Wars Amongst the Poor – the Right Question
Crisis, then… We are in a deep bad economic crisis, steadily underway toward starving and poverty, and survival is at stake. At least for the most of us.
And history is cluttered up with such economic crises.
If we look around, we see basically four things:
The life conditions and the future of roughly 99% of people keep on worsening, while the reverse happens to the remaining 1%. (By the way, just while I was doubting you may deem these figures a bit overestimated I heard the news say that 1% of people owns more than the remaining 99% summed up…)
Countless “wars amongst the poor” of countless types, with endless disputes as to why a poor, among the poor contending for what little there is, should have the priority over another poor.
Ideological, political, economic positions endlessly opposing to one another, never settling their disputes, while stirring up a lot of commotion.
Ideologists, politicians, economists seemingly fight crises and problems in good faith and do not seem to solve them either because those crises or problems are too big events for human means, as if they were floods or earthquakes, or because their opponents won’t let them work long enough, or because they make mistakes in good faith, or because someone undermines their work out of dishonest personal profit.
The first of the following quotes can be found on the internet cleverly paraphrased as follows:
“The most important step in arriving at the right answer lies in asking the right question.” Albert Einstein
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Listing here examples of the wars amongst the poor we live surrounded by would be not only useless but even counter−productive: since there are infinite forms and infinite cases of them, we would end up compiling a redundant encyclopaedia of things you already know, thus wasting our precious energy. So I’ll leave to you this task of detecting such forms and cases of wars amongst the poor, and once spotted, tracing them back to what I discuss here.
As an example, imagine you were born in an extermination camp: all you knew would be a degraded world of desperate individuals, some trampling beastly on their fellows, some heroically bending over backwards to come to their aid, all of them hopelessly wrestling with a bottomless scarcity of wherewithal that permeated the whole existence and drained each and every drop of blood and oxygen out of every nook and cranny of anyone’s life; born and grown up in hell, starving and death as just the way it was. Then one day you stumble upon the electrified fence, and through it you see how every supply line and every production potential is first monopolised and then strangled from the outside; when the flow confined through those huge valves is further curtailed, in due course more and more wars amongst the poor will unleash into every corner of the extermination camp to compete for the less and less remaining drops. Endless rivulets seemingly unrelated and unattributable up until the moment new information reveals them to be not so unrelated and unattributable.
“Which poor has priority in a war amongst the poor?”, “Who is entitled to a little more and who to a little less of the few crumbles we’ve got to share – or perhaps of the few bones we’re forced to compete for?”, “How to scrape out a little more of the hopelessly scarce aid and charity?”, “Who will lose more and who will lose less?” are but various forms of the wrong question.
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Heard a joke once: How do you tell when a politician’s lying? His (or her) lips are moving. Then what is the truth? Obviously the real answer to crises lies behind the right questions.
The right question – the obvious real question – is, “Why is there not enough for all?”, “Why is there a war amongst the poor – why is there need for aid and charity – and why do conflicts appear irreconcilable – in the first place?”
This question begins like a whisper, but then you begin to look around at the kind of world surrounding us: are we starving in a desert? So part of the right question is asking yourself: how come that people starve in a world overflowing with a wealth of all the resources one may need, that just crave to be used? So what is missing, exactly? What, exactly, is not there where it ought to be? And as you linger on this question, strangely enough its whisper keeps on getting louder and sounding more and more like thunder.
What’s this crisis, then? It’s the crisis, we are told. The why of the crisis is the crisis. I mean, you’re not willing to take the question itself as a valid answer, are you?
The first rule of thumb to adopt is, whenever and wherever there is a war amongst the poor, as soon as you realise it is a war amongst the poor, stop wasting time and energy lining up with any side of it against any other side of it and start investigating whose hands you would play into if you did line up naively with someone against someone else: who is ensuring there isn’t enough for all?
The infinite does exist: it’s the wars amongst the poor, the wars amongst the unaware, the wars amongst the irrational, unless and until they detect and solve the hidden real third parties fomenting them.
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So what’s this essay, and why I have written it to you? It is intended as a map of what is really taking place in the backstage of the crisis. It is my opinion that both you and me, regardless of whether we like it or not, for the simple reason that we exist we share certain responsibilities. I have written this map for you so that we all benefit from the fact that you too know what’s really going on.
To this aim, please keep your feet on the ground, and always look at the ideas and concepts mentioned here strictly from the point of view that they are tools to better discover, observe, understand, evaluate hard facts and get somewhere, not idle sparks to dawdle oblivious in the opposite direction.
On the archipelago, there are people who know a lot about what is discussed here, but they are too few and from those scattered islands it may be difficult to share the overall perspective. On the mainland, there are a lot of people, with little time on their hands, who know nothing at all, or worse know only a few things in a flawed perspective, or even worse they think they know but all they know are fabrications. This essay aims at being a bridge between the mainland and all the islands of the archipelago.
It has been said that Who, What, Where, When, Why are the fundamental questions and answers in gathering the information to solve the problem, so:
Who: Who is the cause of what is going on? And who can do something about it?
What: What is going on, actually and exactly? And what can be done about it, actually and exactly?
Where: Where is it happening? And where can something be done about it?
When: Is it happening right now? And how long it’s been that way?
Why: Why those causing it are doing it? Why doing something about it is the sensible choice?