Some of you might think that a society with more poor people would care more about the issue of poverty, or that a person who came from a poor background would have more empathy for the poor. But often times it's just the opposite. If you take a look at poor countries across the world, a pattern tends to emerge. A society that has more poverty is less able to take care of the poor. It's easier to allocate individual money to poor people when there's fewer of them. When there are so many poor people around everywhere eventually it's easy for that society to become numb to it. It's just hard to think about all that suffering, so people just start blocking it out. I see it as a sort of psychological analogue of what has been termed "donor fatigue". It's easy to have sympathy for one poor person, but when you see a crowd of them every single day in the course of your daily life, it's easy for that sympathy to get stretched to the breaking point and pulled thin. Individuals that grew up in a culture of poverty are fighting for survival. Even in cases where they later become wealthy, they are still in that mode. They have to do whatever it takes to get more money trying to secure their own economic standing, and they can't think about other people. This is why, as a society has more and more poor people, that same society starts having less and less empathy for its poor people.
This is why commercials that ask you to donate to the poor show this: And not something like this: (Ok I was going to post a pic of a lot of hungry children, but now I think that's not a good idea, I just need you to imagine a lot of kids that are hungry). When there are less we feel like we can make a difference. When there are too many, we tend to feel overwhelmed, like anything we do won't make any difference (just as you said).
When I am poor, I am distinctly less charitable. Yes I empathise more with the starving when I am starving, but I sympathise less. If I can do it, so can you.
Folk love poverty. They love the poverty porn. The problem is that they don't look at how they're part of the problem. As they watch films about the great imperialist Churchill, they don't think about the historical damage created. As they worship at the altar of consumerism, they don't consider how trade relations is biased in favour of the rich north. As they purchase their baubles, they don't consider how multinationals have funded resource conflicts (such that civil war becomes a 1 in 6 chance).
My loved ones tell me and this has been a hard lesson for me to take on board. You cannot help others until you are able to help yourself. I must place myself in a position of strength before I address the needs of others. I must not put the needs of others before myself, until my own needs are met. To do so helps no one. I just kill myself.
Our poverty is intentional, and we are investing in more and more of it at the behest of the corporate state.
obviously if we had a corporate state we would not have the highest corporate tax in the world. Apple needs people to be rich not poor because only rich people can afford their products
yes they don't support capitalism even after it just ended 40% of all the poverty on earth and even after it saved another 60 million from slowly starving to death.
