Why such intense hatred of the poor?

[ZenTaoist]

I've noticed this a lot recently living in the United States. People just really have deep contempt for those living in poverty or the homeless. There are millions of people out there who you can actually sit and explain to them that they are being robbed and ripped off by insurance companies, CEOs, and banks, and they won't have too much of a reaction. But if you tell this same person that a small percentage of their tax dollars might go to a welfare recipient, they go insane. They want them drug tested, they want extremely low benefits, they want their consumption taxed, they want to know what the people on welfare are buying, etc.

To give you another example, I have a friend who recently was forced into homelessness. He's lost everything because he's disabled. I've never seen so many demeaning things said to him. People just talk about him with disgust and act as if he's "too lazy". The man can't f*cking walk.

I'm really wondering where this comes from. It's just everywhere now. is it the media? The culture? or does the capitalist system have something deeper that causes people to fundamentally hate the poor?

[Os Cangaceiros]

I actually don't think that this is as widespread as people think. I just think that the people who do "go insane" over issues like welfare are an extremely vocal minority. If you look at recent voter referendums and some opinion polls, though, you can see people's increasingly tolerant attitudes on issues like drug policy, prison reform, gay marriage, euthanasia, labor issues (Ohio), plus proposals to drug test welfare recipients have been (http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/02/floridas_welfare_drug_testing_law_struck_down_by_f ederal_appeals_court.html) failing (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2013/apr/29/indiana_welfare_drug_testing_bil) so it's not all bad news. The poor are just a convenient political target because they don't have any real political agency, and thus there are no consequences for scapegoating them.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

It's a remnant of the fucking moronic dated protestant work-ethic.

American churches totally milked it in the 20th century. I wouldn't be surprised if its' footprint still plagues society there today.

[Tim Cornelis]

This explains pretty much most of it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

People believe that the world 'naturally' gravitates towards just outcomes, either through divine intervention or market forces. Hence, the poor are presumed to be to blame for their own misery, they are "lazy". Indeed, the protestant work ethic is also named in that wikipedia article. It's worth checking out.

[cyu]

When you control the means of communication, you control what people believe.

http://quotes.prowritingaid.com/Quotes/24164.jpg

http://www.everything2.com/title/Freedom+of+the+press+is+guaranteed+only+to+those+w ho+own+one

Silvio Berlusconi is Italy's wealthiest person. He also controls more "freedom of the press" than any other person in Italy. Of course, he also happens to have been elected to the most powerful post in Italy multiple times. Not too surprising.

Control over the media translates to control over the ideas and issues discussed at election time. The more that control is concentrated into fewer hands, the less of a real democracy the nation becomes. Authoritarian regimes use the same method to win their sham elections. Since they control the media, they control all discussion and critiques of various policies. Once you control the ideas, you control what people will vote for. The more control of the media you have, the easier it is to control the vote.

While the electorate may not be "illiterate" in the sense that they can't read or engage in complex feats of engineering, they can still be rendered politically illiterate by surrounding them with media that only pretends to be "fair and balanced" or "pravda" when it is not.

As the gap between the rich and poor widens, it shouldn't be surprising that many members of the wealthy classes would use their growing power to influence the media. The more influence they gather, the more they can consolidate their wealth, and further widen the gap.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I've noticed this a lot recently living in the United States. People just really have deep contempt for those living in poverty or the homeless. There are millions of people out there who you can actually sit and explain to them that they are being robbed and ripped off by insurance companies, CEOs, and banks, and they won't have too much of a reaction. But if you tell this same person that a small percentage of their tax dollars might go to a welfare recipient, they go insane. They want them drug tested, they want extremely low benefits, they want their consumption taxed, they want to know what the people on welfare are buying, etc.

To give you another example, I have a friend who recently was forced into homelessness. He's lost everything because he's disabled. I've never seen so many demeaning things said to him. People just talk about him with disgust and act as if he's "too lazy". The man can't f*cking walk.

I'm really wondering where this comes from. It's just everywhere now. is it the media? The culture? or does the capitalist system have something deeper that causes people to fundamentally hate the poor?

I think there are two aspects of this question: where does it come from socially, and why do regualr people accept these ideas (and also, to what extent do they acctuall accept this, as Os raised).

So in the big picture where does this come from? Well it comes from poverty and unemployment being regular and inherent features of capitalism because of exploitation and the desire to keep wages low (both by paying people as little as can be gotten away with and by maintaining reserve labor in the form of unemployed people). Since this is an "unsolvable" problem in capitalism, the ruling class see this as a "natural" problem. So that, combined with other ideological frameworks in capitalism (such as hard work rewards, social-darwinism, and capitalist induidualism) leads to a logical conclusion that poor must not have worked as hard or been as determined as the rich.

