How to be poor

Particularly for a humorist. Have you never
noticed that a rich man’s joke is always funny?

The Idle
Poor

     
    The er a of the Idle Rich is gone. The era of
the Idle Poor has arrived. I have just heard that people have stopped queuing
up for Rolls Royces, that much maligned (by me) car, that vulgar and
ostentatious vehicle of Arab oil sheiks, advertising agents and pop stars.
    Poverty carries no stigma any more;
wealth does. There will always be, of course, a few incorrigible fools who show
off their wealth — real or imaginary — but most people try to hide their
riches.
    Unemployment is a curse but carries
no stigma either. It’s not one’s own fault. We have to distinguish between
negative unemployment and positive unemployment.
    The negative unemployed are the
people who deserve our sympathy. They are the real poor who are not the
subject of this treatise. The positive unemployed are a substantial minority
who choose to be idle. They form the class of the Idle Poor. They may have
diverse reasons for their choice. The two main reasons are: 1. They find that
they are not worse off (indeed, sometimes better off) on the dole. 2. They are
often intelligent people who know that humanity must train itself for idleness.
Everybody speaks about this, everybody is fully aware of this with the single
exception of the Trade Unions who go on fighting the battles of the thirties
and speak of full employment. But full employment, as we knew it during the
sixties, will never return. Prosperity will; full employment will not.
    The most significant change in our
attitudes — in addition to the change of attitudes towards richness and poverty
— is to be found in our demands on the state. In one generation — perhaps in
two — the nanny state has completely transformed us, We expect everything from
the state: jobs, health-care, housing and all sorts of assistance in adversity.
There is a huge army of bureaucrats whose duty is to look after us — to dole
out social security payments or to look after our souls — and these people in
order to secure their jobs, wrack their brains to find more things to do for
us. (They also love denying our claims to show how powerful they are, but their
main preoccupation is to squander — well, to spend — the resources of the
state.) This general attitude produces a Society of Babes, a society of people
who expect to be looked after, people who are unable and unwilling to look
after themselves. Initiative, the spirit of adventure, resourcefulness are on
the decline. Lord Beveridge said something about all human beings having the
right to be looked after by the state from the cradle to the grave. Good old
times of modesty and restraint. Nowadays people expect to be looked after long
before they are born (a large number of would-be embryos demand artificial
insemination by the Health Service, in order to be born) and just listen to the
rows some people make if their graves are not properly looked after at public
expense.
    The era of the Idle Poor coincides
with the era of the Unemployed Babe. This fine state of affairs is being
threatened. A new wave of prosperity is looming on the horizon, which will find
us as unprepared as the recession did. There are not many signs of this coming prosperity,
in spite of the repeated government forecasts, but — I warn everyone — it is on
the way.
    I must explain this.
    A friend of mine, a psychotherapist,
told me that she was listening to one of her patients who kept repeating that
her relationship with her husband did not work. Her husband was a fine man; she
herself was — needless to say — an even finer woman; but her tale of woe always
ended in the refrain that the “relationship did not work”. I do not know what
my psychotherapist friend told her patient but she certainly did tell me: “The
‘relationship’ became an independent force, almost a third person standing
between her and her husband. They — the husband and herself- were innocent
victims. What could they do if that nasty, lazy relationship refused to work?”
    People often speak in the same vein
about the “economy”. It does not work, either. I think the complaint about the
economy is more justified than the complaint about the “relationship”. Surely,
we could improve our lot marginally, we could alleviate some hardships here and
there, but the real villain is “the economy”. We could work a little
harder, no doubt, but even this would be futile as long as the