How to be poor

name of Jones — polished and
sharpened a large piece of round stone and used it for skinning rabbits,
opening shells and all sorts of other purposes. This acquisition made — sometimes
literally — minced meat of their neighbours. They all wanted to have a
polished, round stone with sharp edges, and found life intolerable if they
could not keep up with the Joneses. Poverty had arrived.
    These same Joneses covered the walls
of their cave with drawings of mammoths and for a while this, too, caused envy
and rivalry. But this feeling evaporated soon enough when one of the Joneses’
neighbours declared that the drawings were not originals.
    Ever since those days people have
found it easy to bear their own poverty but impossible to bear the riches of
others. The poor, however, have always outnumbered the rich and the problem has
always been how to subjugate them and how to persuade them 1) to accept law and
order and 2) to serve and revere the rich.

    The poor — to save themselves — have
tried three main devices.
    1. Occasionally they have revolted
against the rich. All their revolts, from Spartacus through to the Swiss revolt
m the seventeenth century — the Swiss have always been a bit slow — were defeated,
and it is difficult to decide who was responsible for the worst atrocities and
cruelty during them, the educated and noble victors, or the uneducated and
angry rebels.
    2. Then the poor put forward the idea
that all men are equal. This ideal failed because all men are not equal. It is
far from true that it is the better man who wins. Often it is the meaner,
baser, more ruthless, cruel and cunning who does so. But the point is that
people are not equally mean, base, ruthless, cruel and cunning, any more than
they are equally enterprising, brave, imaginative and intelligent. Briefly,
they are not equal.
    3. Then came the most brilliant idea:
Marxism. Marxists declared that far from all people being equal, one layer of
the population, the proletariat, was much better than the rest. As it happened,
the proletariat — through no fault of its own, indeed, through the fault of the
rich — was downtrodden, uneducated, bitter and revengeful, so the idea boiled
down to being that the worst layer of the population was the best. As the
doctrine developed, the Marxists added: to hell with equality, let’s change
places. Let the poor be rich and the rich poor. Basically this was a good and
fair idea, and as there were many more poor in the world than rich, the idea
appealed to the masses. But the poor did not know how to be rich, they were
mere beginners. And they were cheated again. A new layer of rich and spoilt
rulers emerged and the fate of the masses was exactly as before except that it
was worse. Capitalism, they say, is the exploitation of one man by the other;
Communism is the other way round.
    So the rich remained on top in all
societies and they had to protect, or preferably to improve, their position.
How to do that? By calling up God in their support. It was His wish that the
poor be poor and the rich be rich. How could anyone reasonably expect God, as a
logical Being, to create an order in which poor was rich and rich was poor? The
very suggestion was an insult to His intelligence.
     
    The rich man in his castle,
    The poor man at his gate,
    God made them high and lowly
    And ordered their estate.
     
    This order worked well for a long
time, so long as feudal society allowed no mobility: born a rich man, always a rich
man; born a beggar, always a beggar. But the development of capitalism,
industrialism, commercialism changed all that. A lot has been written about the
archetypal rich man who started out with nothing and made millions; less about
the archetypal poor man who started out with millions and lost the lot. Both of
these came into being. It became possible for people to move up and down the
scale.
    God — who was beginning to look a
trifle old-fashioned in any case — rather lost His standing. In capitalist
societies His order had given way to chaos, while in Marxist societies it was
now the poor man who was in the castle and the rich man who was at the gate,
which was just as unfair as the old state of affairs used to be. So the
socialists had to defend their unjust society, and had to invent a new
myth for the purpose.
    Under capitalism the “lower orders”,
the poor, the down-trodden are despised; under socialism they are actually
treated in exactly the same way, but they are glorified.