Specifically today there is also an ideological/political aspect connected to neoliberal changes. As social wages were eliminated, and other supports such as medical and mental-health access, and as the industrial working class (specifically urban and disproportionally black originally) was attacked, blaming the poor made them scapegoats for the larger structrual changes, and it had a divide and rule aspect where "poor urban blacks don't need welfare or school funding because they 'don't want to work'" and so they could gain some support (for the neoliberal measures) among some white workers (who were feeling threatened and loosing economic ground) by demonizing black workers who lost more ground.

So I guess that's part of why some people buy into this - they've bought into some underlyingly racist arguments. It's also the flip-side of the "work hard and suceede" argument, so workers who do work hard (and still don't get as much as they would probably like) can look with contempt on those who don't work and say, "well they don't deserve anything because I work hard and still have to struggle". It's also I think an aspect to there being no solution in capitalism for this problem. If you live in a city or a suburb in the US, you see tons of homeless, many have mental problems and so on. Since there is no "solution" then they become a "problem" and I think sometimes out of frustration at a larger problem people don't understand let alone have an idea of what can be done about it, then they resent the symptoms of the problem - in this case, impoverished humans!

And finally, there's just a lot of propaganda and this has an impact on people's views. The poor are either ignored or demonized in the media: those who can not labor and be exploited are therefore "worthless" to capitalism and this attitude bleeds through to the rest of society.

The San Francisco Chronicle has endless articles complaining about the "homeless problem" which always comes down to "the problem is the homeless" not that people are homeless to begin with! So they complain about people shitting on the sidewalks and pan-handling without ever raising the idea, hey, maybe it's because no shops will allow homeless to use their toilets and there are no public rest-rooms; not to mention people complaining about pan-handling raising the issue of how welfare access has been slashed and restricted and San Francisco has one of the highest freaking costs of living!

[RedMaterialist]

I'm really wondering where this comes from. It's just everywhere now. is it the media? The culture? or does the capitalist system have something deeper that causes people to fundamentally hate the poor?

Well, the capitalist system controls the media, the culture and the education system, and uses this control as propaganda to promote the idea that poor people are, essentially, criminals. Daily, hourly, minute by minute, the U.S. people are inundated by images on t.v. depicting poor people as responsible for the economic crimes of the ruling capitalist class.

I suppose that poor people and systematic, mass, poverty are a direct, irrefutable indictment of the capitalist system. No wonder they spend billions of dollars on propaganda against the poor.

[Red Nightmare]

Poverty is one of the failures of the capitalist system. Capitalists wish to maintain an ideological hegemony over the populace, that is to have them believe that capitalism is the best/only system. When people are confronted with the reality of poverty in the capitalist system, the capitalists wish to make it seem like the poor are in poverty because of their own personal actions and not because of the material conditions of capitalism

[Klaatu]

I've noticed this a lot recently living in the United States. People just really have deep contempt for those living in poverty or the homeless. There are millions of people out there who you can actually sit and explain to them that they are being robbed and ripped off by insurance companies, CEOs, and banks, and they won't have too much of a reaction. But if you tell this same person that a small percentage of their tax dollars might go to a welfare recipient, they go insane. They want them drug tested, they want extremely low benefits, they want their consumption taxed, they want to know what the people on welfare are buying, etc.

To give you another example, I have a friend who recently was forced into homelessness. He's lost everything because he's disabled. I've never seen so many demeaning things said to him. People just talk about him with disgust and act as if he's "too lazy". The man can't f*cking walk.

I'm really wondering where this comes from. It's just everywhere now. is it the media? The culture? or does the capitalist system have something deeper that causes people to fundamentally hate the poor?

I think the root of the problem is Fox News.

[CAleftist]

I think there are two aspects of this question: where does it come from socially, and why do regualr people accept these ideas (and also, to what extent do they acctuall accept this, as Os raised).

So in the big picture where does this come from? Well it comes from poverty and unemployment being regular and inherent features of capitalism because of exploitation and the desire to keep wages low (both by paying people as little as can be gotten away with and by maintaining reserve labor in the form of unemployed people). Since this is an "unsolvable" problem in capitalism, the ruling class see this as a "natural" problem. So that, combined with other ideological frameworks in capitalism (such as hard work rewards, social-darwinism, and capitalist induidualism) leads to a logical conclusion that poor must not have worked as hard or been as determined as the rich.

