The Crisis? It's the Fault of the Poor

The other day, in the midst of the global financial crisis, I switched on the television early in the morning to see how the markets were going in Asia and Europe. I came across a debate on an American network, which had the incredible title: “Could the poor be responsible for the crisis?” For several minutes I remained incredulous, listening to the opinions of the well-dressed and well-groomed men and women who were arguing seriously, without a shadow of irony, about the extent to which the poor are guilty of ruining the economy, with all the social assistance and facilities they require. Basically, this was the conclusion: The poor must assume their responsibilities, and it would be better if they also carried the burden of the crisis, without getting carried away with unreasonable demands on society.

At that point I understood everything: A beam of light shot out from my television, blinding like a phosphorous bomb, and finally it enlightened me. But of course the crisis is the fault of the poor! If there were no poor people, would there even be a crisis? Of course not! Are the rich ever in crisis? Not a chance! If there were no poor people, there would be no need for health care and public schools, no sense in spending money on social security, we would not waste money paying the police who patrol the ghettos, unions would melt like snow under the sun, and even public libraries could close their doors. If there were no poor people, we would have no need to keep society on its feet, and no duty to even be civil. Finally we would be what we have always wanted to be: wolves to other men, ferocious beasts with a bank account.

The world would be a truly wonderful place if there were no poor people. Who knows where they come from, anyway? We do not think about it; we do our own thing, and suddenly we discover that they surround us. They live in their quarters, they do not let on, they slip unnoticed through the crowd, they even dress decently to disguise themselves better; you go to the post office and do not even notice that they line up with you. But you are not fooled — sooner or later they throw off the mask and want to send their children to the same school as yours; they make an appointment with your doctor; they even come to the function in your church. They are plenty and well organized; they are worse than how the Jews were once seen, worse than how the gypsies and Africans are seen today. They are zombies — this is what they are — useless to society, dead without knowing it, greedy for your blood, for your house and your car, and to you they pretend that even you are the same: a tramp, starving, who does not listen to reason.

When I say the rich, I should say the middle class, because the really, truly rich, like Scott Fitzgerald writes in The Rich Boy, “are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” Or remember what Tomasi from Lampedusa said in The Leopard about the aristocrats, who live in a world that was not created by God but directly by them. I am not talking about these rich, but about the rich who are only rich compared to the poor. So, what I have learned in these days of crisis is that the poor’s envy of the rich is nothing compared to the rich’s envy of the poor.

I come from a working class family. When I was a child, we often had nothing more than the bare necessities. Other times, when things were going well, when the unions managed to arrange a good contract and there were not too many strikes in sight, we could relax, go on holiday and to the theatre or buy something nice that did not cost too much. Every time we were given some luxury, my mother always said: “Now I understand why the rich don’t let go.” There was no real and true envy, because the difference between us and the rich (or at least this is how we saw it) was a question of quantity, not quality. The enjoyment of riches was precluded by the objective fact of not being rich, but if we had become so, nothing would have stopped us from taking part in that enjoyment.

Once, Hemingway said to Mary Colum: “I am getting to know the rich.” She replied to him: “I think you’ll find the only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.” And an old friend of my father, who had always been without a single coin in his pocket, used to say: “When I become rich I will have a big feast of bread and mackerel,” which was the same dish he ate even as a poor man.

But this is how people once thought, when they had faith in the future. Today things are different. There is a passage of Goethe, in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, in which a company of wandering actors, mediocre and down-at-heel, come to be guests in the palace of a count, under the severe and disapproving gaze of the housekeeper.

So one of the actors dedicates a song to him, in which he, the poor man, admits to being envious of the riches of his host. But he adds that even the host (not so much the count as the housekeeper) is envious of him, because he has no need of material riches to live happily. It could seem like a consolatory banality of the “poor but beautiful” sort, if it did not conceal a profound truth, and that is that the joy of living in poverty is the one jouissance that is unavailable to the rich, because to be able to enjoy it they would have to become poor themselves, and that is out of the question.

There is, therefore, a particular enjoyment which the rich can never experience, as the more possessions they accumulate the further away from it they move, and it is precisely this absence, this impossibility, this black hole in their desire, this small treasure, which is nothing, but which they will never be able to possess, that is what drives them mad with rage. (“What has he got to be so happy about? Doesn’t he see he’s wretched?”)

Now, try to apply this reasoning to the current American situation, in which the greatest fear of the middle class is that those who are poorer enjoy the same benefits (because we are always richer than someone else), and you will understand why, after the election of Obama, the Republican party increased the number of members of the lower-middle class, why the new electoral campaign will be a ruinous race to the right, and why all things public, from health to education to the state, come to be demonized daily. To avoid the risk of living a wretched life, this is the new commandment; the important thing is that the poor should have no enjoyment.