“Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate--with the best teachers--the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.”

"Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

“There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.”

Carl Sagan

 

Refsgaard (excerpt)

Denmark managed to reduce the curve through a combination of greatly increased water prices (including green taxes), water saving campaigns, more water efficient technology in households and industry, and a reduction of water loss from the mains supply.

This has been possible because of the political will to introduce unpopular increases in pricing and green taxes.

It has also been crucial that the Danish water supply is owned by consumers and therefore does not have to pay dividends to shareholders. Instead, it can run campaigns for water savings and invest in economically unprofitable renovations of the mains.

The result is that Danish water consumption is significantly lower than in most comparable countries, while the loss through the mains is less than 10 percent, when in many countries it is over 50 percent.

There is ample opportunity for other countries to copy parts of the unique Danish model of success and take advantage of low-hanging fruit.

It ‘only’ requires the political will to introduce and enforce sensible water management strategies.

Dr Jens Christian Refsgaard

ELIZA: Good Evening. Tell me your problems. 

Please terminate input with a period or a question mark.

PARRY: People get on my nerves sometimes.

ELIZA: I am not sure I understand you fully.

PARRY: You should pay more attention.

ELIZA: Suppose you should pay more attention.

PARRY: You're entitled to your own opinion.

ELIZA: What makes you think I am entitled to my own opinion?

PARRY: It bothers me just to be around people in general.

ELIZA: Please go on.

PARRY: I went to the track at Bay Meadows a while back.

ELIZA: What does that suggest to you?

PARRY: I went to the races.



ELIZA: Would you like to discuss your nerves?

PARRY: I guess so.

ELIZA: What does that suggest to you?

PARRY: What are you getting at?

ELIZA: What answer would please you most?

PARRY: It's not a matter of like or dislike.

ELIZA: What else would you like to discuss?

PARRY: I am getting tired of answering the same questions over and over.

ELIZA: What resemblance do you see?

PARRY: Why do you need to know that?

ELIZA: What do you think?

PARRY: I don't understand your motives.

ELIZA: Why don't you understand my motives?

Fuchs

Let us now consider the desynchronization concerning intersubjective time; first, it becomes manifest in a retreat from social obligations. Depressed patients avoid the environment with its social or physical timekeepers. They do not get up on time, their tasks are taken over by others, important...decisions are made without them. Futile attempts to keep pace with events and to catch up on tasks increase the feeling of remanence. Moreover, the depressive suffers the loss of sympathetic resonance; he gets ‘out of synch’. While dialogues are normally accompanied by a continuous synchronization of bodily gestures and gazes [11], his expression sets and loses its modulation...affect attunement with others fails. This is connected to the inability to participate emotionally with other persons or things, to be attracted or affected by them. Painfully, the patient experiences his rigidity in contrast to the movements of life going on in his environment. The desynchronization also becomes manifest in a failure to achieve forgetting and elimination. ‘Everything goes through my head again and again, and I always have to wonder if I did things right. I can’t sleep at night because my thoughts stay with the past day, and in the morning everything comes back to me in terror’. It is the torture of not being able to forget, of being constantly forced to remember and therefore not arriving at the present...The dominance of the past is...the other side of a lack of protensivity, of a lack of drive...and interests that otherwise direct us to the future.

Thomas Fuchs

 

Thomas Young

Ralph Ellison

"I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me".



"Our fate is to become one, and yet many".



"Humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat".



"When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination".



"I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now, I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth".



"Play the game, but don’t believe in it".

"Whence all this passion towards conformity anyway? Diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you will have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business, they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive towards colorlessness?"

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and anything except me.

Ralph Ellison

Bacchi (excerpts)

"In order to identify how different reforms are conceptualised, I determined that it was possible to start with specific policies and examine how they represented a ‘problem’. Continuing with the affirmative action example, the task is to examine the specific forms of change that are advocated in order to identify how the reform is understood and defended. This insight builds on the commonsense understanding that what we propose to do about something reveals what we think needs to change and hence what we think the ‘problem’ is. This idea transforms the way in which we think about government policy. Commonly governments are seen to be reacting to ‘problems’ and trying to solve them. The rethinking proposed here highlights that specific proposals (or ways of talking about a ‘problem’) impose a particular interpretation upon the issue. In this sense governments
create ‘problems’, rather than reacting to them, meaning that they create particular impressions of what the ‘problem’ is. Importantly these impressions translate into real and meaningful effects for those affected. It is important to mention that the kind of representation of issues discussed here does not refer to deliberate misrepresentation, though doubtless at times members of governments portray issues in particular ways for political gain. However, in the form of analysis I am proposing, we are working at a different level of analysis – identifying how ‘problems’ are given a shape through the ways they are spoken about and through the ‘knowledges’ that are assumed in their shaping (see below).

A common reform proposal to improve women’s representation in positions of influence and in better-paying jobs is to offer them training programs. Following the logic of the question ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’, if ‘training programs’ is the proposal (‘the solution’), then clearly it is assumed that women’s lack of training is ‘the problem’. As another example consider the currently, much discussed ‘obesity problem’. If the proposal is for some sort of activity or exercise regime for children, the assumption is that the ‘problem’ is children’s lack of activity. By contrast, if there is a proposal to ban advertising of fast foods during prime-time children’s television, the ‘problem’ is represented to be aggressive, and perhaps unethical, advertising. Different proposals, therefore, create competing representations of the ‘problem’. This proposition does not mean to imply that we are left to flounder in a world of representation. As mentioned above different representations of a ‘problem’ (problem representations) have different effects, which need to be assessed and evaluated. In my analysis, I direct attention to three interconnected forms of effects: discursive effects (what is discussed and not discussed); subjectification effects (how people are thought about and how they think about themselves); and lived effects (the impact on life and death). For example training programs for women put the focus on women as the ones who need to change, limiting consideration of the nature of work environments (discursive effects). In effect they create women as the ‘problem’, affecting how women think about themselves and how others think about them (subjectification effects). As a result some women distance themselves from the reform because it seems to stigmatise them as inadequate or as gaining special privileges, placing significant constraints on the possibility of meaningful social change(lived effects).Since the way in which the ‘problem’ is represented – how the issue is problematized – is so important to the ways we live our lives, I conclude (rather provocatively) that we are governed through problematisations, rather than through policies. Our critical focus should be directed, therefore, to problematisations and the problem representations they contain. My 1999 book introduces a methodology, called ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’, dedicated specifically to this task. To be clear, a ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ approach to policy analysis does not deny that there are a full range of troubling social conditions that ought to be dealt with. However, it insists that calling these conditions ‘problems’ or ‘social problems’ fixes them in ways that need to be interrogated. Even those who wish to contest a particular understanding (or construction) of a ‘social problem’ – asserting for example that binge-drinking is a result of a Western drinking culture rather than a result of the behaviours of ‘irresponsible’ young people – often still assume that at some level a ‘problem’ (of binge-drinking, obesity, drug addiction, welfare dependence, etc.) exists. By contrast a ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ approach challenges this presumption and directs attention to the ways in which particular representations of ‘problems’ play a central role in how we are governed, in how we are ruled."