Specifically today there is also an ideological/political aspect connected to neoliberal changes. As social wages were eliminated, and other supports such as medical and mental-health access, and as the industrial working class (specifically urban and disproportionally black originally) was attacked, blaming the poor made them scapegoats for the larger structrual changes, and it had a divide and rule aspect where "poor urban blacks don't need welfare or school funding because they 'don't want to work'" and so they could gain some support (for the neoliberal measures) among some white workers (who were feeling threatened and loosing economic ground) by demonizing black workers who lost more ground.

So I guess that's part of why some people buy into this - they've bought into some underlyingly racist arguments. It's also the flip-side of the "work hard and suceede" argument, so workers who do work hard (and still don't get as much as they would probably like) can look with contempt on those who don't work and say, "well they don't deserve anything because I work hard and still have to struggle". It's also I think an aspect to there being no solution in capitalism for this problem. If you live in a city or a suburb in the US, you see tons of homeless, many have mental problems and so on. Since there is no "solution" then they become a "problem" and I think sometimes out of frustration at a larger problem people don't understand let alone have an idea of what can be done about it, then they resent the symptoms of the problem - in this case, impoverished humans!

And finally, there's just a lot of propaganda and this has an impact on people's views. The poor are either ignored or demonized in the media: those who can not labor and be exploited are therefore "worthless" to capitalism and this attitude bleeds through to the rest of society.

The San Francisco Chronicle has endless articles complaining about the "homeless problem" which always comes down to "the problem is the homeless" not that people are homeless to begin with! So they complain about people shitting on the sidewalks and pan-handling without ever raising the idea, hey, maybe it's because no shops will allow homeless to use their toilets and there are no public rest-rooms; not to mention people complaining about pan-handling raising the issue of how welfare access has been slashed and restricted and San Francisco has one of the highest freaking costs of living!

This is an excellent post. Well said.

I would add that the right-wing demonizing of the poor has always been there, in the broader culture and ideological framework of capitalist society, but has gotten worse as social supports have been destroyed, the public programs that did have some benefit to the poor have been significantly reduced or eliminated, and poverty and crass inequality have grown more and more, the working-class has experienced more stress and worse conditions, leading to desperation, anger, and frustrations taken out on the nearest scapegoat, which many unscrupulous political, religious, media, and other public figures are all too willing to provide for their target audiences.

I also think that racism and nativism has a lot to do with it; the capitalist system pits workers against each other in ruthless, desperate competition, and many white, native-born American workers have found their jobs outsourced by their employers to cheaper labor, either at home (often jobs done by "illegal" immigrants) or overseas-both developments that make it all too easy to direct and deflect blame from the rich capitalist employers to the "illegals' or the "foreigners."

In addition to this, a lot of (again, mostly white, native-born) workers in America have the mentality of, "I don't get much help from the government, why should anyone else?" It becomes a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom, as it were, in times of capitalist crisis.

Meanwhile, the professional/managerial strata in the corporate world have done very well, as have the capitalist class themselves. These are the people who have the most influence, by far, in contemporary American society. And with labor unions (let alone, the American Left...) having been destroyed, defanged, or otherwise demonized and made more and more irrelevant, is it any wonder that the ruling class has total ideological, cultural, and political hegemony over American society?

[Comrade #138672]

When you control the means of communication, you control what people believe.

http://quotes.prowritingaid.com/Quotes/24164.jpg

http://www.everything2.com/title/Freedom+of+the+press+is+guaranteed+only+to+those+w ho+own+one

Silvio Berlusconi is Italy's wealthiest person. He also controls more "freedom of the press" than any other person in Italy. Of course, he also happens to have been elected to the most powerful post in Italy multiple times. Not too surprising.

Control over the media translates to control over the ideas and issues discussed at election time. The more that control is concentrated into fewer hands, the less of a real democracy the nation becomes. Authoritarian regimes use the same method to win their sham elections. Since they control the media, they control all discussion and critiques of various policies. Once you control the ideas, you control what people will vote for. The more control of the media you have, the easier it is to control the vote.

While the electorate may not be "illiterate" in the sense that they can't read or engage in complex feats of engineering, they can still be rendered politically illiterate by surrounding them with media that only pretends to be "fair and balanced" or "pravda" when it is not.

As the gap between the rich and poor widens, it shouldn't be surprising that many members of the wealthy classes would use their growing power to influence the media. The more influence they gather, the more they can consolidate their wealth, and further widen the gap.Pressure keeps building up, and resistance keeps being suppressed... That is bound to explode, sooner or later.

