My first reaction is: of course poverty is coercive. A wealthy person enjoys plenty of options if pressed. A sickness or emergency can often be resolved by drawing on this or that asset. Economic trends that result in unemployment are less likely to provoke a crisis as the rent and bills can continue to be paid as before.
In contrast, a poor person’s options often amount to undesirable options. Economic trends can lead to unwanted migration if not homelessness. Unemployment or even unexpected expenses might stop payment for someone’s prescription. Cheap food, cheap lodging, cheap everything or nothing. Avoiding these consequences under poverty circumstances can require equally undesirable results: exhausting work, or crime, no leisure. Sacrifice.
I’m not saying people can’t create their own mess and suffer consequences of their own making. Poverty may or may not be like that. Either way though, by its nature it restricts options and frequently- thereby, I am saying- coerces people into a course of action they wouldn’t otherwise choose.
But I am practically an amateur. Maybe I’m wrong. Is there more debate here than meets the eye?
Good lord. Under that definition, all of reality is coercive. Let’s outlaw it!
Look, Coercion is the use of force to push people into follow unreasonable demands, or demands by an unrecognized authority. It does not mean the simple lack of convenient alteratives to suit you.
More to the point, poverty itself is relative is has no stable meaning over time or across space. The “poor” today frequently have it better off than their (hypothetical) wealthy grandparents, and could easily enjoy a standard of living unknown to anyone over a hundred years ago.
And I want want a flying unicorn to ride about while I dispenses sweet brandy puddings from my +1 Bag of Holding* of Infinite-Brandy-Pudding-Storage. Reality does not conveniently grant me the latter. In the same way, all resources are always and everywhere in shortage. You may notice it, but even the wealthiest human ever born or who ever will be born lives in absolute resource confinement, every hour of every day that they live.
*Yes, this is deliberately facetious. Obviously, I know that a Bag of Holding would normally have plusses as bonuses, unless it was also intended as a weapion.
Is a bully coercive when he’s not directly threatening you, but you’re adjusting your actions in order to avoid him or to avoid predictable consequences from him?
I disagree.
If said bully is not interacting with you, I think you are not being coerced.
If you are speeding and notice a cop in the distance then slow down, the cop isn’t coercing you. You are making a decision, unprompted, to avoid an [more?] unpleasant situation.
Poverty is coercive. There is plenty of work to be done and plenty of goods and available time to be shared helping one another with special skills. Poverty is manufactured as a social system that maintains the power of the privileged. This is why there is such a desire to claim ownership over things that were once universally accessible. There are companies that have tried to go into foreign countries and claim ownership over their drinking water while making it illegal to collect rain water(I mean they did do that, but were thrown out). This is to coerce these people into poverty, into servitude. It’s an extreme example but more subtle methods are used in every country to achieve the same ends. The paycheck lenders all over the USA have taken over the place of the mafia. In one year a person can owe 20x the original amount borrowed. The mechanism here is to take an inappropriately large fee for a minor service to take the wealth of the poor person and transfer it to the already rich person.
Humanity has an obligation to it’s own community. There is no individual achievement. Each of us would be nothing but a surviving savage without the others. By participating in this game of hierarchy even those people at the top lose a great deal: their integrity, their individuality, their honesty and their pride. You cannot take without giving something up. You cannot be the tyrant in the play without being an actor who pretends to be what they are not. We take the unimaginable potential of humanity and squander it in order to guarantee the privileged of those we care about around us and ourselves. Because we worship power and role and ignore our own souls.
He’s already coerced you. If he didn’t interact with you at least indirectly, your actions would not be affected. And the cop is coercing you with the threat of a speeding ticket. You can argue about what type of interaction is required for coercion, but any threat, direct or implied, is coercive.
I’m not sure where to draw the line, but the case seems clear at the extremes. A wealthy person who can’t complete their antique hairdryer collection because of limited resources isn’t having to alter the course of their life by letting go of this goal. A person who lives in a box outdoors may be in a truly desperate situation and to get out of it might do things another person would consider nuts.
For a more normal example, I think a lot of people are making themselves miserable motivated by fear of becoming homeless, what with the by-now long history of stories in the media about the subject, not to mention a noticeable increase in homeless people themselves in some places, businesses shutting down and people getting fired and all.
If the person’s fear can be regarded as legitimate, how much are they motivated by coercive force, if such a thing is possible to be impersonal? Aren’t they even more coerced by circumstances if they are literally trying to work their way out of homelessness? Might they choose one ‘unreasonable’ course of action over the ‘unreasonable’ status quo of remaining homeless?
I suppose if coercion just absolutely, positively Has to be the product of a specific person’s or group’s intentions (and not via circumstance itself) to fit its definition, then the debate becomes a semantic issue of choosing a better word.
I think we cheapen the term when we disassociate it from human action. Person A can coerce person B. If I’m threatened by a lion, I wouldn’t say the lion is “coercing” me to climb a try. One can be coerced into poverty by someone, but “the state of poverty” isn’t coercive. That’s like saying music is coercive or disease is coercive.
Coercion requires intent, and poverty isn’t even an entity.
It’s like claiming that our need to ingest food is ‘coercion’, or our need for sleep is ‘coercion’…
That’s the rub though. Withholding food or sleep is something a person might do if they are trying hard to coerce you because the consequences are very much worth avoiding. A person who is forced to migrate to avoid starvation, if not coerced by hunger, is ______?
What about the person who takes advantage of a starving person in their lowly state. If the hungry person gets suckered because it is better than continuing to go hungry, is the person suckering them then coercing them with their hunger? They are knowingly wielding hunger against them in this instance. Without poverty there is no coercion in this example, so where does poverty fit in?
I disagree with you’re using my quote to justify your stance. The sign is the physical representation of human action, coercing you to not exceed a certain speed. It’s a fairly mild form of coercion, since we all know that we can speed a little bit and almost certainly not get caught. Still, it’s meant to force you to drive under a certain limit.
I can’t find it, but this reminds me of a thread (started I think by Bricker) with the following scenario.
You are stranded with a beautiful starlet on the island and are the only one with the ability to catch food. You tell her that if she wants to eat she has sex with you.
The general consensus was that this didn’t constitute rape, but I think most would agree that it was coercive.
But a human being put that speed sign up. Is that then coercion? If a police car is there, whether or not he’s got his radar gun out, is it coercion? I think the definition is too permissive if either case is coercion. Influence is not coercion.
Is poverty coercive to those who willingly embrace it? (Monks, hippies, whatever)
How can it be if it is freely chosen?
If it is not coercive to them, then how is it coercive towards others? Is it the person affected by poverty that defines whether it is coercive or is it the thing itself?