A Tajik colleague told me, quite a while ago, that poverty makes people cruel. It stuck in my mind. The way she said it, as an absolute truism, resonated and reminded me of the cruel things I have seen poor people do. Mothers who sell their daughters in sex slavery, for example, or the horrors exerted on child laborers in Bangladesh. Or even, on a level down, the awful treatment of animals in many developing countries.
It seems impossible to argue that poverty leads to cruel things. Not really an interesting or disputed point. The real question, I suppose, is whether wealth also leads to cruelty. When you consider systemic cruelty, the answer is yes. The factory owner who benefits from child labor is as culpable as the parents who give their children to the factory. Probably more culpable, since the factory owner could make money in another way.
I posed the question of poverty and cruelty on Twitter, and I think that Ian Thorpe gave me the best answer. He suggested that inequality makes people cruel. That explains the people on the bottom end of the pyramid forced into cruel actions and cruel choices, and the people on the top end, so far from poverty that poor people and their problems no longer seem real to them. It’s easy to be cruel when you can’t see your victims. Or when you think their problems are inevitable and can’t be solved. Or when you think poor people make themselves poor or even aren’t quite human. Inequality creates the kind of distance that makes that happen.
*********
Chosen because it shows one of the cruelest forms of child labor.
I offer this as a rough idea rather than a carefully thought out view: taking a pessimistic perspective, perhaps people are simply cruel to begin with? In rich countries prosperity and institutions force people to be less cruel. But the absence of cruelty is the aberration, rather than the other way round.
That…seems distressingly likely to be true.
I’m not sure. Institutions to blunt the impact of poverty and inequality are campaigned for where they don’t exist and cherished where they do by populations in many countries, so I think people generally do –to some extent, and always with mixed motivations– at least *want* to be less cruel.
(Not sure that was very coherent.)
I would agree that poverty makes people coarse and hard, and that wealthy people often have only a tenuous grip on reality and little idea of what life is like for those not as well off.
Of course it takes its part in becoming cruelty because at times few inevitable things tend the people under poverty to become harsh and cruel.
Philip Blue & Alanna – I think that’s true, but a more positive perspective is that altruism also exists. In spite of our “selfish genes” we actually do have empathy and the capacity to sacrifice for others. Our culture, institutions, families, genetic roll of the dice and personal choices will all influence how much our capacity for cruelty is brought out, and how much our empathy and cooperative instincts are cultivated.
To me , that’s something to appreciate.