poverty

69:5.12As civ­i­liza­tion de­vel­oped, men ac­quired new in­cen­tives for sav­ing; new wants were rapidly added to the orig­i­nal food hunger. Pov­erty be­came so ab­horred that only the rich were sup­posed to go di­rect to heaven when they died. Prop­erty be­came so highly val­ued that to give a pre­ten­tious feast would wipe a dis­honor from one’s name.

111:4.10Ideas may take ori­gin in the stim­uli of the outer world, but ide­als are born only in the cre­ative realms of the in­ner world. To­day the na­tions of the world are di­rected by men who have a super­abun­dance of ideas, but they are pov­erty-stricken in ide­als. That is the ex­pla­na­tion of pov­erty, di­vorce, war, and racial ha­treds.

81:6.62. Cap­i­tal goods. Cul­ture is never de­vel­oped un­der con­di­tions of pov­erty; leisure is es­sen­tial to the prog­ress of civ­i­liza­tion. In­di­vid­ual char­ac­ter of moral and spir­i­tual value may be ac­quired in the ab­sence of ma­te­rial wealth, but a cul­tural civ­i­liza­tion is only de­rived from those con­di­tions of ma­te­rial pros­per­ity which fos­ter leisure com­bined with am­bi­tion.

69:9.53. The de­sire for lib­erty and leisure. In the ear­lier days of so­cial evo­lu­tion the ap­por­tion­ment of in­di­vid­ual earn­ings among the group was vir­tu­ally a form of slav­ery; the worker was made slave to the idler. This was the sui­ci­dal weak­ness of com­mu­nism: The im­prov­i­dent ha­bit­u­ally lived off the thrifty. Even in mod­ern times the im­prov­i­dent de­pend on the state (thrifty tax­pay­ers) to take care of them. Those who have no cap­i­tal still ex­pect those who have to feed them.

160:4.10It re­quires in­tel­li­gence to se­cure one’s share of the de­sir­able things of life. It is wholly er­ro­neous to sup­pose that faith­ful­ness in do­ing one’s daily work will in­sure the re­wards of wealth. Bar­ring the oc­ca­sional and ac­ci­den­tal ac­quire­ment of wealth, the ma­te­rial re­wards of the tem­po­ral life are found to flow in cer­tain well-or­ga­nized chan­nels, and only those who have ac­cess to these chan­nels may ex­pect to be well re­warded for their tem­po­ral ef­forts. Pov­erty must ever be the lot of all men who seek for wealth in iso­lated and in­di­vid­ual chan­nels. Wise plan­ning, there­fore, be­comes the one thing es­sen­tial to worldly pros­per­ity. Suc­cess re­quires not only de­vo­tion to one’s work but also that one should func­tion as a part of some one of the chan­nels of ma­te­rial wealth. If you are un­wise, you can be­stow a de­voted life upon your gen­er­a­tion with­out ma­te­rial re­ward; if you are an ac­ci­den­tal ben­e­fi­ciary of the flow of wealth, you may roll in lux­ury even though you have done noth­ing worth while for your fel­low men.

69:2.2Be­fore the dawn of early fru­gal­ity and prim­i­tive in­dus­try the lot of the av­er­age tribe was one of des­ti­tu­tion and real suf­fer­ing. Early man had to com­pete with the whole an­i­mal world for his food. Com­pe­ti­tion-grav­ity ever pulls man down to­ward the beast level; pov­erty is his nat­u­ral and tyran­ni­cal es­tate. Wealth is not a nat­u­ral gift; it re­sults from la­bor, knowl­edge, and or­ga­ni­za­tion.

55:5.2The ad­vanced stages of a world set­tled in light and life rep­re­sent the acme of evo­lu­tion­ary ma­te­rial de­vel­op­ment. On these cul­tured worlds, gone are the idle­ness and fric­tion of the ear­lier prim­i­tive ages. Pov­erty and so­cial in­equal­ity have all but van­ished, de­gen­er­acy has dis­ap­peared, and delin­quency is rarely ob­served. In­san­ity has prac­ti­cally ceased to ex­ist, and fee­ble-mind­ed­ness is a rar­ity.

89:3.2Just about the time bar­bar­ian man was re­cov­er­ing from the waste­ful prac­tice of burn­ing and bury­ing prop­erty with the dead, just as the eco­nomic struc­ture of the races was be­gin­ning to take shape, this new re­li­gious doc­trine of re­nun­ci­a­tion ap­peared, and tens of thou­sands of earnest souls be­gan to court pov­erty. Prop­erty was re­garded as a spir­i­tual hand­i­cap. These no­tions of the spir­i­tual dan­gers of ma­te­rial pos­ses­sion were widespreadly en­ter­tained in the times of Philo and Paul, and they have markedly in­flu­enced Eu­ro­pean phi­los­o­phy ever since.

89:3.3Pov­erty was just a part of the rit­ual of the mor­ti­fi­ca­tion of the flesh which, un­for­tu­nately, be­came in­cor­po­rated into the writ­ings and teach­ings of many re­li­gions, no­tably Chris­tian­ity. Pen­ance is the neg­a­tive form of this oft­times fool­ish rit­ual of re­nun­ci­a­tion. But all this taught the sav­age self-con­trol, and that was a worth-while ad­vance­ment in so­cial evo­lu­tion. Self-de­nial and self-con­trol were two of the great­est so­cial gains from early evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion. Self-con­trol gave man a new phi­los­o­phy of life; it taught him the art of aug­ment­ing life’s frac­tion by low­er­ing the de­nom­i­na­tor of per­sonal de­mands in­stead of al­ways at­tempt­ing to in­crease the nu­mer­a­tor of self­ish grat­i­fi­ca­tion.

71:3.8No so­ci­ety has pro­gressed very far when it per­mits idle­ness or tol­er­ates pov­erty. But pov­erty and de­pen­dence can never be elim­i­nated if the de­fec­tive and de­gen­er­ate stocks are freely sup­ported and per­mit­ted to re­pro­duce with­out re­straint.

121:1.8Not­with­stand­ing the in­ter­nal peace and su­per­fi­cial pros­per­ity of the Greco-Ro­man world, a ma­jor­ity of the in­hab­i­tants of the em­pire lan­guished in squalor and pov­erty. The small up­per class was rich; a mis­er­able and im­pov­er­ished lower class em­braced the rank and file of hu­man­ity. There was no happy and pros­per­ous mid­dle class in those days; it had just be­gun to make its ap­pear­ance in Ro­man so­ci­ety.