Poverty-Punishing
Poverty-Punishing is the common sociological act of either directly attacking the poor, justifying poverty through false explanations (like the Just-World Fallacy or False Mental Health Eugenic Arguments), and more often offering social suggestions for eliminating poverty by making poverty even more uncomfortable and harmful to “motivate” the poor.
Meta studies routinely suggest that the majority of the poor are not lazy, severely mentally ill (15% max, which is lower than the general non-homeless/impoverished societal population diagnosis of 33% per the World Health Organization, NCBI, etc) nor comfortable with their situation, and in fact poverty appears to exists as the result of a myriad of factors related to childhood and young-adult social mobility (usually through adult/authority interference at home and school), ease of access to sustainable work, housing, education and healthcare.
The idea of punishing the poor relates to the early common belief that supernatural forces or socially-constructed/natural forces are inclined to reward the good and punish the bad, when in reality, both in a historical sense and logical sense destructive people are often rewarded and innocent, honest, hardworking, normative people often find themselves in harms way, difficult situations, or the target of groups and individuals.
This blaming seems to have been a method for early people to justify and make sense of the world around them, often in the same sort of way that many people applied magical thinking and confirmation bias to their personal psychology; as a way mediate anxiety in relation to the dangers in one’s environment (by externalizing blame or blaming victims) and to double the impression of rewarding circumstances.
Suspicion and conjecture are often tied to known logical fallacies and cognitive biases to reinforce this false Just-World belief system, and as a result the number of obstructions a person of lower social classification faces increase exponentially (Snowball Theory).
Also weaved into this matrix are false patronizing narratives that blame targets or obstructed individuals in ways that seek to limit their humanity in order to justify their situation in ways the draw pity from other less-conflicting/”more acceptable” social circumstances; that victims are lesser in some way or have deficits in order to avoid entering into conflict with society and the groups and individuals involved in obstructing, neglecting or targeting individuals. It is easier to sympathize without conflict than it is to empathize and engage in potential conflict with power structures and one’s own apathy and inertia.
There’s so much more that I could cover on this subject, but in honestly at this moment I feel that I’ve said enough at this point.
I may follow up on this in the next few weeks.
