Responsibility Is the Antidote to the Poverty Mindset

Commentary from Barry Brownstein on FEE.org:

Recently a psychologist friend was singing a familiar refrain: "My clients want their problematical circumstances alleviated, but few want to change how they see the world.”

Most intransigent among his clients are those with government benefits and mandated weekly therapy. Some have been coming to him for years. Their mindsets are characterized by hopelessness, but they have shelter and food and seem to be averse to change.

Going to therapy is a big event in their week. Qualifying for benefits is important to them. An oft-repeated question is, "Can you get me eligible for more benefits?" They were unlikely to take steps to hold a steady job, since doing so is at odds with keeping their benefits. 

My friend’s caring for his clients and concern over the waste of human lives is palpable. “People aren’t meant to do nothing,” he laments.

With a defensive tone, he adds, “and the poverty mindset I see has absolutely nothing to do with race.”

A Poverty Mindset Is a Choice

Dr. Anthony Daniels corroborates the observations of my psychologist friend. In his many books and essays, Daniels, writing as Theodore Dalrymple, describes the mindset of the underclass in England.

Dalrymple is no armchair theorist. He is a retired English physician who spent his career working in the inner-cities and prisons of England and also in sub-Saharan Africa. His hard-hitting observations of the poverty mindset are not without respect for the humanity of those he sought to help.

Having truly known the plight of the poor, he reflects upon what he learned about poverty mindsets. Dalrymple describes English poverty:

I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England... the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul.

This poverty of the soul is by choice. Dalrymple observes, of the English underclass, in his book, Life At The Bottom, “It could scarcely occur to you that they are other than fully conscious agents, in essence no different from yourself.”

Capable of making choices, those mired in poverty choose self-destructive patterns. “Day after day I hear of the same violence, the same neglect and abuse of children, the same broken relationships, the same victimization by crime, the same nihilism, the same dumb despair,” he recounts. Dalrymple then seeks to understand, “If everyone is a unique individual, how do patterns such as this emerge?”

Dalrymple rejects “Economic determinism, of the vicious cycle-of-poverty variety” as an explanation for ruinous choices made over and over again. Escape from poverty is possible. He writes, “Untold millions of people who were very much poorer have emerged from poverty within living memory in South Korea, for example. If being poor really entailed a vicious cycle, man would still be living in the caves.”

…………………..

The Self-Deception of the Underclass Is Aided by Intellectuals

Dalrymple points out that there are advantages to the underclass to pretend that they are innocent victims:

When a man tells me, in explanation of his anti-social behaviour, that he is easily led, I ask him whether he was ever easily led to study mathematics or the subjunctives of French verbs. Invariably the man begins to laugh: the absurdity of what he has said is immediately apparent to him. Indeed, he will acknowledge that he knew how absurd it was all along, but that certain advantages, both psychological and social, accrued by keeping up the pretense.

Pretending to not have the power of choice is not natural and has to be taught.

Dalrymple writes:

The idea that one is not an agent but the helpless victim of circumstances, or of large occult sociological or economic forces, does not come naturally…. On the contrary, only in extreme circumstances is helplessness directly experienced in the way the blueness of the sky is experienced. Agency, by contrast, is the common experience of us all.

Dalrymple heaps scorn on academics and intellectuals who theorize that the underclass doesn’t have agency. He writes, “In fact most of the social pathology exhibited by the underclass has its origin in ideas that have filtered down from the intelligentsia.” One example is the use of “the term ‘addiction,’… to cover any undesirable but nonetheless gratifying behavior.”

These academic ideas have pernicious consequences:

Not long after academic criminologists propounded the theory that recidivists were addicted to crime… a car thief…asked me for treatment of his addiction to stealing cars—failing receipt of which, of course, he felt morally justified in continuing to relieve car owners of their property.

Dalrymple’s deep dive into the poverty mindset encourages us to challenge those who would assure us that poverty has everything to do with capitalism and racism. Dalrymple would tell us those theories are wrong and to rely on them will not alleviate poverty. What is essential is for the poor to experience a mindset shift towards taking more responsibility for their lives. Is it not time to approach the poverty problem believing that the poor are able to make this essential change? [read more]

Even though the author doesn’t say so, but the “intellectuals” are mainly on the Left. Whatever the Left touches they inevitably destroy. If people are responsible for their income (ie saving their money and being mindful of their spending) then they are less likely to need the gov’t which makes the Left nervous (takes power away from them).