René Girard XIX: Poverty
The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.
“Poverty is humiliation, the sense of being dependent and of being forced to accept rudeness, insults, and indifference when we seek help.” (from Voices of the Poor, World Bank, 2000)
Poverty is humiliation. The human body and spirit can endure extremes of physical deprivation without breaking; it is in the humiliating relationship with others that the spirit is broken. That poverty is a spiritual rather than a material problem is especially true in modern times, and especially in more developed countries, in which the poor have the physical nourishment and comfort levels that as late as two centuries ago were not available even to high European nobility. It is clearly not the absolute physical deprivations of the poor that destroy them, but the humiliating relationship they must endure with the Other, the rest of society.
Today, it is widely recognised that conventional initiatives to fight global poverty have not quite achieved their goals. [1] The same is true for many national-level initiatives. Charity and policy can surely make some difference, but ultimately, since poverty is generated by attitudes, it requires deeper social changes. “You can’t legislate love… Can’t legislate us into liking each other”, says Denzel Washington.
We will argue here that in reaction to the continuous humiliation that is poverty, the underprivileged enter a life of self-destructive sadomasochism, which according to René Girard is the final state of all frustrated desires. [2] Though poverty cannot be legislated against, it can and ought to be worked against at all times, but for any such work to be effective it must recognise the sadomasochistic nature of poverty.
The engine that drives classification of society is fuelled by desire common to all humans. Triangular desire drives all of us to desire what our neighbours possess or themselves desire. Yet, the underprivileged are set up to be the perennial losers in the race for things of this world. Desire that is permanently frustrated and that constantly leads to humiliation turns life into hell. The Other mutates into a devil, forever enticing one to imitate him and his desires, but always causing one to trip and bite the dust in the pursuit of those desires. One loses hope, or simply forgets all ideas of positive mimesis, or love. The world is ruled by deceivers operating through lies. Yet, to the degree that one holds on to desire, one imitates one’s environment.
A person who feels constantly humiliated develops an inferiority complex and, simultaneously, begins to cover it up by looking for his own victims to humiliate. [3] He feels irreparably inferior to those above him, and to those below him he plays out the role of the tyrant, attempting with his abuse to ascend to transcendence of his own tormentors. He interprets the mastery of the ruling classes through conspiracy theories (of the more esoteric kind), which ascribe to those who rule incomprehensible levels of demonic intelligence, and any nearness to oneself he interprets as proof of inferiority. His worldview becomes sadomasochistic in the broader (not specificially sexual) sense. Yet, in all this he only does what every other human being does – he imitates transcendence as he experiences it in his own life.
In the absence of other victims, the underprivileged turn on their own family and neighbours. They abuse their loved ones and themselves through domestic violence, physical and verbal abuse, and addiction. Misogyny is more common among the poor because women are perceived as objects, and as such they remind humiliated men of their competitive failure. [4] Women also have a genetic predisposition for caring for those immediately around them, which leads to an attitude of practicality that counters and offends self-destructive sadomasochism.
The underprivileged victimise those near them for the lack of alternative victims, but otherwise are more open to scapegoating others, and are more susceptible to every sort of prejudice. They can be relatively easily flipped into fascists, communists, racists, or anti-Semites, depending on political circumstances. Polarisation of the underprivileged or frustrated masses against surrogate political victims is commonly called populism.
The phenomenon that we call “crabs in the bucket”, by which a peer group exerts pressure against an individual’s rising above it, exists on every socioeconomic level, but on the lowest level this pressure is enforced with a brutal level of violence. The sadomasochism of the poor is so much more intense because it is the only mechanism they have available to cope with frustrated desire; all other mechanisms, such as consumerism, transcendence and differentiation through education and specialisation, prestige in the workplace, are nothing but games in which they are set to lose. The lowest socioeconomic class, unlike those above them, cannot vent their aggression on anyone other than those close to them.
To dismiss the misery of the poor as a result of congenital stupidity or lack of education is to miss the point. People don’t engage in abuse and self-harm because they are poor at algebra. Their political pliability cannot be ascribed to those reasons either. As René Girard describes in his book Violence and the Sacred, “[violence] should not be regarded as a simple reflex that ceases with the removal of the initial stimulus”, but rather, and despite the eternal humanist insistence on the human “rationality”, “it is more difficult to quell an impulse toward violence than to rouse it”, and “when unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim.” The poor are continually primed for violence, a physiological phenomenon comparable to hunger or sexual drive, and about as amenable to reasoning as the latter two.
Yet even the most well-meaning of politicians, when they look at the humiliation of the poor, and generally at all of the vast mess of personal problems we are all having, often can do no better than provide us with surrogate victims in the form of political enemies. The complex problems in our private lives, which no one wants to hear about, can be uploaded to a national dialogue. As a result, we are no longer insignificant, and our once intractable issues now appear to have straightforward solutions.