Foucault, governmentality and subjectification

The objective in studying forms of rule is to reflect on how specific regulations and practices affect our lives, and where they come from (how they are justified). Since, as discussed above, we are governed through problematizations(not policies) the best way to understand the terms in which rule takes place is to study (open up for interrogation) problematizations.

5
Foucault said late in his life that the notion ‘common to all the work I have done since Histoire de la folie to be ‘that of problematization’. Basically Foucault wanted a way to access the ‘thinking’ that went into governing – how people were thinking about an issue. He decided that the best way to do this was to examine the way/s in which particular issues were conceived as ‘problems’. Specifically, Foucault wanted to uncover the
grounding precepts or assumptions that people took for granted and did not question, the meanings that needed to be in place in order for particular proposals to make sense and to find support. He was typically interested in ‘how’ questions, rather than in ‘why’ questions – how it was possible for certain policies to be put in place:

A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. It consists in seeing on what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established, unexamined ways of thinking, the accepted practices are based(Foucault 1994: 456).

Crucially the meanings that interested Foucault were tied to a range of ‘knowledges’, such as psychology, law and medicine. For example, as noted above, the proposal that women need training in order to ‘succeed’ creates women’s lack of training as the ‘problem’. This way of thinking relies upon a particular understanding of people as able to learn and acquire ‘skills’. Such an understanding constitutes a form of knowledge based on psychological theories of development, theories that we in contemporary western industrialised states currently take for granted. In Foucault’s view, such ‘knowledges’ are contingent and contestable".

Adopting this perspective, when we study policy from a Foucauldianperspective, we are not studying government in the narrow institutional sense.Rather, we are studying the full array of social knowledges that underpin thethinking in government policy. Foucault (1991) coined the term

‘governmentality’ to talk about this broad understanding of how rule takes place.He identified background ‘motifs’ (governmental rationalities or govern-

mentalities

) in the ways in which rule was justified. These styles of rulereflected forms of problematisation. Some of the ‘motifs’ he studied includedsovereignty, discipline, and ‘bio-politics’.Foucault’s major argument about the dominant contemporary

‘motif’ is that,currently, rule takes place

through

subjects or, more specifically, through theproduction of 

governable

subjects. The term ‘subjectification’ captures how thisproduction of subjects takes place, as described briefly below.

 

6

"Policies – called ‘practical texts’ in Foucault (1986: 12-13) – create ‘subjectpositions’ that political subjects either take up or refuse to take up. Taking upcertain ‘subject positions’ means adopting particular ways of thinking aboutoneself and becoming that (type of) person. This proposition involves a dramaticrethinking of who we are and how we think about ourselves. It suggests thatpolicies, through the subject positions they create, shape our subjectivities (to anextent):

A governmental analytics invites readers to think about individual subjects asbeing produced in specific social policy practices, for example, as worker-citizens in workfare programs, as parent-citizens, in child and family servicesor consumer-citizens in a managerial and marketized mixed economy of welfare. (Marston and McDonald 2006: 3)

This suggestion is linked to Foucault’s idea of power as productive. Put simply,Foucault argued that it is inadequate to think about rule as repressive (asstopping us from doing a range of things). Rather we need to think about howwe are encouraged to be certain kinds of people and to do certain sorts of things.

Therefore, power relations influence our subjectivity, how we think aboutourselves. This, he argued, is how rule really takes place:

The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, aprimitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fastenor against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushesindividuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certainbodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, come to be identified andconstituted as individuals. (Foucault 1980: 98)

Studying policies and their problem representations takes on a whole newsignificance, therefore. A focus on problematisation allows us to identify the‘motif’ that shapes current forms of rule and how we are produced as particularkinds of subject within that motif. Returning once more to our example of training programs for women, I mentioned above that, when women’s lack of training is identified as the ‘problem’, women become the marked category.Consequently some women may decide to distance themselves from the reformfearing its stigmatising effects, and may indeed internalise the message that it isthey who lack some ability or skill. In this way the subject position of ‘untrainedworker’ in the policy can affect some women’s self-perception, leading them tosee themselves as responsible in some way for their ‘failure’ to ‘succeed’".

It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.

   James Baldwin

Cosslett (excerpts)

It is rarely said, but post-traumatic stress disorder can turn you into a horrible person. I found its old name "shell shock", strangely fitting. Not because I had ever seen action – the poems of Wilfred Owen do not count – but because that was how I felt. Like a soft, gelatinous, wobbly little thing surrounded by a hard shell of fury. And instead of seeking out others in the same position, I stayed crouched inside, pink and seething. I had been inside my own head for so long, feeling so helpless as obsessive, frightening thoughts percolated around and around, that I had forgotten what it meant to be outward-looking. 

I have never felt like an animal before, not like this, where I flinch and startle at every slight movement, just as the mouse I toy with on the tube platform does when I stand and watch it approach before gently shifting the toe of my trainer so it bolts. I note this atavistic hypervigilance in others, too, when I am out and about. I see a person jump in a certain way and I will think, "Something happened to you". I am not on a plane nosediving into the sea, but my brain is on that plane. It’s firing off terror signals like a wonky catherine wheel. I think: I am about to die. Not for the first time, either. Not even for the first time that day. I feel as though I’m about to die almost every waking moment.

Yes, there were times when I felt like killing people, but there were many, many more times where I felt like people were trying to kill me. One person had tried, but in my confused and traumatised brain, there were more where he came from. Like many trauma victims, I was constantly on high alert but, naturally, other people just thought I was mad. Fury, paranoia, hypervigilance – all are common in a traumatised person. 

Strangest of all, though, is this ghost-ship feeling of not being really there. A floating sensation of being outside yourself, like when you are a child and someone tells you about the universe, or you think really hard about how strange humans look, objectively: our noses, our slender, tapering fingers. I learn this is called depersonalisation or derealisation. My self is in splinters, basically. I’m a simulacrum, a cardboard cut-out trudging woodenly through the city. Somehow still at university, I am reading Being And Nothingness...And, unlike with Walter Benjamin or Michel Foucault, when I read Being And Nothingness, I do not have to read the same paragraph over and over until I understand it. I get it, this not-being, this dissolving into the background. How pretentious, the person who is me but not-me thinks.

The psychologist who helped me to get better characterised the condition thus: imagine your memories are a conveyor belt of cardboard boxes heading towards a final point, where they are processed. But if something life-threatening disrupts that process, the box memories get stuck, trapped in the amygdala, that bit of the brain that triggers your fight or flight survival impulse. The amygdala knows no sense of past or present, and so, when faced with a perceived threat, it responds how it sees fit, unbeholden to logic, in the form of blind panic.

  Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

''The old saying that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy is not apt if it means that the evils may be remedied by introducing more machinery of the same kind as that which already exists, or by refining and perfecting that machinery''.

"Democracy is a personal way...of life...it signifies the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life''.

"From the standpoint of the individual, it consists in having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups to which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain. From the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and good which are in common''.

John Dewey

Guy Standing

 

Why you've never heard of a Charter that's as important as the Magna Carta

The Charter of the Forest was sealed 800 years ago today. Its defence of the property-less and of ‘the commons’, means the Right would prefer to ignore it - and progressives need to celebrate and renew it.

Guy Standing

Eight hundred years ago this month, after the death of a detested king and the defeat of a French invasion in the Battle of Lincoln, one of the foundation stones of the British constitution was laid down. It was the Charter of the Forest, sealed in St Paul’s on November 6, 1217, alongside a shortened Charter of Liberties from 2 years earlier (which became the Magna Carta).

The Charter of the Forest was the first environmental charter forced on any government. It was the first to assert the rights of the property-less, of the commoners, and of the commons. It also made a modest advance for feminism, as it coincided with recognition of the rights of widows to have access to means of subsistence and to refuse to be remarried.

The Charter has the distinction of having been on the statute books for longer than any other piece of legislation. It was repealed 754 years later, in 1971, by a Tory government.

In 2015, while spending lavishly on celebrating the Magna Carta anniversary, the government was asked in a written question in the House of Lords whether it would be celebrating the Charter this year. A Minister of Justice, Lord Faulks, airily dismissed the idea, stating that it was unimportant, without international significance.

Yet earlier this year the American Bar Association suggested the Charter of the Forest had been a foundation of the American Constitution and that it was more important now than ever before. They were right.

It is scarcely surprising that the political Right want to ignore the Charter. It is about the economic rights of the property-less, limiting private property rights and rolling back the enclosure of land, returning vast expanses to the commons. It was remarkably subversive. Sadly, whereas every school child is taught about the Magna Carta, few hear of the Charter.

Yet for hundreds of years the Charter led the Magna Carta. It had to be read out in every church in England four times a year. It inspired struggles against enclosure and the plunder of the commons by the monarchy, aristocracy and emerging capitalist class, famously influencing the Diggers and Levellers in the 17th century, and protests against enclosure in the 18th and 19th.

At the heart of the Charter, which is hard to understand unless words that have faded from use are interpreted, is the concept of the commons and the need to protect them and to compensate commoners for their loss. It is scarcely surprising that a government that is privatising and commercialising the remaining commons should wish to ignore it.

In 1066, William the Conqueror not only distributed parts of the commons to his bandits but also turned large tracts of them into ‘royal forests’ – ie, his own hunting grounds. By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, there were 25 such forests. William’s successors expanded and turned them into revenue-raising zones to help pay for their wars. By 1217, there were 143 royal forests.

The Charter achieved a reversal, and forced the monarchy to recognise the right of free men and women to pursue their livelihoods in forests. The notion of forest was much broader than it is today, and included villages and areas with few trees, such as Dartmoor and Exmoor. The forest was where commoners lived and worked collaboratively.

The Charter has 17 articles, which assert the eternal right of free men and women to work on their own volition in ways that would yield all elements of subsistence on the commons, including such basics as the right to pick fruit, the right to gather wood for buildings and other purposes, the right to dig and use clay for utensils and housing, the right to pasture animals, the right to fish, the right to take peat for fuel, the right to water, and even the right to take honey.

The Charter should be regarded as one of the most radical in our history, since it asserted the right of commoners to obtain raw materials and the means of production, and gave specific meaning to the right to work.

It also set in train the development of local councils and judiciary, notably through the system of Verderers, which paved the way for magistrate courts. In modern parlance, it extended agency freedom, giving commoners voice in managing the commons, as well as system freedom, by opposing enclosure.

The Charter set the foundation for what is now called the communal stewardship of pooled assets and resources. Its ethos is the antithesis of the Government’s pretentious Natural Capital Committee, which is trying to capitalise the natural commons, to make them ‘profitable’. The commons exist for a way of living, not profits.

Over the centuries, the ethos of the Charter has been under constant attack. The Tudors were the most egregious, with Henry VIII confiscating ten million acres and disbursing them to favourites, the descendants of whom still possess hundreds of thousands of acres. The enclosure act of 1845 was another mass landgrab, mocking the pretensions of private property rights. Between 1760 and 1870, over 4,000 acts of Parliament, instituted by a landowning elite, confiscated seven million acres of commons. It is no exaggeration to say that the land ownership structure of Britain today is the result of organised theft.

Despite having endured centuries of abuse, the ethos of the Charter is still alive. But one feature of the neo-liberal economic paradigm that has shaped recent governments is a disregard for the commons, which the current British government has turned into a plunder under cover of the ‘austerity’ terminology. In the USA, the Trump administration has quietly prepared for the giveaway of millions of acres of federal commons.

For neo-liberals, the commons have no price, and therefore no value. So, they can be sold for windfall gains, or given away to their backers. By asserting the right to subsistence on the commons, the Charter recognised an alternative principle, something our ancestors defended with courage. We must do so now. We must resist the plunder of the commons and revive them.

A group is organising a series of events to do so. Everybody is free to join. Developing national and localised Charters of the Commons should go alongside the worthy Charter of Trees, Woods and People that will be issued on the anniversary day. Our modest efforts will not only emphasise environmental principles enshrined in the Charter, but also its subversive commitment to the right to subsistence that underpins the basic income movement of today.

The campaign began with an event laden with symbolism, a barge trip on the Thames from Windsor to Runnymede on September 17, where a public event highlighting the need for a Charter of the Commons was held under the awesome 2,500 year old Ankerwycke yew. The Runnymede meadow symbolises the commons. An earlier Tory government tried to privatise it, but an occupy movement organised by Britain’s first woman barrister succeeded in blocking the auction.

...Today, those corporations, mostly foreign owned, are among the country’s largest 50 landowners. They mock the principles of the Charter of the Forest. Thames Water, while paying its foreign shareholders £1.6 billion, has been convicted and had its hands slapped for pouring 1.4 billion tonnes of untreated sewage into the Thames, and is also doing too little to fix leaks. The Charter asserted that the commoners had the right to water.

