And that’s what you took away from my lengthy post. Very revealing.
I think the OP is in some ways correct.
Here’s my take on the causes
- We are comfortable enough to worry about complex issues.
- Class divides
- Lack of a common enemy
- Lack of universal social norms
Simple examples
We aren’t worried about how to feed ourselves so we are free to contemplate gay marriage.
We don’t have people who might die for lack of being able to see a doctor for an injury so we’re free to worry about how exactly to deal with healthcare in general.
Class division has been a driving force behind rebellions and revolutions throughout history
Nothing unifies people more than a common enemy, it’s no longer PC to villify some other country, plus most larger powers aren’t all that dissimilar from us. We don’t have the USSR or Nazi Germany anymore. We can’t make China the new USSR because our economy isn’t independent of them. Couldn’t even do it with a middle eastern country for the same reason + they couldn’t be seen as a penultimate threat, despite attempts.
Issues like gun control were never even a question long ago because it was just normal to walk around with one. Now it’s normal some places and non existent in others.
Lacking universal social norms is probably also partly due to the amount of communication. You can easily find people who share your views outside of your local community and reenforce them if they are different.
So basically we’re divided largely because we can be.
To me these two statements seem to be polar opposites, or at least in conflict.
Is it social pressure that made your decision for you, or your own will power?
That said, given equal willpowers the person with external factors working against them isn’t going to get as far.
My interpretation is that it could be both, plus a combination of myriad other factors that interact in chaotic ways. Richard Parkers comment laid out a “liberal” view of the situation that accepts this chaotic mix of factors and behavioural drivers and steers clear of simply blaming those in those situations.
That’s certainly how I see it and your final sentence is a very simplified version of this, i.e. take two groups of otherwise indistinguishable people and put one group under extreme financial and societal/cultural stress and bad things are more likely to happen.
His theory doesn’t explain the success rate of those who went through the great depression versus those in long term poverty.
Poverty is a term applied post mortem to describe a monetary condition. The lack of money does not determine it’s cause. The reasons differ for short term poverty but narrow as time progresses to long term poverty. Long term poverty is often referred to as generational poverty and I think for good reason. It’s a loss of skills that should have been passed down from one generation to the next. Once those skills are lost then society cannot rectify it directly with money. In fact, any attempt to do so will add more to the number of impoverished. Generational poverty requires a restoration of the skills needed to successfully interact in a work environment.
Your juxtaposition of “willpower” as against “social pressure” and “external factors” suggests to me that the contradiction you see is because of your definition and understanding of willpower. There is a common belief that willpower is some aspect of a person’s character, the presence or absence of which are the moral responsibility of the individual. In this belief system, there is a kind of meta-willpower in which people choose to have or exercise willpower.
In my view, that framework is only coherent if you posit some kind of eternal soul that stands apart from the influences of earthly matter and that you are morally responsible for its state. Without that stuff, the only thing willpower can be is just one more function of the brain like the power to identify musical pitch. It is the product of some combination of good genetics, social factors, and only in some small degree the choices one has made in life (which choices themselves are also constrained by all these factors). Even in a world in which free will exists in some sense, your ability to execute the right choices is determined in large part by things everyone agrees are not in your personal control.
Mostly lurking. I guess the spirit moved me on this one!
(Just busy, mostly.)
Hell, an individual can struggle with that argument within themselves at the same time.
Someone can be a dumb-ass and make really poor decisions and yet still be the product of his cruddy environment.
I recall there being anti-smoking messages from VERY early on in my life. And they seemed to stick- very few people in high school or college actually smoked, and very few in my age cohort smoke to this day. Yet literally every single day I see poor people smoking outside the public transit stations.
Part of me wants to say that they’re SOL if they want public medical care for smoking related problems; it’s been common publicized knowledge for 40 years now that smoking is bad.
Part of me wonders what fucked-up community they live in where they smoke anyway despite the fact that its dangers are well publicized AND it’s an expensive habit for anyone, especially someone with low income.
