Are Poor People Just Lazy?

BY SOFO ARCHON

This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.

Are the poor just lazy?

Well, that’s what quite a few people believe. They believe that poor people, in a sense, deserve to live in poverty because they are unmotivated, lazy, and unwilling to work. They prefer to sit around chilling, doing nothing. If people in poverty, such people believe, would work hard, then they would soon be out of poverty. Because, as the saying goes, hard work pays off.

But people who hold such beliefs do not understand how our economic system works. They don’t understand that our economic system is a competitive zero-sum game. They don’t understand that in the competitive game of our economy, some people inevitably win while others lose. They don’t understand that, in fact, the success of some people depends on the failure of others.

They also don’t understand that people who are in poverty actually are those who often work the most.  They are those who often have to engage in two or three different jobs on a daily basis in order to make ends meet, in order to be able to provide for themselves and their families. And if we see things globally, people who live in poorer countries are often the ones who work harder and longer than those of us living in wealthier countries.

Also, people who are living in poverty have a tremendously difficult time getting out of poverty because they cannot compete with the rich. They don’t have the capital and the resources necessary to do so, nor do they have access to education, healthcare, and so on. At least, they don’t have equal access to those things.

So this system is unfair; it is rigged. Therefore, we need to stop blaming poor people for being poor and blame that system, blame the conditions that inevitably produce poverty. But for some people, it is convenient to blame the poor because then they don’t have to feel empathy for the poor, and therefore they don’t have to share in their pain, in their suffering, nor do they have to take any responsibility. They don’t have to, for example, fight against this rigged economic system that rewards them and punishes the poor. No, everything is fine. It’s not the system that is the problem; it’s the poor.

But if we truly care about the poor, if we truly want to see a world where there is no poverty, where people are healthy and happy and peaceful, then we need to be honest with ourselves. And we need to take a look at reality, eye to eye. We need to admit that it’s not the poor that are to blame, but the conditions that result in poverty. We need to stop seeing the poor as a failure, but see our society as a failure. And as part of that society, we need to understand the responsibility that we have for the poverty that exists and do something, take action in whatever way we can to raise awareness about the true causes of poverty and try to make change in order to end it.