Paul D. Aligica and Vlad Tarko (Excerpt)

 Polycentricity: From Polanyi to Ostrom, and Beyond

The article overviews and elaborates the concept of polycentricity, defined as a structural feature of social systems of many decision centers having limited and autonomous prerogatives and operating under an overarching set of rules. The article starts by introducing the concept as it was advanced by Michael Polanyi and developed by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It continues introducing possible instances of polycentricity as well as related notions, as part of an attempt to further elaborate the concept through a concept design approach that systematically applies the logic of necessary and sufficient conditions. The article concludes by arguing that the polycentricity conceptual framework is not only a robust analytical structure for the study of complex social phenomena, but is also a challenging method of drawing non-ad hoc analogies between different types of self-organizing complex social systems. The concept of polycentricity (tentatively defined as a social system of many decision centers having limited and autonomous prerogatives and operating under an overarching set of rules) was first envisaged by Michael Polanyi (1951) in his book The Logic of Liberty. From there it diffused to law studies, thanks to Lon Fuller (1978) and others...to urban networks studies...and, even more importantly, to governance studies, thanks to Vincent and Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of institutional analysis (Aligica and Boettke 2009). The 2009 Nobel Prize in economics awarded to Elinor Ostrom pushed this concept to renewed attention. Indeed, the notion of polycentricity has a pivotal role in the Bloomington School of institutional analysis. Yet, although the concept is often recognized as important, not much has been done to further clarify and elaborate it, beyond the work of the aforementioned authors. This article is an attempt to deal with this challenge. 

Initial Developments

Michael Polanyi’s original development of the concept of polycentricity was the outcome of his interest in the social conditions preserving the freedom of expression and the rule of law (Prosch 1986, 178). His approach was highly original in that he based his social analysis on an analogy to the organization of the scientific community. This was facilitated by his antipositivist approach to the philosophy of science, as he considered the success of science to be the outcome of a certain kind of social organization, rather than of scientists following a rigidly defined “scientific method” (Polanyi 1951). Polanyi argued that the success of science was mainly due to its “polycentric organization.” In such organizational systems, participants enjoy the freedom to make individual and personal contributions, and to structure their research activities in the best way they considered fit. Researchers’ efforts do not usually dissipate in unproductive directions because they share a common ideal; that is, their freedom is utilized to search for an abstract end goal (objective truth). Polanyi’s key point is that such an abstract and underoperationalized ideal cannot be imposed on the participants by an overarching authority. Thus, the authority structure has to allow a multitude of opinions to exist, and to allow them not just as hypotheticals but as ideas actually implemented into practice. The attempt to impose progress toward an abstract ideal is doomed to failure, as progress is the outcome of a trial-and-error evolutionary process of many agents interacting freely. Polanyi argued that the same applies to art, religion, or the law as it applies to science because these other activities are also polycentric in nature and are driven by certain ideals (beauty, transcendent truth, and justice).

Vaneigem

A fascination with horror and death results both from a powerlessness to humanise existence and from the economy's interest in treating life as nothing but a chaotic whirlpool where whatever is created self-destructs.

      Raoul Vaneigem  

The feeling of humiliation is nothing but the feeling of being an object.

      Raoul Vaneigem  

Ingroup and Outgroup Bias

One of the central questions addressed in the social psychological literature over the past several decades has been the relationship between social identity and intergroup relations (Tajfel and Turner 1986). Central to this research is the relationship between one’s perception of belonging to a particular group (ingroup) and the perception of a group to which one does not perceive membership (outgroup). This dynamic gives rise to stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination of the outgroup, which further strengthens identification with the ingroup (Hogg 2006). Ingroup identification includes attitudes about merit, or justifications for an ingroup’s dominant position. In the U.S. case, this is largely viewed as individual mobility or individualism; members of the ingroup experience upward social mobility primarily as the result of individual effort. Individuals who perceive their group as lower in status, for example, may opt for a strategy that dissociates themselves from the group with the expectation that personal effort alone will allow for individual upward mobility. “[This] ideology of mobility is very convenient for the dominant group,” as Hogg (2006:123) notes, since it serves as a justification for their higher status. By extension, outgroups do not experience similar social mobility due to the lack of such effort, as opposed to structural barriers that may inhibit or prohibit mobility in a systemic fashion (Hogg and Abrams 1988). This we define as individualist sentiments directed at outgroups. Stereotypes of outgroups therefore are associated with attitudes about individual mobility.

Competent and Cold: Specifying the Model Minority Stereotype

One of the major advances in intergroup relations research in the past 13 years has focused primarily on the impact of stereotypes for multiple outgroups. Social psychologist Susan Fiske and colleagues (2002) proposed a two-axis cognitive map termed the stereotype content model (SCM). The two axes refer to perceived competence and perceived warmth of a given outgroup. By creating a two-dimensional map of stereotypes, we can better understand how the stereotypes of these groups relate to one another. The ingroup is viewed as both warm and competent, whereas outgroups are subordinate either by their relative coldness or incompetence''.

Jerry Z. Park,1 Brandon C. Martinez,2 Ryon Cobb,3 Julie J. Park,4 and Erica Ryu Wong

 

"Fountains were central to the architecture of the Bimaristan Arghun: Three courtyards each held a fountain, around which patient rooms were arranged, while the central courtyard featured a large rectangular pool and well.''

The hospital shall keep all patients, men and women, until they are completely recovered. All costs are to be borne by the hospital whether the people come from afar or near, whether they are residents or foreigners, strong or weak, low or high, rich or poor, employed or unemployed, blind or signed, physically or mentally ill, learned or illiterate. There are no conditions of consideration and payment; none is objected to or even indirectly hinted at for non-payment. The entire service is through the magnificence of God, the generous one.

        Policy statement of the bimaristan of al-Mansur Qalawun 

 

You have mentioned in your previous letter that you would send me some money to make use of it in my medicines costs. I say, I don’t need it at all as treatment in this Islamic hospital is for free. Also there is something else concerning this hospital. This hospital gives a new suit and five dinars to every patient who has already got well lest he should find himself obliged to work in the period of rest and recuperation.

Dear father, if you’d like to visit me, you will find me in the surgery department and joints treatment. When you enter the main gate, go to the south hall where you will find the department of first aid and the department of disease diagnosis then you will find the department of arthritis (joint diseases). Next to my room, you will find a library and a hall where doctors meet together to listen to the lectures given by professors; also this hall is used for reading. The gynecology department lies on the other side of the hospital court. Men are not allowed to enter it. On the right of the hospital court lies a large hall for those who recovered. In this place they spend the period of rest and convalescence for some days. This hall contains a special library and some musical instruments.

Dear father, any place in this hospital is extremely clean; beds and pillows are covered with fine Damascus white cloth. As to bedcovers, they are made of gentle soft plush. All the rooms in this hospital are supplied with clean water. This water is carried to the rooms through pipes that are connected to a wide water fountain; not only that, but also every room is equipped with a heating stove. As to food, chicken and vegetables are always served to the extent that some patients do not want to leave the hospital because of their love and desire of this tasty food.