I have no idea what you mean by this.
Many millions of people were utterly crushed by the Depression. That other millions survived was due, first, to ameliorative programs passed by the government after private charity had failed, and second, to the giant influx of government spending promoted by war expenses. The way the Depression was solved can be answered in three words: money, money, money.
Nor can the Depression be equated to generational poverty. The Depression lasted a decade. That’s a long time in someone’s life, but certainly not generational.
You should take a look at the plight of black Americans before, during, and after the Depression, when they were systematically discriminated against in government programs, in war work, and in the armed forces, and ask them about their success rate.
We have spent a great deal more on the War on Poverty than we did on WWII and the New Deal - why haven’t we solved poverty?
I don’t think that’s a good example. Blacks progressed socially at a much faster rate in the 50s than they did in the 20s and 30s. Of course, they were starting from much further back.
Regards,
Shodan
I can barely see those goalposts from where I am. You have a heck of a throwing arm.
The CCC wasn’t designed to solve poverty; it merely kept people from starving. Same with the WPA and other New Deal programs.
WWII spending was of an entirely different magnitude. Spending from 1933-1936 was about $26 billion. Spending from 1942-1945 was about $297 billion. On a percentage of GDP basis, government spending went from about 8-10% a year to over 40% a year. That is about double the highest percentage in any year since. Money is the answer. Lots and lots of money. Note that if spending went up 10 times and % of GDP only five times the takeaway is that the rest of the economy was hugely booming to account for the other 500%. Jobs = money. BTW, what happened to those jobs employing women and minorities when the white boys came home from the war?
[sarcasm]Yeah, those ungrateful bastards rioting in the 1960s after all we did for them in the 1950s. You’d athunk they would be thank us for the free water from those fire hoses.[/sarcasm]
Yes, I think it’s not only the voting blocs but the voters themselves who are conflicted. As bump put it:
Government solutions are necessarily broad and applicable to large numbers of people, but as individuals we have trouble coming up with solutions that we think are applicable to everyone, which makes it very difficult to reach a consensus.
(underline added)
I don’t consider the removal of opposing viewpoints to be a compromise. Removing opposing viewpoints would be considered repression.
Understanding that the opposition might have a valid viewpoint, and still processing the ability to actually talk to those who hold opposing viewpoints, can lead to compromise.
Nobody is saying that the solution is to simply take money out of rich people’s bank vaults and airdrop bundles of cash onto inner cities. Obviously much of the money involved in any realistic program to assist these people should be going towards job training programs, free college education, drug rehabilitation programs, etc.
But at the end of the day, it’s a lot easier to focus on your schoolwork if you are going to bed in a safe home with a full stomach.
Something I struggle with, at least in a philosophical sense, is that regardless of how much we may do, or how successful the poverty reduction efforts are, there are always going to be poor people, because at its heart, poverty is essentially a state that relates to relative disparities in resources.
We see this now in that relative to the past, today’s poor are inarguably better off- they have some basic access to health care, however imperfect or lacking. And the bigger concern these days is whether or not the food distribution system is adequate for proper nutrition, not whether there is food available at all. But clearly there is still a lot of room for improvement.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try and ameliorate/remedy poverty, but just wondering where we would eventually draw the line where we say “Yes, these people have less resources than others, but they have all their needs met and don’t need any assistance.” It seems to me that it might be a smart thing to define that state of affairs and shoot for that, rather than just struggling along wailing and gnashing our teeth because there’s a relative difference… because there will ALWAYS be a relative difference.
Perhaps it’s personal experience, as someone who had plenty of external factors working against me.
90 percent of my family were non functional alcoholics, a large portion were drug addicts.
Quite a few actually encouraged me to partake.
More than half have served prison time. Almost all aside from Mom , myself and my older brother have been in jail.
Within ± 5 yrs of my graduation I was one of 6 members of my extended family to have graduated high school. I spent several years of my childhood in the projects.
These things pre-dispose me to believe that will power is indeed all you have against social pressures.