In much of the literature on the topic, humiliation is used more or less synonymously with shame, but this muddies the waters. [5] In the English language, there is no context under which the term humiliation has a positive connotation. The term shame, however, does. To have a sense of shame is a good thing; indeed, it is the essential thing for maintaining a civilized order. Shame is a powerful emotional regulator which tells us, and through which we acknowledge, that we have done something unequivocally wrong. We have desired something that we ought not to desire. A state can legislate laws against bad behaviour until the Judgment Day, but without shame, the laws are too weak, too formal, and too corruptible to keep our behaviour within boundaries of functionality. This is another way of repeating the trope about “family values” being essential for a country. A state punishes, but parents make you feel ashamed.
The two sides of the modern political debate between the progressives and conservatives on how to solve the problem of poverty align with the humiliation-shame dichotomy. The stereotypical progressive sees the poor as victims of humiliation, an activity he would like to end. He sees the middle and upper classes as responsible for actively humiliating the poor. The cartoon conservative, on the other hand, believes that as long as a society maintains a sense of shame, meaning people don’t desire things excessively, and a sense of decency, meaning that people behave nicely to each other, then the humiliation inflicted on the poor will be minimized. He includes the poor in his scope of society, insisting on their moral agency and in America, against “bigotry of low expectations”.
The risk with the traditional conservative solution is that it may end up amounting to little more than turning a blind eye on the plight of the underprivileged. Surely, one cannot humiliate those one does not even notice. This fault becomes more reprehensible the greater the actual exploitation and abuse of the underprivileged.
On the other hand, progressive solutions to poverty fail because they are, for historical reasons, married to humanism and its erroneous belief that humans are rational, meaning here not only that humans possess the ability to reason, but also that their behaviour is a predictable, mathematically conceivable optimization algorithm. Such assumptions are not to be assailed, for the ground on which they stand is the sacred ground of science. Social sciences proceed by the hallowed ritual of the scientific method: they identify an object of study, make and test hypotheses about its behaviour, and derive a predictive model.
Mimetic theory does not deny the rational capabilities of humans; moreover, it too puts forth a predictive model. However, it differs from other social theories in that it eliminates a fixed objective, whether specific or abstract, from its model. Humans do not know what to desire, yet they do desire. Consequently, the mimetic model features an extra degree of freedom that greatly expands the set of possible future outcomes and makes it harder to pick which particular outcome will come true. Diminished predictive powers may be seen as a flaw, but only if we ignore the fact that no objectivist theory has ever correctly predicted the future, either.
Ironically, social sciences become scapegoating mechanisms in their very attempt to become rational. Taking up scientific method, they cannot but turn humans into objects. In the very first step of objectification, that of classification, there arises a failure in distributing blame, because within any conceivable category of human beings there will be good and bad individuals. Evil – or deviated desire, to use the technical mimetic term – always seeks disguise; the moment a group is labelled as good, there will be individuals who will seek to join it as moral free riders. Evil always desires the respectable social position. It cannot be disentangled from any worldly category of good, which it pursues and clings onto with all its ferocity. People lie and cheat in order to acquire respectability. The Devil is in hell, but he desires to be in heaven – as he imagines it, of course.
To give an example, in the aftermath of numerous communist revolutions, individuals who were wealthy in traditional capital quickly sunk from respectability to persecution. Yet, capitalist currency was only to be replaced by party influence, which then became subject to the same and worse forces of evil as every form of currency before it. Before the revolution, evil struggled for capital; after the revolution, it went after party influence.
The next common error of progressive theorists has been their irascible habit of assuming that people are after objects. When we think of our own desires, we introduce a degree of detachment between us and them – we desire money, or fame, or knowledge, but only with a degree of disinterest and irony fitting for a master of one’s own emotions. Yet, when we model society at large, we postulate that others desire objects in and of themselves. We make the assumption that people at large are after money in and of itself, or after sexual satisfaction, and so on, and thus we imagine them to be rather like animals stubbornly and instinctively pursuing a fixed objective.
One may here put forth money as an object that people have always desired in and of itself, and not according to others, as mimetic theory would have it. The error here is not understanding that money is not an object in itself, but a measure of accumulated social credit won in a game of mimetic desire. Money and all of the things it can buy hold their value only in the gaze of the other: large homes, nice clothes, expensive accessories are things that most people can relate to, can’t have, and therefore envy.
Another notable example is the pursuit of high social positions, such as degrees from elite universities. Again, the value of these degrees is precisely in their exclusivity – it is an entirely mimetic value. It is impossible to solve the problem by giving everyone a degree from Harvard, because that would destroy all of its special value.
The progressive idea that humans are after objects can lead, in extreme cases, to rejection of shame as a legitimate social regulator. Since it is in the human nature to desire, and desire is ultimately about the object, then the only problem is that there are not enough objects. Human society becomes a carnal competition, and shame merely a power play by the privileged to curve the natural instincts of the disadvantaged. Morals become an opium for the masses, numbing them to their natural desires and replacing them with cheap moral fulfilment.
