Suzanne Harrington: Want to abolish poverty? Here's how - it's actually pretty simple
Suzanne Harrington: getting past poverty means getting past them-and-us. Pic: Denis Scannell
The greatest trick that humans have ever pulled off is to convince ourselves we are not all connected. Instead, we have an Us/Them binary, which allows us to shut off.Â
As Tolstoy put it, “We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another.” This is on the first page of Pulitzer-winning sociologist Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, by America, where he discusses how one in eight Americans live in poverty, despite America being the land of corporate dollars and insane wealth.
It’s not sexy, poverty. If you’re in it, you can’t think about anything else, but if you’re not, you’d rather scroll through TikTok until your eyes fall out than confront the psychological discomfort of acknowledging the actual discomfort of others. We have entire systems in place to distract us, from politicians scapegoating voiceless minorities to made-up culture wars about gender pronouns to revering the rich on Instagram. Anything to direct our gaze away from the fact that we live in a time of extraordinary abundance, but still haven’t figured out how to do proper distribution.
Poverty is not anything new – it’s been with us about 7,000 years, from when we moved from using hoes to oxen, except not everyone got an ox, and broadly speaking, this is when the Us/Them binary took hold. (Before that, people grew food on the equivalent of allotments, and were more or less equal).Â
Anyway, seven millennia later, hoes mean something else, oxen are tractors, and industrialised agriculture provides more food than we can eat, yet we still have poverty. To deal with this, we have been trained to chuck a tenner to charity – which, while well-meaning, absolves Us, as we have now done our bit for Them. And nothing changes.
In the US, Matthew Desmond says that liberals explain poverty as an insurmountable structural problem, while conservatives blame the poor directly for being poor.Â
Yet how easy it is to slide from being an Us to a Them; a few missed pay cheques, an illness. An unforeseen twist, an unexpected turn. Lives then lived in quiet desperation, in despairing isolation. Nobody wants to know you when you’re poor.
Instead, says Desmond, we need to organise, to come together. To blend Us and Them.
“You might not think of yourself as the protesting type,” he writes. “I’m not either. But mass movements are composed of scores of people finding their own way to pitch in. Movements need people to march, but they also need graphic designers and cooks and marketing professionals and teachers and faith leaders, and lawyers. We can all direct our obsessions and talents towards abolishing poverty.”
Which sounds a bit Bono, but Desmond says rather than outsmarting poverty (which we could easily – we’re clever), we need to make it taboo: “We need to out-hate it.”
