The Revelations of a Not-Child

It seems like the more I learn about the world, the more I begin to realise how hard it can be to live in it. Nothing in this world is ever easy.

I’ve known that sentence for it’s literary meaning for years, but I hadn’t properly understood the feeling it describes. There seem to be no quick clean solutions, ever, and for some people, in some situations there are no solutions at all.

It must be a thing of childhood to expect a solution. It doesn’t make sense to expect it in life. People live, they encounter a problem but rarely is there a Hollywood climax where everything is turned around. I guess if there’s a problem, we just live with it until we die.

I know this sounds depressing as hell, but don’t worry, I haven’t decided to turn my back on life. It’s just starting to sink in that some problems can’t be resolved. At least, it is beyond my, and many other people’s brain power to find a solution.

To turn this blog in a relevant direction, in sociology we discussed inequality and the gap between the rich and the poor in Australia. A few years back, John Howard announced that the growing income gap was not a problem, because the people at the bottom were not getting poorer and that’s all that matters. They are the relative poor, no one in Australia is living in absolute poverty and that is a-okay folks. What crap.

Absolute Poverty is a standard of living deemed independent of time and space. Person’s classified as living in absolute poverty are unable to obtain any two of the following: Food (BMI above 16), water, shelter, sanitation, healthcare, education, information, and access to services (financial, legal, etc).

If rich people are getting richer, they consume more, they draw away resources – from the poor. Marx described the working class as having labour power, where people sell their labour to the rich in order to survive. The wider the gap between the rich and the poor, the less buying power the poor are going to have. Relative or not, guess who is most likely to become the absolute poor?

Despite general definition, I think absolute poverty is a changing label. As the “pinnacle” of living goes up, what people consider a satisfactory standard of living also increases. If society, or the world, continues to polarise in this manner fewer and fewer people are able to achieve an acceptable standard of living. Fifty years ago, listed must-haves, like ‘information’ and ‘access to services’ were not a necessity of living. The bar is moving up and leaving more people below it.

Now back to solutions. In terms of poverty, we know what is not a solution. The solution is not to throw money at people who don’t have it, or food, or water, or televisions. The idea is they need more labour power, more capital – they need to be able to create income and production. Giving the poor money simply means they buy the next meal – and the money we gave is circulated back to us.

However, giving the poor more capital means that the wealthy will likely be giving away their own capital. If society is more equal, the people at the top won’t be so well off. Which is kind of the point, but it doesn’t feel good for people at the top. After all, the goal of the individual in capitalism is to rise to the top, right? Anyone can do it. They just have to want it enough…right?

A common opinion of people who are poor and unemployed in Australia is that they can get it together if they tried. If they weren’t lazy, if they weren’t alcoholics, if they weren’t uneducated – then they could do as well as us. It feels like these things are the reasons for their poverty, and not the result. From what I’ve learned, people in a bad situation are there because they cannot get themselves out. It is not a question of will, the poorer half of society is not the weak-willed half. Nobody wants to be poor. Often, this is just a justification for inaction.

It’s starting to feel like everyone in the world either doesn’t want to or is incapable of creating a solution. Actually, this philosopher guy (I’ve forgotten his name) once theorised that no human is capable of creating rules, actions, morals, etc, for a society, because nobody has the capacity to comprehend the complexity of how society functions. You’d have to know what each person would do in response to any one thing, how other people shape each other. Agency or structure? Does the individual shape society or does the society shape the individual?

Are we expecting too much for people to solve the problems in society?

~

Another childish ideal of mine appears to be that everything will be okay. Sort of related to the solutions thing, sort of not.

To gabble on a bit more about sociology: Durkheim was the guy who brought up the concept of Anomie. He said that society where technology, information and efficiency are taking precedence, people are seeing themselves as individuals – but this means there is less social cohesion – we may be lost and not know our place in society. A group of individuals is less ‘together’ than a group made up of several members.

At first, this didn’t seem to be that important to me. Who really cares about social identity? It’s not something I think about. But maybe that’s what he’s describing – the lack of concern for the well being of society because we feel less a part of it nowadays.

Anyway, while everything is in such fast forward motion, we are propelling ourselves into more knowledge. We make better machines, have better knowledge, strive for better things, and yet some people argue that this will be the doom of human kind. When chasing the individual, no one will care about anyone else and social rules will one day collapse – when nobody cares, people will murder, rape, pillage, or just not step in to help someone in trouble.

At first it seems ridiculous to consider the concept of doom. It seems like such melodrama and we’re all used to life going on. We haven’t seen any of this doom stuff before. Why should it happen now? However, life going on is only ever subjective. Our experience is a short window in history, where there’s no noticing all the changes. Think of a child that you watch growing up. If you see them every day, there’s no real difference. But if you come in at age 5 and come back again at 15, then you see what’s changed.

No one knows about the future, what is it? Can we really say what hasn’t happened before won’t happen ever? I don’t know if I believe Durkheim and Anomie, but I am starting to wonder if things will always be okay. It could be a survival instinct to believe so. Or something adults tell children, and then forget to revise later, “Oh, remember when I told you everything will be okay? Yeah … I don’t actually know. Could happen, could not. Sorry about that.”

Regardless of having solutions or not, and knowing that everything will be fine or not, the most anyone can do is just live with it. I guess that’s the only practical solution we can come to. Having the ponderings, having the thoughts is all well and good, but it all just boils down to the salty dregs at the bottom of the pan. One practical step at a time – because that’s as far as our near-sighted minds can see.