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.
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Chosen because it shows one of the cruelest forms of child labor.