A Poor Way to Exist
Wealth is not a sin in itself the same way poverty is not an inherently righteous condition.
I have wound up my August challenge but i haven’t ended entirely. The challenge is still on but in another month that i will choose. I learned a lot about women and their interfaces and i have gleaned lots of insights that I hope to share soon. If you haven’t read my August challenges, I have added the links below. Thank you
The animated discourse I listened to recently focalized around who is rich and who is poor. The man appearing genuinely agonized over his general lacklustre didn’t minced words when it came to revealing his fruitless endevours: that the more he is habitually engaged in earnest work, the more his vigorous efforts turned out mediocre in results. "My friend has no assets, no known business, but has a big mansion, drives a big machine..and yet lives the best of his life,” he comparably quipped. "What exactly do people do in this industry?" He fretly wondered.
And responses from his friends were not any better. They oscillated between less of hard work and more of something magical. Something whose means cannot be explicitly explained but the results are conspicuous to everyone. “There is the secret source behind that flamboyance man!” One of them confidently asserted.
It’s not news that words like rich or poor are taking on a different unfamiliar yet unsurprising connotations narrowing down to economic prescriptions. When someone says there is a big man in the town, it doesn't imply he has a big heart, a big soul or a big generosity. What's implied is he has a big pocket, a big car, a big land, a big business, big political connections.
Our societies are gradually transmuting into a kind of utilitarian place where our relationships are purely transactional. There is no aesthetic. There is no gentleness. There is nowhere to call home. There is only a marketplace everywhere. Everything is a sort of calculations (trading balance) of what is useful and what is not useful. When our relationships are founded on marketplace principles, you are fundamentally concerned with what you take and not what you give. You give less so you can take more; that's the underlying principle.
We often hear in our culture that wealth creation is the zero-sum game to imply that those who are privileged likely got their wealth through dubious means or at the expense of the people. This age-old assumption is frequently echoed by politicians that large profits is a result of big corporations exploiting the poor and the middle class. (But don't get me wrong; certainly, it is possible for the wealthy to mistreat those of lesser means.
The notion of material poverty isn't new; it's traceable to the Biblical era. Jesus himself had no permanent home. Though his disciples suffered from bouts of physical hunger by abandoning their previous occupations, they hungered and thirsted for what was right. They were concerned with what they give and not what they receive in return. The disciples gave out what they gave and got fulfilled knowing they did what tickles their heart.
We cannot, nevertheless, discard material production because it pivots us to the position of taking care of the truly needy. We are, however, implored not to pursue wealth for the sake of merely wealth creation. We also cannot take care of our household needs, chidren's home, deserving neighbours and the deprived without paying little attention to material production.
Wealth is not a sin in itself the same way poverty is not an inherently righteous condition. The only problem is we live in an age with a high regard for the material life. The life that the vast majority of us will never lead.
If we feel lowly as the economic tags suggest, we will struggle to shed off this identity because we presumably believe it's not what we deserve. We will disbelieve the current state. We will wander in longings for overnight success. We will desparage our little yet fulfilling efforts. We will feel guilty of our lesser accomplishments even if our own improvements have been notable in our personal journey.
I know for sure nobody finds it attractive to be labelled as poor. It goes against what the heart desires. We abhor naturally when poverty shows up in us. If at all possible, we dress ourselves up even if for a short while just to prove something and inflate our reputation. The cost of others seeing us in distress is too much for any of us to bear. And in that regard, the pride instinct in our heart soothes us at all costs to evade looking penniless and feeble.
It goes without saying the love of money is the root of all evil. It has never been about money per se but how we frame money. Rich and poor alike can love money, but they can also be driven by something other than a love of money. Wealthy people can be out for only themselves and to amass as much as they can because they have made wealth their god, but poor people may also love money as their god and be motivated to sacrifice their integrity for the sake of escaping their condition.
We cannot choose those who to envy based on their net worth, but nevertheless the altruists can find in their hearts a special concern for the plight of the poor. People may be generous enough with their richness, just as people may love generosity above all else even though they are poor. So the question of how much wealth threshold qualifies to be an altruistic sense is out of the equation.
Above all, the poor won't cease to be there just like the rich won't cease to exist in the land of scarcity. Our role, however, isn't to denigrate them further. Our role is to open our hands to the brother, to the sister, to the poor, and to the needy. We shouldn't yearn solely for delusions of grandeur. The work of our hands could profitably yield us the extra not because we thirsted as the ends. Understand that anything extra is only a means to enrich our existence not in economic terms but in our everyday living. And in that case, life becomes beautiful when you're will to give more and not care what you get in reciprocation.
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Your European colonial masters taught your people well, Edwin. Their example of living the life of grandeur and ease while forcing your people to work to support them translated to some people as I must get rich too. Same thing here in the US. Through "admiration and longing for wealth" we have allowed 0.01% of our nation to control 70% of the wealth so now we're faced with the arduous task of trying to undo the damage and try to get to a balanced economy.
Civilization has been the best and the worst evolution for Homo sapiens. It has led through 10, 000 years to the happy ability to improve our lives and status while at the same time raising greed and cruelty in too many of us.
As you so aptly point out Jesus was a man of high good conscience who despaired of the cruelty of wealth upon people of lower rank and willingly risked his life to try to right the wrongs. But within a hundred years of his death people like Paul were busy undoing a lot of the good he tried to teach.