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

The propoganda of capitalism has become a kind of common 'truth' - if you work hard and play by the rules, you'll get your just rewards. And some people do get rich or get comfortable through hard work within the system so assume anyone who doesn't is underserving and lazy. Also, those who fall on the hard times and cannot obtain the allusive Capitalist Dream are so marginalised and isolated that they automatically become something 'other'; outsiders (which we're all conditioned to be suspicious or afraid of).

[cyu]

That is bound to explode, sooner or later.

They think they can get away with the same old tricks, just because it's always worked so far. But they don't realize that the old tricks just enable the situation to deteriorate further, until they're caught off-guard by things like the guillotine or any number of other revolutions - after some red-line is crossed, the old tricks just end up falling flat.

Strategic sociopaths would attempt to always stay just on the safe side of the red-line, but it's really hard to judge the exact location of that line. In a different time and place, the line could be entirely different.

Idealists would try to build a society as far away from that line as possible, but idealists don't end up in control of capitalist society. Sociopaths do =]

[Crixus]

This has been the ruling classes ideology for centuries. Even before Adam Smith's account of primitive accumulation, how wage workers and capitalists came to be- his version went something like: 'some people were lazy and prone to vice while others worked hard and saved', the lazy became wage workers and thrifty hard workers became capitalists. The soft velvet glove that is the invisible hand will see to it that the hard working are rewarded and lazy left in want because there's no internal conflict within the market. When people fail it is because of laziness and vice. So says Smith and other enlightenment thinkers.

Smith , Ricardo, Malthus etc all thought this way but even before capitalism, during the process of primitive accumulation, during the Tudor period (16'th century) beggars, people who's ability to work for themselves had been taken away, were burned with hot irons, tortured and hung as a matter of state policy. The only way to avoid this was if a landowner would 'take them in' for two years out of the 'kindness of their heart'. In reality it was a way to force the dispossessed into slavery. Most of the modern disdain for the poor is rooted in the period of primitive accumulation. They needed a 'disciplined work force' and needed to stamp out 'sloth and indolence'. They knew in reality if people weren't intentionally impoverished they wouldn't submit to wage labor. The more poverty there is the bigger chance to make profits. In that vein capitalists began making profits from poverty while taking vacations, eating fine foods, hunting, inventing things and doing little actual work in their profit making endeavors. They embraced laziness for themselves.

People like Francis Hutchinson, one of the key thinkers of the enlightenment, wrote books on 'moral philosophy'

http://books.google.com/books/about/A_system_of_moral_philosophy.html?id=XEoqAQAAMAAJ

in where he says things like prices should be raised where workers arent working hard enough in order for them to be forced to pay more to survive and thus work harder (to make more profits for the capitalist). Those who couldn't keep up would be, at the least, forced into indentured servitude by the state. They saw 'sloth and indolence' everywhere. They, workers and potential workers, all 'needed discipline' when in reality it was dispossession and the subsequent game of property based market musical chairs that left people without access to the means of production. Earlier people such as Thomas Mun and Josiah Tucker actually declared war against laziness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mun .... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Tucker. A fucking 'war on being lazy'! Michel Foucault called this the period "The Great Confinement" where people were forced to contribute to profits by being placed in institutions to 'rehabilitate' them for, well, being lazy. Even the lazy children would be put to work. The invisible hand saw to it. Via people like Jermey Bentham:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham

He came up with plans for the modern prison labor system and a 'charity company' modeled after East India Company to round up the poor who couldnt be branded dangerous criminals in order to place them in labor camps. He modeled the designs for these places and called it the panoptican design where
people in the prisons and 'charity' labor camps would be overseen by guards watching every step. It was a sort of militarization of labor (probably would give Trotsky a hard on). He said the institutions were to have "authority over the whole body of the burdensome poor". He made designs for about 500 of these labor houses that were to house millions of poor people in order to force them into labor. These are the main thinkers of the enlightenment who have crafted the ruling classes ideology which in turn is projected onto the working class and accepted as the 'natural order of things' as if capitalism is some social mechanism to reward the hard working and punish the lazy.

It's a drive for profits based in dispossession masked as some natural sort of social Darwinism within our modern capitalist system that cannot provide full employment due to the fact profits would then become impossible but those lazy drug addicts are making the system dysfunctional because there are no internal conflicts within the market system other than sloth, vice and indolence. Capitalism is prefect! It's a sort of economic utilitarianism where only actions, thoughts and lifestyles that maximize profits are legitimate so in that sense even people who simply don't want to take part in the system become 'undesirables'.

[Klaatu]

The propoganda of capitalism has become a kind of common 'truth' - if you work hard and play by the rules, you'll get your just rewards. And some people do get rich or get comfortable through hard work within the system so assume anyone who doesn't is underserving and lazy. Also, those who fall on the hard times and cannot obtain the allusive Capitalist Dream are so marginalised and isolated that they automatically become something 'other'; outsiders (which we're all conditioned to be suspicious or afraid of).

