I think
that one of the mistakes
that we have made with so many problems —
including drugs, poverty, illegal immigration, sexual conduct
that we don’t agree with —
is that there is a technocratic solution,
or even a one size fits all solution.
Alcohol is clearly bad and it’s addictive. It’s dangerous. Fine.
Let’s prohibit alcohol.
Well, that didn’t work so well.
And of course it didn’t stop people from doing
the exact same thing with drugs
and we’re just beginning to sense that
maybe that’s not going to work so well either.
It’s not working so well with immigration.
And we haven’t made a lot of progress with poverty either.
And one of the reasons is that people talk about
some kind of objective solution.
We throw a certain amount of money at the problem.
If people are in bad housing projects,
let’s tear them down and put them into new housing projects.
Maybe some of those things might have useful effects.
Maybe not.
But they’ll only go a certain degree in addressing the problem.
Because poverty is a state of being. It’s the way somebody feels.
And if somebody feels that he doesn’t have enough.
Maybe
he has enough to eat, enough to sleep on, whatever.
But he has so much less than the people around him
that he feels humiliation and rage,
and yet
he’s above the minimal monetary standard for poverty,
let’s say,
then what solution do we have for him?
So it’s a problem
like so many of these social problems
that involve communication skills
and particularly require the ability to listen
and individualize on the part of the prospective benefactor.
And that’s something that we’re not good at.
William T. Vollmann
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