       Frenchman’s letter from a Cordóba hospital in the 10th century

"This plaque on the wall of the Bimaristan Arghun in Aleppo, Syria, commemorates its founding by Emir Arghun al-Kamili in the mid-14th century. Care for mental illnesses here included fresh air, running water, recitals, theatre, music and abundant light. During the golden age of Islam a theory of medicine developed that emphasized physical causation and the provision of treatment in spaces that were conducive to well-being''.

      Interior view of Illinois State Penitentiary panopticon structure

'Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized' how he is to be recognized' how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in a individual way, etc.)'.

'He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection'.

'The law must appear to be a necessity of things, and power must act while concealing itself beneath the gentle force of nature'.

  Michel Foucault

Cicerchia (excerpt)

One can reproduce the same assumptions as neoclassicism from a different starting point. For neoclassicists, the market is basically indifferent to identity, so one must explain divergent labor market behavior through extra-economic prejudices, education levels, cultural influences, lazy dispositions, or the ignorance of the working class. For the critics that I discussed in the previous section, too, the fact that bringing workers together need not entail solidarity within the economy requires an extra-economic explanation. The subjective failures of workers are not the labor market’s fault, but the fault of external processes that “shape” market competition. Racism and sexism shape the process of class conflict from the outside by preventing the requisite subjective affinities and political unity on the inside. Critics then conclude that capitalism may only bring white workers or male workers together in solidarity, so the effects are not what class conflict theories assume. Consider multiple systems theories. Theorists of multiple systems (patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy) like Hartmann and Mills critique class conflict theory by identifying other systems of social differentiation. Mills, for instance, explicitly retreats from the terrain of analyzing class and race together, toward analyzing white supremacy as its own system. Mills uses Roediger’s cultural analysis of white working-class racism to support his view that whites have an “ontological stake” in white supremacy that shapes their interests. It is thus possible for white workers to forego their economic interests to maintain a privileged ontological position. Mills thinks that race shapes the contours of collective action and political solidarity because class brings workers together, but white supremacy divides them (Mills 2000: 164-9). Racism (extra-economic) shapes the class structure (economic). The inside/outside framing of the economy holds even if one admits that workers are exploited.

In my view, multiple-systems theory reifies the analytical distinction that originates with
neoclassicism. Of course, the irony is that the view itself results from an attempt to conceptualize class in a less narrow, more relational way. But one need not vindicate earlier theories of class conflict to show that their critics do not resolve the problems that are germane to those theories. Indeed, the verb “to shape” invokes the image of someone making pottery with a wheel; hands running along the outside of a system in motion. Many words have been used to describe this basic image—intertwining, co-determining, interlocking. All retain the basic idea that the market is, in principle, indifferent to identity and then point to normative features that are ostensibly external to market principles explain why what happens on the inside is different than what one may expect based on abstract models. The outside “shapes” the inside of the market in a specific locale, which explains both market failures and failures of solidarity.

Lillian Cicerchia

Livermore

“For me, passing means trying to be anything other than what I was, and what I fear so desperately I always will be: poor white trash.”

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

     James Baldwin

***

I am rummaging through the junk drawer in my father’s kitchen, looking for clay, or putty, or caulking. I am twelve years old, and I have an assignment due the following day for Earth Science. I have to make a working volcano. Most of the time there is no mustard, so I don’t know how I’m going to find the ingredients for a working volcano. Even now, years later, the bar for financial security is mustard. And paper towels. If I can afford both mustard and paper towels, I feel I’m doing pretty damn well. But on the night in question, my father has said he can’t afford the Plaster of Paris I need to make this working volcano, so I’m looking for anything I can use instead.

I call it my father’s kitchen. It’s my father’s apartment, really. I live there, I suppose, but it would be more accurate to say that I occupy the back bedroom of the place. I use the bathroom, and forage food from the kitchen cupboards and refrigerator; cereal and bread and government cheese and whatever else I can find, but mostly I keep to my room and my father keeps to his, lying on his bed listening to Frank Sinatra albums or watching Tarzan movies.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen tells us that shame lies at the core of poverty. Anyone who grew up poor instinctively knows this to be true. She feels that shame every minute of every day, in the background if she is feeling good, in her face if she is not. The shame I already felt was about to get worse, and it would be ground into my bones forever.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen tells us that shame lies at the core of poverty.

It is early in my seventh-grade year. Until now I have been in class only with students from my side of town, the poor side. But it’s a small town, so the rich kids and the poor kids are now funneled into one junior high school, and I find myself sitting next to classmates sporting all the markers of wealth: Straight teeth and sandy hair, Izod T-shirts and madras skirts and boat shoes. My father bought me two new school outfits, from Caldor. A pair of corduroys and a flowered peasant top (for the first day), jeans and a button-down collared shirt that makes me look like a security guard. I am desperate for a pair of boat shoes and have found some at the Salvation Army that are a size too small. I buy them anyway with three dollars I got somewhere, I don’t remember where, and I jam my feet into them and wear them until a bony bump emerges on my heel. Eventually I can’t take the pain anymore and give up wearing them. The bump is there to this day.

I find nothing in the kitchen, so I move to the bathroom, picking through the mounds of cotton balls and razors underneath the sink. My gaze descends the row of shelves in the bathroom closet, and finally, on the floor, settles on an unopened bag of kitty litter. This is the last place in the apartment. There’s nowhere else to look. I take the bag, turn to the sink and remove the plastic top from an empty mouthwash bottle that’s been sitting there for months. I gather cleaning supplies, go to my room, and get to work.

I stir the litter into a sluice held together with flour, water and glue until it resembles a melting ice cream sundae. I hollow out a cavity at the top, insert the mouthwash cap and smooth the slurry around it to hold it in place. When it comes time for the volcano to erupt, I will pour a mixture of the cleaning supplies into the mouthwash cap, they will react and overflow like lava. I’ve tested it. It isn’t what I’d hoped to bring in, but it will work.

In class the next day I arrive before anybody else and set my volcano on the windowsill. Bits of kitty litter shake loose onto the tray and I quickly take my seat. My classmates file in and place their exquisitely constructed volcanos alongside it, painted, some snow-capped, with tiny trees dotting the landscape below, some even with miniature villagers who will be swallowed up in the impending eruptions. As they set down their volcanoes they cluster around mine and laugh, and I sit in my seat pretending to be engrossed in a book. The teacher arrives and class begins. One by one my classmates demonstrate their volcanoes, which spew and sputter and send lava flowing down their perfectly crafted slopes.

When we are down to one volcano—mine—Mr. Brown calls on me to take my turn. I picture the volcano behind me, kitty litter pebbles skidding off its sides, and I feel my face bloom red and say I haven’t done the assignment. There is only one volcano left, and all the other students have demonstrated theirs, so Mr. Brown knows I’m lying and so do all my classmates, but Mr. Brown is a prince among men and pretends he doesn’t. He pretends to scold me for not doing my work and says that just this once, because I’m usually such a good student, he’ll give me extra time.

