Poverty Mindset vs Voluntary Poverty

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

What was once called voluntary poverty is now referred to as voluntary simplicity because some people seem to have had problem with the word poverty.

When you decide to go that route on your own accord, to live a simpler, more or less, poverty lifestyle, it is a different kettle of fish to having it forced upon you by circumstances, some beyond your control.

We have looked at Voluntary Poverty before so now let us consider the Poverty Mindset with which we have, more or less, been programmed through various societal pressures and via the power elite.

The reality of this here and now of our existence in this world is that money, in one form or another, is an inherent part of the global interactive construct.

While many of us, if not indeed most, would love to live in a different kind of economic collective where money would not, necessarily, be the means of exchange fact is that currently most of us live in one where we have to use money for most of our transactions regardless of our beliefs and ideology surrounding this “energy”.

This “Poverty Mindset” is a mind control program that has cleverly created and disseminated by the wealthy elite who want us to believe in and operate from. The poverty mindset formula is simple: if we don’t have access to financial abundance, then we don’t have access to the resources we require to become more effective in this world. It is a program of suppression and oppression. Interestingly, it is also a program that requires resentment to fuel it.

In addition to that the mind control has gone so far that we see everyone who does not have the financial abundance as a failure and someone who is alone to blame for his misfortune.

Those elites and “our” politicians keep referring to money as “resources”? But money is not a resource. It is, at the very best, a piece of printed paper (or minted metal), at worst it is a bunch of numbers on a screen. The only thing that gives it any value whatsoever is our shared belief in its value. This means that money is actually a faith-based religion and the politicians and bankers its clerics. But are you and I ready to become non-believers?

Money only has the value that we give it. After all it is only a piece of metal, or worse still a piece of paper, with a number, a “value”, printed upon it. If we would so decide we could use anything as “money”, such as the bits of paper for the Monopoly board game, shells, copper discs of different sizes (in the latter case at least the metal does have a value in that it is something that is needed for the making of things), or bits of wood or simply figures written in a book.

What is “Poverty Mindset”?

It is the mindset that we are being programmed with, through societal pressure, into believing that only if we have a certain amount of money, a fancy car, a big house, and so on, that we are valuable to and in society. That those that have a lot of money and possessions are our betters and thus we should look up to them and, maybe, even obey them.

There is nothing wrong with having a lot of money and there is also nothing wrong with having not so much. However, people should not be pushed into poverty through high prices and low incomes, despite the fact that they work all the given hours, while others who work little or not at all “make” lots of money. That we should not accept. The worker is worthy of his hire, and in all honesty the people that many look down upon because they do the so-called menial and manual jobs are probably worthy of it more than the bankers and the chief executives of industry. Without the worker all the wheels would stand still.

But we are conditioned to believe in this exploitative capitalist system that those “at the top” are worthy of greater pay and remuneration than those “at the bottom” and that those who are in more or less poverty have only themselves to blame for not doing well at school so that they too could be in those “higher” positions. But what would happen if we all would be academics? Who would then maintain the parks, the forests? Who would collect the trash, keep our streets clean, care for the elderly and the sick?

Everyone's hours of work should have the same value and be rewarded in the same way, for the hour of the academic, of the chief executive, of the prime minister, is worth no more than the hour of the road sweeper, the dustman, the gardener, the forester, the nurse or the carer. An hour is an hour is an hour.

It is the system that pushes people into poverty and it is also the system that keeps them there and the majority blames the poor for their condition and looks upon them as something of no value. Mind you, those of the middle class and the upper class also look down upon those of the working class as if they have little or no value. And in the poor the same mindset takes hold, of believing that they are not worthy, but also resentment of those that have more.

And all, including those that are poor not by their own choice, look down upon those that chose Voluntary Poverty; who chose a simple life and lifestyle, trying to do with little money only and few(er) possessions. Doing without a car, a television, foreign holidays, and so on. Few, even those that are poor, believe that people could be (so stupid, as many see it) to voluntarily life a life of poverty (aside from, maybe, some monks).

There should be no poverty, aside from the voluntary kind, in society, if our society is as it is meant to be, with equality. Everyone should be equally remunerated for the hours that they work regardless of what the work is that they do. But for that we would have to change the system, including and especially the “monetary system”.

When everyone's work is regarded the same and everyone is being remunerated in the same way for the hours worked in hours and not coin and when there is work for all then, and only then, the poverty mindset will no longer exist either.

© 2018

Voluntary poverty

Voluntary poverty could very well save your life, but it is a hard sell

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Simple living can be comfortable, but are we ready to voluntarily seek out poverty just to survive after peak oil and other calamities that climate change and whatever else may bring?

Poverty is finding middle class families these days these days through unemployment, bankruptcy and home foreclosure, whether they like it or not. And mostly, they don't like it. However, those who haven't found poverty yet might want to seek it out for their own good as, when things are ging to get scarce, as they will, it will be the only way to go.

Poor and lovin' it

Preparing we must for the eventuality of the end of the world as we know it and in order to do that I would recommend preparing our households for a future of doing with fewer products and services from the marketplace once peak oil puts an end to our current age of abundance.

In order to do that I would suggest “Survival Games” to be played at home, aside from generally cutting down on things and making things ourselves more than we have been doing in the last decades.

As we look forward to an economy of "scarcity industrialism", if looking forward to can be the right word, and whether industrialism actually still will be part of the equation is another story as even the UN is stating that the industrial age if coming to its end and we are entering a port-industrial era, we must develop the kinds of DIY skills that could be found in issues of Mother Earth News from the 1970s and which would be referred to as “Green Wizardry”.

