity and support for creative, athletic, intellectual or other form of self-expression.
And remember that in many cases these poverties are self-perpetuating, specifically because of the artificial dependencies – the variations of toddlerization and infantilization – that they create. Whether or not these generalizations resonate with your understanding of the world, doesn’t it seem prudent to eliminate infantilizing or toddlerizing dynamics from human society, to whatever degree possible, so that its pressures, enticements and negative consequences can be de-energized? Would it hurt to either remove the prolific influence of infantilization and toddlerization on various forms of poverty, and poverty’s reinforcement of paternalizing patterns? If so, then how? We can’t force people to grow up if they don’t wish to, and these patterns are the core facilitators of both unwieldy government bureaucracies and growth-dependent commercialist corporationism. In other words, in a croniest, clientist State capitalism that advocates monolithic for-profit enterprises, there is tremendous pressure to sustain these trends.
But wait . . . are we still navigating interference to negative liberty? Doesn’t this broadening scope of poverty begin to emulate the concerns of “positive liberty” in its inclusion of internal qualities? Certainly, but only in the sense that those qualities can be inhibited or destroyed by external conditions; remember that we are concerned with the foundations of liberty here, and there is no difference between a freed prisoner who has no access to food, shelter or livelihood and a child who has zero access to education, social capital or equal justice due to race, gender, region of residence, or class. We are still focused on eliminating interference, not positively creating means and ability; we are just appreciating more variables, and with more precision.
On the other hand, the lone inhabitant of a shanty in the woods, whose self-reliance is a product of generations of sociological, economic, industrial and scientific development – resulting in sophisticated technologies, an affluent support system, a well-nourished childhood, critical thinking skills honed in the best education available, knowledge and resourcefulness grounded in the past successes others, and relatively elite social capital – is not really operating in isolation, but “on the shoulders of giants” as it were. Thoreau, after all, was a white pencil-maker’s son living in a predominantly white society, who studied at Harvard, was mentored and patronized by Ralph Waldo Emerson, supported himself through the family pencil business, and only spent one night in jail for his “civil disobedience” before he was bailed out. Such were the affluence, pedigree, support, resources, social capital and privilege afforded him that he could choose “to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life,” and then philosophize about it. In this sense, Thoreau’s means and ability to exercise freedom were positively created within the very societal conventions he railed against. It doesn’t require much investigation to realize that, in the very same way, the idealized pinnacle of individual sovereignty in modern society is supported by an endless intersection of facilitative factors, like the majority of mass for an iceberg that lies below the water but is invisible to the casual eye.
So it seems that in order to maximize freedom for everyone, we are faced with some unambiguous choices: either attempt to eliminate the conditions contributing to these variations of poverty via some coercively authoritative or utopian mechanism; magically enhance human capacities to an ideal degree so these poverties have no enduring effect; theorize and fantasize about a universal individual autonomy while denying both the convergence of facilitative factors that positively enable that autonomy, and the coercive force that variations of poverty actively generate against it; or acknowledge the constraints to freedom such poverties and infantilizing patterns impose on us all, as well as the constructive realities a vast iceberg of supportive conditions necessitate, and navigate our lives accordingly. I’m not aware of other options or methods to sidestep or escape this substantive interference to liberty.
Again my intention here is also to shift the emphasis away from creating the means and ability to exercise free will as enforced by the State, and towards removing barriers to freedom in some collective fashion – that is, mitigating substantive interferences to liberty through intersubjective agreement. This may seem to be a subtle distinction, but I believe the methods of implementation shortly to be outlined will clarify significant differences – especially when we evaluate what supports our intrinsic capacities to experience and operationalize free will in more detail. Along these lines, then, what are appropriate intersubjective social agreements that foster the foundations of liberty in the most effective ways? And what are the interobjective systems and conditions that provision them?
We might assume that democracy itself is intended to moderate some of these forms of poverty, but not if we are “playing the freedom lottery.” Additionally, as far back as Aristotle’s Politics we are warned: “extreme poverty lowers the character of democracy, so measures should be taken that will provide them lasting prosperity....” And of course as Jefferson wrote in an 1816 letter to Charles Yancey: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” These are just two of the poverties we’ve listed, but they speak to the essence of our concerns. I believe only more advanced forms of democracy, together with additional foundations of liberty that are collectively supported for all, will be able to achieve a durable freedom. For even those who advocate the criticality of personal responsibility and choice still acknowledge the importance of collective agreement in support of that agency. As Amartya Sen writes in the Preface to Development As Freedom (1999):
“We have to recognize, it is argued here, the role of freedoms of different kinds in countering these afflictions. Indeed, individual agency is, ultimately, central to addressing these deprivations. On the other hand, the freedom of agency that we have individually is inescapably qualified and constrained by the social, political and economic opportunities that are available to us. There is a deep complementarity between individual agency and social arrangements. It is important to give simultaneous recognition to the centrality of individual freedom and to the force of social influences on the extent and reach of individual freedom. To counter the problems that we face, we have to see individual freedom as a social commitment.”