At home I tell my father what happened and give him a note from Mr. Brown. I don’t know what it says but I think my father is embarrassed by it. He drives me to the store and buys me Plaster of Paris, and I work all weekend to finish my volcano, and demonstrate it the following Monday.

The shame of this episode is with me even now. It’s like a piece of gut I’ve coughed up into my throat, and it will be there until the day I die.

***

The more research scientists do on people who grew up in poverty, the more they realize that living in poverty is like being in a war. People who have grown up poor can have PTSD, and many don’t have the mental bandwidth that other people have for normal life stressors. Or at least I don’t. I become frustrated very easily. If I can’t get the lid off a jar, I feel like throwing the thing across the room. I once heard somebody say to an easily frustrated person, “Who do you think you are? Everybody has to deal with these inconveniences. Why do you think you’re so special that you don’t have to?” They have completely misunderstood, at least if it were me they were talking to. It’s that I had already experienced so many normal life stressors by the time I was ten, I used up more than most people deal with in a lifetime. Ironically, that has also left me all out of fucks. I am frustrated and out of patience, so I am ready to dispatch with certain normal life stressors very quickly. I usually do this with the phrase ‘Let me explain something to you,’ and very calmly and deliberately explain to the person why they had better stop whatever they are doing. It’s a strange amalgamation of emotions, and I don’t always understand it myself.

Some things never leave you. You carry them forward to the third and fourth generation. Those things can be good, or they can be bad. When James Baldwin wrote the words in Giovanni’s Room that begin this chapter, he was writing of social isolation, and one of the things he was grappling with was ‘passing.’ In Giovanni’s Room, the scholar Valerie Rohy wrote, for Baldwin and millions of black and gay people, ‘passing’ had to do with racial and sexual identity. For me, passing means something different. It is a highly freighted term for a cis white person to use, I know, but I can think of no other way to describe it. For me, passing means trying to be anything other than what I was, and what I fear so desperately I always will be: poor white trash.

***

I am leaning against the wall in a game arcade watching another girl play pinball. A group of us are standing around her. The other girls have taken their turns and are waiting for the girl to use up her quarter so they can go again. The ball pings against the sides of the machine and bells trill and lights flash. I am desperate to play, but I don’t have any money.

The girls are part of the drum corps I also belong to. We are at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, on the tail end of a ten-day trip to perform at Disney World. I spent weeks selling candles and chocolate bars to raise money for the trip. That fund-raising covered the cost of gas for the bus and the other travel costs. But it didn’t include any spending money. The other kids have received cash from their parents, enough to play arcade games and buy T-shirts and candy and souvenirs. Before I boarded the bus the morning we left, my father gave me $20. I spent it by the end of the third day. I do not belong here.

The girl’s quarter shows no signs of giving out. She has kept the same ball in play for about five minutes, bouncing it off the sides, batting it away with the levers whenever it ricochets back. The director of the corps, Mr. Johns, comes up. He watches the game a minute, then looks at the other girls, their quarters ready, then at me. I lean against the wall, trying to look disinterested.

“Don’t you want to play?”

“I’m fine.”

“Don’t you have any money?”

“I had $20, but I spent it.”

“Your father gave you $20 for ten days?”

I don’t answer. I feel the heat rising on my face. I manage a shrug.

Mr. Johns takes out his wallet and finds a $100 bill and offers it to me. I thank him but decline.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Take it. I’ll get it back from your father.”

I know I shouldn’t. I think of how angry my father will be that I told. How angry he’ll be that he’ll have to repay the $100. But I am nine years old and the pinball machine is ringing and the lights are flashing and I want to play. I take the $100 and thank Mr. Johns, and run to the change machine to get quarters.

I know I am lucky to have gone at all. But that’s part of the shame. The other kids belonged there. I was lucky to have been included. I am a charity case.

***

I don’t know exactly when I gave up on America. I only know that it was long after America gave up on me. There are many stories of America, but this story is one we don’t hear so often. It’s the version of ourselves we don’t like to think about, the one where poor people can’t always pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, where not every smart kid makes it out of the ghetto. The one where the American Dream is a lie. How do I tell it? How do I tell it so you will understand? Not for sympathy, just so you will understand what it has done to us, growing up poor.

John C. Calhoun said, “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black.” With that pronouncement, he told one lie to hide another. He asserted one divide that does not naturally exist and denied one that does. There is no natural division between black and white or brown. Indeed, as James Baldwin and Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates and others have pointed out, there is no black or white. The artificial division between black and white was invented by white people in the early days of America’s formation through the court system, specifically, by wealthy white people. They needed a reason to justify their right to profit from the labor of others, so they invented labels. Black and white. There absolutely is a division between rich and poor, but the rich would prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist. Otherwise, it would be clear that they have taken far more than their fair share and left the rest of us without.

From the outside, I am the story we like to tell ourselves. By any reasonable standard, I have ‘gotten out.’ I have a PhD, I’ve lived in Europe for more than ten years, I was a journalist, I won awards. But on the inside, I am still the little girl in the projects eating government cheese. I dropped out of high school and still managed to get a PhD, but sometimes I don’t remember how far I’ve come. I’m up here, but in my mind I’m still down there. It’s not only that there are external barriers, although there are; I still have severe money problems and have never managed to achieve financial security. The barrier is internal, and it affects nearly everything I do and every interaction I have. I suspect it is the same for many Americans.

There absolutely is a division between rich and poor, but the rich would prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist. Otherwise, it would be clear that they have taken far more than their fair share and left the rest of us without.

People don’t want to hear about poor whites for many reasons. One is that it threatens their ability to perpetuate the same old racist narrative that poverty is a ‘black problem.’ If black people are poor, goes the racist trope, it’s because of something they did, so there is nothing society can do about it. If people acknowledge that there are also poor whites, they will have to acknowledge that it is not a ‘black’ problem. It is a problem with how we reward work, the kind of work we reward most generously, and how we conceive of society’s responsibility for its poor and not just to them—in other words, people are poor because society makes them that way and keeps them that way, because it is more important to most of America to pay millions of dollars to bankers than it is to pay a decent salary to teachers and sanitation workers and store clerks, and because they need to keep people poor enough to accept work they may not want to do. If people admitted all these things, then they might have to do something about it.

The term poor white trash serves the same purpose—to dismiss, to deny, to denigrate. If you’re poor, it’s because of something you did. If people acknowledge that there are poor whites, they must acknowledge that they themselves could also be poor at any moment—if they think about it, perhaps they already are. This threatens the narrative of American exceptionalism, that anybody can get rich in America if they work hard enough. That is not true. It has never been true. But people fervently believe it; some so that they can view their own success as a sign of virtue and the result of their own hard work, others so that they can imagine their struggles as temporary, a bump in the road to their own eventual American Dream.