Comparison of religion to opium is apt from a certain perspective because religion does take away worldly appetites. What Marxist critics failed to see, whether due to their blindness or due to ineffectiveness of the religions they observed (not all religion is great), is that once this appetite is destroyed, the person can be liberated from greed that communism itself tried unsuccessfully to cure through multiplication or equal redistribution of objects. The effectiveness of religiosity in alleviating poverty is an empirical fact, well-documented even by most secular sources. A study in Nature magazine, for example, states that “under impoverished conditions, the difference in well-being between religious and non-religious people is evident.” [6]
As desire is mimetic, shame is legitimate, because it forces us to realise that unbridled desire inevitably leads to conflict with others. Yet, more radical progressives can see shame as a tool of oppression. They may advocate a more intense pursuit of desire as a way to liberation. This was the case during the cultural revolution of the sixties. It also the case in today’s post-capitalist world, multiplication of objects has plateaued, [7] not least due to environmentalist concerns, leaving marketers to fight for a stagnant pie of consumer spending by ever more widespread and sophisticated stimulation of desire.
Social media has brought mimetic fetishising to a fever pitch never before seen in recorded history, it is terrifying to think of all the demons this is going to unleash on the coming generations. We can already see that the combination of inflammation of desires and stagnant of development has led to increasing inequality. There may arise braking mechanisms, however. The most basic one is simply desensitising. A backlash to the widespread availability of pornography and promiscuity on the internet has been a plentifully documented drop in sexual interest, sex-drive, and curiosly, sperm count. [8][9] We often talk about sexually repressed past when we read about severe sexual mores of the past, and we may imagine not only sexually repression but also attenuation, but given the evidence of the last half-century, the correlation may be the opposite.
Poverty cannot be cured by redistribution of wealth alone. Poverty is caused by permanent frustration of desire and perpetuated by the resultant psychological damage. Yet, things that are widely available thereby cease to be desired, and are replaced by some, or by any other rarity. By that logic, only if we – in some wild and yet untried scenario – were to give to the poor so much that we make ourselves poor could we make them not poor anymore, but then we would make ourselves poor, and the problem of poverty would not be solved.
Poverty can be eliminated only with the healing of sadomasochism and the ravages it caused in individual lives. All concrete initiatives of charity, wealth distribution, or anti-exploitation must be guided by that fundamental goal. The poor live in a demonic world in which all imitation leads to humiliation and violence, and as imitation is inevitable, the only options are whether one will be on the giving or receiving end of it. Preaching good behaviour from a merely rational perspective looks like an invitation to become a victim, merely another deception.
The mimetic solution to poverty is not merely algorithmic; it requires what can well be described as an exorcism. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of The World, Girard describes Satan is “the mimetic model and obstacle par excellence”. To eliminate poverty is to eliminate the humiliation of poverty, and this humiliation cannot end until the sufferer is freed form the negative mimetic desire that has turned him into a sadomasochist. The demonic Other that causes nothing but failure must be somehow expelled from the psyche. Yet, a plain admonition to not imitate others doesn’t work – nobody can be reasoned into abandoning their desires. The victim of the demonic possession, like the rest of us, cannot cease being mimetic.
The demonic mediator of desire must be replaced by another mediator, one who the victim can be persuaded will not lead him down the path of violence and destruction. In the developed and secular West, we often hear about the need for positive role models. Fair enough, but such role models can always disappoint; one might always detect some human fallibility in them, some self-interest or hypocrisy. And even this is being optimistic, for often human role models do nothing but inflame desires and polarise them for hidden agendas – they are often nothing but avatars of propaganda and of an endless variety of exploitation. An alternative and fail-safe role model is God of the Bible. Unlike demonic or merely human role models, He is a mediator of desire who promises the greatest possible transcendence without any possibility of rivalry.
Filiality with God bestows believers with self-respect, which guards them against mimetic contagion. Once one is exorcised of the demons that humiliated him and tormented him through mimetic enticement, one can begin to feel a sense of gratitude for whatever possessions one has. Underprivileged individuals or whole social classes who are able to overcome humiliation often produce an especially powerful forms of dignity and express it through music and other arts. Whole of society will often imitate and romanticise what they call grit, that dignity unique to the underprivileged. People love an underdog.
Read more in the book Catharses.
[2] See Chapter VIII, Masochism and Sadism, in Deceit, Desire and the Novel by René Girard.
[3] Alfred Adler, who coined the terms inferiority complex and superiority complex, argued that the two are sides of the same coin; according to Wikipedia his argument is that “a superiority complex is a defense mechanism that develops over time to help a person cope with painful feelings of inferiority”
[4] https://www.shepherdconsortium.org/how-poverty-perpetuates-domestic-violence/
[5] as in: Sayler, Michael D. Humiliation and the Poor: A Study of the Management of Meaning. Fielding Graduate Institute, 2004.
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0272-3
[7] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/the-global-decline-of-manufacturing
[8] https://ifstudies.org/blog/fewer-american-high-schoolers-having-sex-than-ever-before
[9] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sperm-count-dropping-in-western-world/