What is Poverty?

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/poordevelopment.html

The findings show that poverty correlates with stress which correlates with poorer working memory.

What is missed from the Wired article but included in the Economist article (ed. Natasha Loader?) is an analysis of "poverty". Sir Michael Marmot of UCL apparently have shown that it is social heirachy which is the active agent in poverty which has been concluded by other means in this blog (worth considering how facts can be revealed without evidence) ... so happily I'll rest that line of enquiry.

http://www.euro.who.int/socialdeterminants/socmarketing/20050912_1

If social climbing is the way to happiness then we are doomed to mediocrity since only some people can be "rich" and by definition they need a poor class with whome to compare themselves and consider themselves successful and happy. In themselves they are not successful and happy! And, following from the recent dialectics analysis to consider oneself rich by looking through the eyes of a poor person is actually to make oneself poor for the benefit of the spectacle of seeing oneself rich!

(In dialectics lies the SRH (self reference hypothesis) that we cannot be ourselves. It seems that this is implicit in dialectics but remains to be uncovered why.)

If we are poor while we enjoy the spectacle of being rich, what is the actual meaning of poor and rich? The rich must be poor at least for the purposes of seeing themselves as rich.

The materialists would have argued that the rich were "actually" rich and the poor "actually" poor as proven by the research. Not enough food = death. Poverty is real. But if poor and rich are simply dialectical and poor and rich swap places all the time in order to see what they are then it isn't real. The name for real poverty is absolute poverty. Relative poverty doesn't exist.

Yet relative poverty is bad for your brain as the research shows. The key then is that thinking about the world the wrong way is actually bad for your health! This blog - as I think was discovered another way not long ago - is not simply arguing the toss over the abstract Nature of Life but is actually questioning the very mechanisms of welfare and Life itself.

It's not the measurable circumstances that determine "Poverty" but how people think! Thus winning the lottery guarentees you nothing if you can't change how you think. And if you can change how you think then why do you need to win the lottery?

Its very trivial and common sense - yet the European Enlightenment has built its entire palace on the wrong foundations! A quote I like from Raiders of the Lost Arc when they see the rest of the amulet and figure that the french archaeologist is "looking in the wrong place".

This it seems (unbelievably!) is the most important thing to realise about the mainstream narrative of Life that we are bred upon: it is looking in the wrong place. The nature of richness and the key to life lies elsewhere; even if we can't work out exactly where that is. Remarkable to think that armies of powerful, educated and rich people have wasted their whole lives looking in the wrong place: but dialectically it is no suprise... but a word of caution... in this blog lies no wisdom and no Key to Life for to think one has the key to life is to become authentic and to contract out Life from oneself to the Key. If there is a truth it is We are the Key, a story that we each still have to write. So all this blog can ever hope to achieve is to show that the Keys that we can get our hands on are fakes. Richness, Material well-being and Status being the first key to Life which I hope is soundly here and elsewhere shown to be a fake.