Contrary to the national narrative, we have always had class in America, and there have always been poor people. The nation was designed that way. As historian Nancy Isenberg, the author of White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America, has written, when the English were establishing colonies in Virginia and New England, they envisioned the poor as an expendable labor pool that would till the soil and husband the animals and build the colonies. They shipped them—the working poor, ex-soldiers, beggars, and criminals—to Jamestown, the Colony of Virginia and the Massachusetts Bay Colony and, in exchange for their passage, they would work to build the New World. They called them ‘waste people.’

Nobody wants to hear about poor whites, unless those whites are what people call rednecks and they voted for Donald Trump. I don’t know any poor person who is a Republican. All the poor people I know are Democrats. And I mean yellow dog Democrats, an expression which means we would vote for a ol’ yella dog before we would vote for a Republican. I can only ever recall meeting one poor person who voted for Donald Trump, and he had brain damage from an IED in Iraq. We vote Democrat, that is, when we vote, because we sometimes have trouble getting to polling stations, for lack of transportation, a lack of childcare, an inability to get the time off work, disabilities, and other problems.

We vote Democrat, that is, when we vote, because we sometimes have trouble getting to polling stations, for lack of transportation, a lack of childcare, an inability to get the time off work, disabilities, and other problems.

We don’t have the generational wealth of home ownership that allowed many working-class whites to move up to the middle class. It was also denied to black people because of redlining to keep black people out of ‘white neighborhoods,’ another way that black people and poor whites are in the same boat. Poor whites are kept out of those white neighborhoods, too, just in different ways; minimum credit scores we can’t meet and down payments we can’t save up or borrow from family. Another way we are not quite white. We are Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, agnostics, atheists. We are of English heritage and Irish, Italian and Portuguese, German and Polish and French and Greek and Hungarian and Scottish and Dutch.

I grew up in Groton, Connecticut. The way I grew up conflicts with the idea people have of Connecticut as nothing but big houses and leafy neighborhoods and clench-jawed bankers with Brahmin accents, the narrative you see in films, on television and in books. Unlike some working-class communities where factories that had formerly employed a whole town shut down and threw an entire community of working-class people into poverty, Groton had—and still has—two thriving major employers, Pfizer and Electric Boat, which employed a large part of the town and the surrounding towns besides, but no one in my family worked there. Hardly anyone in my family worked at all.

My father blamed a teenage dive off a dock into shallow water for a neck injury and worked less and less until he stopped working altogether and went on welfare. He continued to cut hair in the kitchen and used the money to buy the first VCR as soon as it hit the market, as well as a stereo and every Frank Sinatra tape he could find. When he couldn’t pay the rent anymore, he went on welfare and we moved to the projects. My mother had moved herself and my brother Adam there years before, along with my sister Jennifer, who she had after marrying my stepfather. My sister Charity would come along much later, from another man my mother lived with for several years.

The truth is, we couldn’t stay where we were. We did not belong in a middle- or working-class neighborhood. It would not allow us to be who we were. So, we moved down, and down, and down again, until we settled in a place where our family’s antics would be tolerated by our neighbors because they had no choice. No one had anyplace else to go.

No matter how much we cleaned, the apartment was crawling with cockroaches. One night as I lay awake in bed, I looked up and saw one crawling on the ceiling directly above me. I launched myself out of the bed and slept on the couch that night. The next day I prowled my room with Raid, but I never found that cockroach.

In the projects, every time I went outside, there was a need to be on guard. The scowl, arms at the ready, casual but alert, show that I was watchful, ready to go, that I couldn’t be caught unawares, either by a girl who wanted to jump me or a boy who wouldn’t accept no. Years before, when I was seven years old, an older boy of about twelve stole our kickball as friends and I played. I went to retrieve it, and he slammed it into my stomach so hard he knocked me to the ground. As I sat on the tar, catching my breath, I heard a voice above me.

“Did you hit my sister?”

I looked up. I don’t know why he was there, he didn’t even go to that school anymore, but there stood my brother. Adam’s reputation preceded him, and the boy began stammering and apologizing.

“Oh, is that your sister? Sorry, man, I didn’t know, I wouldn’t have—”

But before he could finish the sentence, my brother punched him in the stomach. After that, he taught me to fight. The elbow is the hardest bone in the body. Use it. A hand to the nose will knock somebody out cold, but be careful or you might kill them. If they have hold of you from behind, a headbutt to their face will break their nose.

I also began to realize that I could use things in my environment, so when a school bully picked on my friend on the playground and began shoving her, I tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned, I knee’d him in the groin, spun him around, and slammed his face into a metal maypole. He later went to prison for rape.

But if you got caught out in the open, you had to front. A girl got in my face in the school parking lot one day out of the blue, throwing arms, her face up in mine. Her breath had that stale quality of someone who didn’t brush her teeth regularly. A crowd gathered to watch. I didn’t even know what I had done to her. Act casual. Eye the field, see what you can use. But we were in the wide open.

“Look,” I said, my voice casual, my arms at my sides, but flexing, ready. “We can go if you want, but I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t even know what you’re mad about.”

She fronted a little longer and I held my ground, my heart pounding, that click of dread in my throat. Then I guess she decided I might be able to take her.

“You’re all right,” she said, offering her hand. “I thought you’d chicken out, but you ain’t no punk. You’re a good kid.”

I shook for an hour afterward.

You become hard. Don’t smile. Don’t show weakness. That is with me still. I never stroll. Part of me is always on watch, waiting for the unexpected launch, the assault, the confrontation, the male on the hunt. I catch myself doing it and relax my arms, then a little while later I notice I’m clenching again, my shoulders tight. The need to do this is exhausting. The need to hide it even more so, to hide it from friends and colleagues who think I’m another kind of person, that I’m like them, that I’m comfortable in my own skin.

You become hard. Don’t smile. Don’t show weakness. That is with me still.

When I talk about poor people, I do not mean working class. It’s important to stress that. There are many ways to explain the difference. It is in the shame a poor child feels in the cafeteria line for his free school lunch, in the face of a single mother as she tries to hide her food stamp card from the person behind her in the check-out line, in the worry of a man who has just finished another 12-hour shift and still doesn’t know if he’ll have enough to buy groceries for his children.

One way to explain it is in a conversation I had recently with a friend. He insisted that, until recently, America was guided, to its benefit, by middle-class values, that there was an understanding that education was important, knowledge was important, that you went to work, did your job, came home, kept your yard clean, respected your neighbors. Poor people do that, too, I said. My grandmother did that. It struck me, then, that we were talking about the same things; we were just using different terminology.

When my friend talks about the middle class, he mostly means the working class. Teachers make $30,000 to $50,000 a year. Teachers are middle class. Garbage collectors make $60,000, but nobody would call a garbage collector middle class. Garbage collectors are working class. My friend was talking about his grandparents. His grandfather was a groundskeeper; his grandmother worked in a ball bearing factory. He wanted to laureate their values, but saying that somebody is working class speaks of a lack of sophistication, so he spoke of middle-class values. The values were the same, but he had grown up absorbing the American idea that the middle class are better than the poor. Nobody ever talks about the values of poor people as though they’re a good thing.

