Merit and Motivation

[virginia_fell]

The next time someone tells you that poor people don't deserve help because the real problem is that they don't work hard enough to deserve food, health care, and homes, remember how many of them are being deliberately obstructed.I know that we like to act in America like our culture is a perfect meritocracy, that rich people earned their money and

Comments

[motherwell]

One may not know exactly WHICH other poor people are making stupid and/or destructive choices, but's pretty obvious to everyone that a lot of them are making such choices, and that said choices are at least part of the reason why they're in need of state assistance. So if you're trying to do the right thing 24/7 and you still need help, you're bound to feel a good bit of resentment toward people who are doing the wrong thing and still competing with you for the same help. The hate is not "directed inward," it's directed at others in similar situations. They're not quite the same thing. It's a bit like hating someone of your own race or religion for reinforcing a stereotype harmful to you. It's not self-hatred, it's hatred of something or someone that makes you look bad or otherwise impedes your own progress.

My fiancee is a social worker, and she sees a lot of this all the time. She's perfectly happy to help people get what they're legally entitled to, but she also wants to wake them up to what they can do to avoid having to beg the state for money. Of course the comfortable wingnuts and moralists are grossly exaggerating the proportion of poor people who are poor because of their own stupidity; of course the states are cutting budgets for assistance, due to falling income-tax revenue, when the need is growing; and of course some personal choices are less clearly wrong than others (having another kid seemed perfectly sensible when you had a decent job, but suddenly...). But the poor are no more uniformly blameless than they are uniformly lazy.

[virginia_fell]

But the poor are no more uniformly blameless than they are uniformly lazy.

Oh, that I definitely agree with. I just feel really shitty categorically laying blame when I know that in many cases people are being actively prevented from having their efforts pay off.

[motherwell]

Yes, there IS a lot of that, and it always gets worst during recessions, when the rich and powerful suddenly have a lot more suffering to pretend they had nothing to do with. It's easy to blame the poor for their lack of progress in the best of times, when real opportunities abound; but when the same reasoning gets applied in the bad times, as if the good times were still rolling, that's when it becomes indiscriminate, cowardly victim-bashing.

[virginia_fell]

Yeah. And the people I was talking about who put down on themselves for being poor are telling themselves really unhealthy stories because of crap they have personally internalized. These are the sort of people who believe that someone has to be on the bottom, and better it be someone slow and stupid like them so that the awesome folk can have their chance to soar.

It's that fatalism that really smacks to me of self-loathing. "I deserve this because I (got knocked up/wouldn't sleep with my boss/left my husband/etc). I'm poor because I'm supposed to be, and if I'd just (miraculously had access to an abortion/screwed my boss/put up with my husband/etc), I would still have a home and food. My choices got me here, which means I did this to myself."

That's the kind of self-hating that I think is really fucked up. It's one level of screwy and awful to spread that mentality among the well-off, but it's a whole 'nother level of disturbing when I see poor people buying into it.

[motherwell]

I see your point, but I still think the thought-processes are a bit less simple than that. There may be resentment-driven sense of justice here: not just "my choices got me here," but "I made these choices, I got screwed for them, so I don't want to see someone else getting away with doing things I didn't get away with. If I don't get a break because of my own choices, then why should someone else who made the same wrong choices get a break?"

Also, blaming oneself for one's situation isn't all bad if it's kept within rational limits: if I think I'm suffering because of something I did, then I'm more likely to reexamine my own actions and try to make changes to get better results. When this thinking is driven by others, to justify their own disdain for you, rather than by you for your own interests, that's when it gets debilitating.