And so therein lies the problem: no one in the Capitalist sphere "plays by the rules." There are no morals and there is no discipline.
Get Rich! --- but there is only one way to do this: by exploiting others.

Rest assured, this tyranny will end soon, because the Socialist Revolution is coming. ;)

[Geiseric]

A friend of mine from Bulgaria claimed only reptilian aliens could hold back human evolution and make humans be anti-social; as capitalists and feudal lords. He's a little mixed up but i think he's wondering how things got so bad across the world, he witnessed the breakup of the fSU btw.

[DasFapital]

The ruling class likes to create divisions among the labor pool and create an "us vs. them" mentality. its good for business, well their business anyway.

[cyu]

Reminded me of this thread...

http://mondediplo.com/2013/05/04income

in villages receiving payments, people spent more on eggs, meat and fish, and on healthcare. Children’s school marks improved in 68% of families, and the time they spent at school nearly tripled. Saving also tripled, and twice as many people were able to start a new business.

“They told us the men would use the money to get drunk, and the women to buy jewellery and saris. But it’s a middle-class prejudice that the poor don’t know how to use money sensibly.”

“Women are no longer afraid. They are becoming independent, managing money, making plans. In several villages, they have forced the landlord to raise their wages”

“The idea of unconditional income comes from the failure of conditional programmes. As soon as there are conditions, there is erosion. Conditionality means intermediaries, which means power, which means corruption.”

Dewala told me the little white flowers growing among the wheat at the side of the road were called “besharam, flowers without shame, because they grow anywhere, with no regard for private property.”

[Jimmie Higgins]

Propaganda is obviously a big part, but I think the other piece of the puzzle is just that we do have to compete to survive let alone gain a level of stability in capitalism. When capitalists say we have to work hard to get ahead, in one sense they are totally correct - within the bounds of capitalism we have to "work hard" or get a degree or compete with others for a few employement spots.

This is why the propaganda and ideological viewpoints can resonate among workers - this might also be why the increased competition in the neoliberal era seems to have also increased some of the nastiness of people towards eachother - particularly the "underdogs" (I think obviously in conjuntion with other factors such as a decline in the left, and increased capitalist propaganda to sell the neoliberal agenda).

This is also why even basic stikes are a rudamenatry development of working class consiousness - on a very basic level, recognizing that the rules of the game have to be altered because workers can't get anywhere according to the "rules". Of course being that it's still "part of the game" has it's own problems, but never the less it also means workers are rejecting how things are supposed to work and induvidualist capitalist ideology and seeking their own way forward.

[cyu]

Capitalists attempt to dupe their followers into accepting resource competition amongst the poor, while distracting them from seeing the resource competition between rich and poor. Investment advice from http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2007/01/08/plutonomics/

There is no “average” consumer in Plutonomies. There is only the rich “and everyone else.” The rich account for a disproportionate chunk of the economy, while the non-rich account for “surprisingly small bites of the national pie.” Kapur estimates that in 2005, the richest 20% may have been responsible for 60% of total spending.

The best way for companies and businesspeople to survive in Plutonomies, Kapur implies, is to disregard the “mass” consumer and focus on the increasingly rich market of the rich.

On the meta-question of competition itself, http://everything2.com/user/seeya/writeups/Darwin%2527s+Dangerous+Idea

It is rather unfortunate that one aspect of Darwin's theories were so revolutionary - the emphasis on competition. In this view, everything from biological systems to social systems improve themselves by internal and external competition. Since Darwin's theories were first published, a great deal of research has gone into the study of competition and how it could be best used to promote "progress" or the "advancement of human society". As a result, competition is probably understood today much better than cooperation.

Imagine if Darwin had wrote or been associated with the word "cooperation" instead of the word "competition." Biological and social research since him would have gone down an entirely different path. Emphasis would have been put on how the individual cells of our bodies cooperate, rather than how individual human beings compete with one another.

Had Darwin happened to go down the cooperative path, his theories would have probably been much more closely associated with religion and explaining how religions serve to hold society together, rather than serving as the antithesis of religion today. Had his research been focused on cooperation, Hitler would probably never have had the chance to develop his concept of a super-race, and Ayn Rand would probably never have come up with her ideals of selfishness. In effect, neither Nazism nor Objectivism would probably have existed, and there would probably have been much less protection of trade secrets in economic systems today. Why force competing groups of individuals to reinvent the wheel if mutual cooperative development would be much more efficient?