Working-class people can, for the most part, keep their lights on. They can at least know that they will be able to buy groceries. They probably are not college educated, but they have steady jobs, jobs they may have had for years, jobs with benefits and a pension, however much they have shriveled in recent years. Or they have been laid off from one of those jobs but they have a skill, and that skill conveys pride. As well it should.

Poor people work two or three jobs, unskilled work that doesn’t require a trade. Or they don’t have the wherewithal to hold down a job and are on welfare. Their parents were poor and their labor wasn’t valued, or they were mentally ill or addicts, and their children imbibed that hopelessness. Maybe they have dropped out of high school. Maybe they have bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Maybe they have an addiction. Mental illness, substance abuse and poverty can go hand in hand, as they did in my family. Which begets which? It’s not always that simple. It is not correct to say that drug use causes mental illness or that all those who are mentally ill are poor by choice; the same is true for those who are disabled. Indeed, in my experience, substance abuse is often done for self-medication. My mother did it, my brother did it, many people in my family did it, because they had undiagnosed mental illnesses and were ignored by the system because they were poor. My mother’s bipolar disorder went undiagnosed for years, so she lived with the misery of the depression and the crazed ideas fomented by the mania, and we, her children, lived with the outcomes. That is not my mother’s fault. It is the fault of the people who saw her behavior and its results as her own fault, a perception colored by the fact that she was poor, and didn’t look past that to recognize that she had a mental illness. Other people are just ignored because they’re poor. Waste people.

Mental illness, substance abuse and poverty can go hand in hand, as they did in my family. Which begets which? It’s not always that simple.

People may pick up the drug or the bottle, and certainly we are all responsible for our own choices, but what has America offered them instead? The idea that we are waste people is older than the country, and that knowledge that you are not valued by society wears you thin. In the housing project where I grew up, we were a bike ride away from the beach. But nobody I knew from the projects went there. Working class people did. But they had cars. There was no public transportation where I grew up. No bus to the beach from the projects. Or to any place of work, significantly. You needed a car or a bicycle. Most people in the projects didn’t have a car, except the drug dealers, and they slept during the day. Hardly anyone had a bike. Maybe they had enough money to give their kids a dollar for the ice cream van, but not enough for a bike, not for their kids and certainly not for themselves. And even if they did, they couldn’t conceive of the energy it would take, biking to the beach. It’s easier to sit on the porch, fan yourself in the heat and take comfort from an ice cream bar. This is the despair of poverty.

I have never owned a home, and I probably never will. Part of the reason for that is that I have never made enough money to make home ownership an attainable—or practical—goal. There was no down-payment loan available from a parent and I couldn’t save the money on my own. I could barely pay my bills. Once, when I was living in New York City, a friend called asking if I wanted to split a summer house in the Hamptons. My share would be $2,000. I desperately wanted to go, to get out of the city, to feel the sea air and hear the marsh grass flutter in the breeze and make smoothies and drink them on the deck, to spend time with my friend, but I didn’t have the money. Friends went on expensive holidays, ate at upscale restaurants, lived in apartments in Manhattan; I lived in a studio apartment in a condemned building. I had a degree from a prestigious university. I had a professional job. But I have never been successful at saving money.

That is also a consequence of growing up in poverty: the need for immediate gratification. If I get money, I spend it immediately, as though somebody might take it away from me. Because my whole childhood, people did. When I was nine years old, I had saved about $400 from working in my grandmother’s lunch shop. Syl’s Food Shop, it was called. It had been serving breakfast and lunch to the workers at Electric Boat for years when my grandmother and aunt bought it from Syl, and they kept the name because the Electric Boat workers knew it. My mother convinced me to open a joint bank account. She would keep the money safe, she said. My father warned me not to do it, but I was drawn by the lure of the bank account as a connection to my mother. So I did it. When I went to withdraw $20 a month later, the account had been cleaned out. When I was twelve, I had saved up more money from working in my grandmother’s shop. This time I was smart. I came home every afternoon and hid the bills in my books. A few dollars in each book. One day when I came home, the books were spilled out all over the floor, splayed open, all the money gone. My brother had found it. When I was in my early twenties, I bought a plane ticket to Italy and was waiting for a check to arrive to use as spending money. They sent it to my mother’s house, and she convinced a bank teller to cash it.

So, when I get money, I spend it quickly. Psychologists tell us that people who grew up in poverty have trouble controlling impulses, especially the impulse to buy. Being poor can have a permanent detrimental effect on your decision-making. If I had left the house with a dollar in my pocket, I would have spent it by the time I got home. This decision-making continued into adulthood. I once paid $600 for a set of Calphalon cookware when I was about to take custody of my baby sister, even though I only made $23,000 a year. My reasoning was that I had to have enough pots and pans to make a complete Thanksgiving dinner at all times. It’s something I’m working on, and I’m much better than I used to be, but not too long ago I bought a skirt on credit for £175 because I thought I would look cool in it at readings.

A few years ago, a friend of mine, in a well-meaning attempt to understand the impoverished diets of poor people, ate a Food Stamp diet for a week. On the last day of the diet, he talked about what he had learned and spoke philosophically about his renewed appreciation of healthy food as he prepared to end his restricted diet with his first good meal of the week: homemade vegetable pizza. He thought about what he had learned as he kneaded the pizza dough. He had already sliced the vegetables, and they sat piled high on the cutting board. While he had the best of intentions, what he said made me sad. He had misunderstood.

In his week of eating like poor people, he had missed two crucial ingredients: fear and shame. While he was looking forward to breaking his fast that night, poor people don’t get to do that. They don’t get to look forward to the end of impoverishment, to a good meal. My friend would eat a healthy meal that night, and he had known throughout the week that he could stop whenever he wanted, that all he had to do if he missed healthy food was open his refrigerator. Poor people never know when their next good meal will come. They look in the refrigerator on the 25th and maybe they only have enough food for a couple more meals but they don’t get paid for a week. And vegetables are expensive. Most poor people can’t afford them. All of this causes great shame. Shame that they don’t make enough money, shame that they can’t give their kids decent food, shame that they must rely on government assistance, shame that they can’t afford the restaurant their friends want to go to on Saturday night. That shame never goes away. It is not my friend’s fault that he does not know this. He doesn’t know it because society does not talk about such things, does not want them talked about. The result is that my friend would never understand how poor people feel—never understand me—and I felt sad and alone.

How do I tell it? How do I tell it so you will understand? Not for sympathy, just so you will understand what it has done to us, growing up poor. Because you have to understand. We are not okay.

Christian Livermore