[I follow Sri Rohit Arya on Facebook, and I've found his commentary on the human condition one of the best I've ever come across. This post is a reproduction from his wall.]
Poverty damages the psyche more than anything else. Those who have never been poor can never understand that to be poor is to be in a permanent war zone with no exit and no ceasefire. And you inevitably develop PTSD. Every choice you make is not a financial one but one of survival. What will you do without so that you and family can eat? It is that stark. High rates of alcoholism are almost inevitable. There is no other way to last and many decide it is not worth it. A person who travels by bus or local train all the time is not the same kind of human being who moves by car. A train and bus option creates one sort of personality while the same journey by plane and private taxi makes another sort. We have this fetish for equality without realizing it is impossible. Leftists think making incomes equal will fix matters. No, all it will do is make more broken people.
It is worst of all for the intelligent who are poor. They feel the shame of it, they develop a permanent hunger for things they can’t have, and many of them become rabid leftists out of spite, malice and envy. They know all the things they could have done to be a productive member of society had they the slightest break. One story was of somebody who could not afford taxi fare for an interview and was rejected for wearing ‘shabby crushed clothes’ because the bus did that to them. The person who told me that drives a Merc today but his eyes were wet. Poverty creates this permanent sense of humiliation which leaves a person without dignity or self-respect. Movies lie about the nobility of poverty, which may soothe for a while, but then reality pushes the person back into the mud pit. I always regard Deewar’s Vijay as a genuine positive breakthrough in the Indian psyche, because he refused to go back into poverty even when his mother disowns him.
Those who know they are doomed to poverty finds ways of coping. I once learned a hard lesson about not being pompous from a bai who announced she was marrying off her minor daughter. I gave the English education liberandu lecture on how sad that was and how bad she was too. She knocked me flat with a no holds barred description of what life was like in that environment and how girls needed protection even from within family. The mangal sutra was a social protection. All my notions of right were upended and I was shown up as being shallow and ignorant of reality. It is not that I was that much better than her financially but between living in a flat in a mid-level housing society and a chawl there was already an impassable gulf of comprehension. It was a most valuable lesson in perspective and context.
The utter all pervasive reality of such a life is Lack. Of Everything. And such a person receives so much damage to the mind and spirit they hardly ever recover. When I started my spiritual process I learned the hard way that sadhana is not for the struggling. Most of my mentoring is to fix income issues because one may go a long way without fixing that but one day it explodes in the face. You renunciate and become a sanyasi. Then it may work. Some basic modicum of comfort is needed for the average person however. The damage caused otherwise is too great to repair. Those who come from poverty very soon learn that those who have do not care. It disturbs and upsets them and many of them are snobbish and put down the person for their ‘background’.
Silence about the past is the mark of the poor person who has escaped poverty. They have learned there is a taint they will never shrug off if it was known they were poor. I had a friend who had climbed out of poverty and whose breakup tactic was to send his girlfriends to his childhood family home. Once they saw his home, they were full of praise and admiration for how far he had come up in life and dumped his ass in less than 3 months. Every single time. He and I would laugh over it but the taste in our mouths was not good.
The single most important thing a society can do is wealth creation. ‘Kosha purva sarvarambham’ as Chanakya so grimly began in his Arthshastra. It is not a coincidence that every golden age of Bharatiya Spirituality overlaps with an age of great prosperity.
First one must live well. Then one can be good and noble. Dharmasya moolam artha!