Also in the list of study materials should be How-To books such as used to be published by Odhams in the UK in the first third of the twentieth century, as well as books such as those by John Seymour and the Australian Bushman crafts ones by Ron Edwards and also the Foxfire Books. I am lucky enough to have a number of Odhams How-To books in my collection as well as a couple of Foxfire ones, some of John Seymour's books and the two Australian Bushman ones by Ron Edwards.

Knowing how to grow and preserve our own food is only the start. There is learning how to cook with the haybox, how to insulate and weatherize and to provide the small amount of energy one may need from homescale sources. Those who know the latter will be able to ignore the decline of the electrical grid.

Those who learn how to get the things they need from salvage, instead of relying on global supply chains fed from rapidly depleting resource stocks, will be able to stand aside as what's left of the global economy circles the drain and goes down it.

The idea of voluntary poverty – or better the term – was coined by Henry David Thoreau. The founders of the modern movement of "voluntary simplicity", however, backed away uncomfortably from the noun in Thoreau's phrase, and thereby did themselves and their movement a huge disservice as it is all too easy to turn "voluntary simplicity" into a sales pitch for yet another round of allegedly simple products at fashionably high prices. The concept of voluntary poverty does not lend itself anything like so well to such evasions. The idea, Thoreau's idea, is to deliberately embrace being poor, in every material sense, in order to avoid the common fate of being possessed by your possessions. And this commercialization has happened, as we must all be well aware, to the term “green”, “eco” and “environmentally friendly” and thus “greenwash” came about.

Without many modern comforts you can still live a comfortable life when your food comes from a backyard garden, your heat comes from a wood stove, and your job comes from refurbishing salvage. But it requires the proper mindset to be able to do so.

Free your mind

A thrifty, self-reliant life – I refuse to use the term self-sufficient, as it is simply not possible, complete self-sufficiency that it – may be comfortable physically, but it is certainly not a middle-class lifestyle. And it is also a lifestyle that is not liked by the powers-that-be who, not so long ago in Britain, declared that people who did not buy enough products would undermine the economy and were, in fact, terrorists.

True household self-reliance – homesteading or its urban variety – is more like monasticism, the lifestyle of a Benedictine or Zen monk who has taken a vow of poverty and committed himself to simple living for a higher cause. And what especially is not comfortable about living in poverty is the loss of status.

I know that plenty of people like to claim that they don't care what other people think about them but it is clear from the way most Americans act, and not just Americans, that they care very much about status, reflected in conspicuous consumption from Versace to Nike to Apple. Big brands are not just on our bodies; they are inside our heads, defining the good life.

Even for people interested in prepping for peak oil (and peak everything) and open to a message of simple living, I don't think, if we are honest with ourselves, this message is a hard one, and many of us are not quite ready yet to leave behind all the ideas of the “good life” that they have known since childhood and embrace what society would define as personal failure. But, the problem, so to speak, is that we must.

Indeed, corporate marketers have done so well at getting inside our heads that most of us judge the good, the true and especially the beautiful by what brand advertising has taught us.

I like the idea of transitioning out of the money economy for philosophical reasons, and many others around the world do too. Some have even done it and gone into the “money strike”. I would like to free my mind from money, status-seeking and corporate brainwashing, and personally I have been able to do that to a large extent due to the way I was raised (we will come to that later). Many in our Western world who are in financial distress right now also might find it appealing to find some relief from the stress of juggling bills that get harder to pay each month as the economy continues to stagnate, despite of what we are being told by governments and media (who have become but a mouthpiece for government).

But to get to a life beyond money, and to do it with joy rather than resentment, will take a huge mind-shift. And here looking to the past might help.

There is a long tradition of simple living or even voluntary poverty in the West going back before today's Amish and Old Order Mennonites through Tolstoy and St. Francis of Assisi all the way to down to the ancient Greek philosophers Epicurus and Diogenes. The latter was such a showboat that he lived in a barrel in the agora of Athens, the agora being a central spot in ancient Greek city-states, the literal meaning of the word is "gathering place" or "assembly", just to make sure everybody knew how much he was doing without.

But none of the great ascetics of the past embraced poverty merely as a way to survive in a difficult economy. Instead, there was always that higher motivation: to get closer to God, to reach enlightenment, to discover absolute truth.

Survival is a surprisingly very bad motivator

For modern Americans were to do something so opposed to the country's national character as to go beyond the fashionable slow food, slow work and slow sex of the simple living movement to brand themselves with the straight-up shame of poverty, there would need to have a better reason to do it than mere survival.

A people that have been brought up on the Horatio Alger dream of hard work, equal opportunity and upward mobility won't soon walk around in sackcloth and ashes even if it means their very survival is at stake and that of the Planet. Sad to say, but it would appear that many Americans would choose to die first than to give up on their middle-class identity.

Indeed, it has been shown that they are perfectly ready to give their lives in the cause of maintaining our social status. It is not only the Japanese salaryman who is drawn to harakiri when he loses his job. Plenty of Americans have also sought refuge in an early grave to avoid the ignominy of bankruptcy or otherwise appearing to fall out of the middle class, and also many bankers in recent times, though with the latter one may wonder as to whether they were suicided because they knew too much about the economic collapse that was engineered by the banks, on behest of our governments.

But whether we like it or not the path to voluntary poverty will have to be taken by us all in order to be able to cope with the inevitable coming of the peak oil and peak everything.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

© 2014