Solutions To Poverty Quotes

When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.

The point is simple: talking about the problems of the world without talking about some accessible solutions is the way to paralysis rather than progress.

Poverty is rooted in broken relationships, so the solution to poverty is rooted in the power of Jesus' death and resurrection to put all things in right relationship again.

Vocabulary words are the building blocks of the internal learning structure. Vocabulary is also the tool to better define a problem, seek more accurate solutions, etc.

The world has never been as divided as it is now, what with religious wars, genocides, a lack of respect for the planet, economic crisis, depression, poverty, with everyone wanting instant solutions to at least some of the world's problems or their own. And things only look bleaker as we head into future.

When the tragedies of others become for us diversions, sad stories with which to enthrall our friends, interesting bits of data to toss out at cocktail parties, a means of presenting a pose of political concern, or whatever…when this happens we commit the gravest of sins, condemn ourselves to ignominy, and consign the world to a dangerous course. We begin to justify our casual overview of pain and suffering by portraying ourselves as do-gooders incapacitated by the inexorable forces of poverty, famine, and war. “What can I do?” we say, “I’m only one person, and these things are beyond my control. I care about the world’s trouble, but there are no solutions.” Yet no matter how accurate this assessment, most of us are relying on it to be true, using it to mask our indulgence, our deep-seated lack of concern, our pathological self-involvement.

My dream—the solution—is that we would have a National Entrepreneur Day, with the following message: Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are at the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you.

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement. Knowledge is a viaticum. Though is a prime necessity; truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reasoning faculty, deprived of knowledge and wisdom, pines away. We should feel the same pity for minds that do not eat as for stomachs. If there be anything sadder than a body perishing for want of bread, it is a mind dying of hunger for lack of light. All progress tends toward the solution. Some day, people will be amazed. As the human race ascends, the deepest layers will naturally emerge from the zone of distress. The effacement of wretchedness will be effected by a simple elevation level.

If we see each problem—be it water shortages, climate change, or poverty—as separate, and approach each separately, the solutions we come up with will be short-term, often opportunistic, “quick fixes” that do nothing to address deeper imbalances.

First known as “waste people,” and later “white trash,” marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children—the sense of uplift on which the American dream is predicated. The American solution to poverty and social backwardness was not what we might expect. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of “loser” people on the larger economy. In

Why, even poverty itself, the one problem that has always seemed to need money for its solution, would promptly disappear if money ceased to exist.

Talking about the problems of the world without talking about some accessible solutions is the way to paralysis rather than progress.

It doesn’t matter how long you live on planet earth, if by the time your whole life has evaporated, you have not solved the problems you were created to solve, then you wasted your life.

Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education is not ‘broken.’ Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it.

Solitude is the greatest treasure and through it, you can rebuild your life, reorder your life and solve life’s problems.

The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

Elite solutions to poverty are always about managing poor people and never about redistributing wealth.

Universal dilemma of the real dog person: You leave the dog home, you worry what will happen to him when you’re out. You take the dog with you, you worry that something will happen to him when he’s alone in the car….The solution, of course, is to keep the dog at your side twenty-four hours a day, every day, but then you worry that your constant presence is making the dog neurotically dependent, and besides, you can’t go anyplace that doesn’t allow dogs, so you can’t go to work or get your hair cut or go to the dentist. And then, of course, you feel guilty because, after all, doesn’t your wonderful dog deserve a better owner than this poverty-stricken, shaggy-headed slob with decayed teeth? Meanwhile, the dog doesn’t worry about anything. Why should he? That’s what he has you for, and for obvious reasons, he trusts you completely.

Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable, the only Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! "There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy their neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.

Where was innovation to come from? We have argued that innovation comes from new people with new ideas, developing new solutions to old problems. In Rome the people doing the producing were slaves and, later, semi-servile coloni with few incentives to innovate, since it was their masters, not they, who stood to benefit from any innovation. As we will see many times in this book, economies based on the repression of labor and systems such as slavery and serfdom are notoriously noninnovative. This is true from the ancient world to the modern era. In the United States, for example, the northern states took part in the Industrial Revolution, not the South. Of course slavery and serfdom created huge wealth for those who owned the slaves and controlled the serfs, but it did not create technological innovation or prosperity for society. N

The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

If achieving world peace and ending poverty were really genuine concerns to the majority, then they would have happened already by now. So, either people are not aware of their collective power, or their fears overpower their desires. The amount of money spent on the military-industrial complex in one year is more than enough to end hunger in Africa. Every problem on earth today has more than one solution. However, priorities are determined by values.

When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I had lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problem was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid. A lifetime of never making positive decisions, accepting instead the lesser of the evils presented to me, had atrophied my will. It was not so much that I longed for death as that I didn't long for life. Emptiness, though, was not a sufficiently definite feeling to lead to a violent act. Instead of sitting in my room and balancing the relative convenience of various ways of ending it all, I ought to have been busy trying to summon up a reasonable amount of despair. Hopelessness was thinly spread like drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in.

The poverty in India is not because of spirituality, but because of not practicing spirituality and not knowing the technique of integrating spirituality with external life. Those leading the country now should become aware of this fact. India suffers because the leaders and people of the country today still do not have a unified vision for uplifting the country as a whole. They do not have an answer to the population problem, nor does there seem to be any immediate solution. I think India is surviving

If you turn to a branch of those sciences that try to give a solution to the questions of life--to physiology, psychology, biology, sociology--there you will find an astounding poverty of thought, a very great lack of clarity, completely unjustified claims to answer questions that lie outside their subject and never-ending contradictions between one thinker and others, and even within himself. If you turn to a branch of the sciences that is not concerned with solving the questions of life but answers its own scientific, specialized questions, then you are captivated by the power of human intellect but you know in advance that there are no answers to the questions of life. These sciences directly ignore the questions of life. They say, "We have no answers to 'What are you?' and 'Why do you live?' and are not concerned with this; but if you need to know the laws of light, of chemical compounds, the laws of the development of organisms, if you need to know the laws of bodies and their forms and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you need to know the laws of your own mind, to all that we have clear, precise, and unquestionable answers.

...the capital city had grown in alarming fashion: cardboard walls, tin roofs, people in rags clearly visible along the road from the airport. Since this made a very bad impression on visitors, for a long time the solution was to put up walls to hide them. As one politician said, 'Where there is poverty, hide it.

The biblical way to help people rise out of poverty is through wealth creation, not wealth redistribution. For lasting results, we must offer the poor a hand up, not merely a handout. You spell long-term poverty reduction “j-o-b-s.” Training and tools liberate people. Trade, not aid, builds the prosperity of nations.

If we reduce human beings to being simply physical—as Western thought is prone to do—our poverty-alleviation efforts will tend to focus on material solutions. But if we remember that humans are spiritual, social, psychological, and physical beings, our poverty-alleviation efforts will be more holistic in their design and execution.

Perfect people always have a solution to a problem, you see. But what do you do when words fail? Truth: sometimes a murderer cannot be found. Truth: sometimes your children are taken and you are left behind. Truth: poverty is a prison. Truth: disease and age come to us all. These are so terrifying, we program them out of the human brain.

The technocratic illusion is that poverty results from a shortage of expertise, whereas poverty is really about a shortage of rights. The emphasis on the problem of expertise makes the problem of rights worse. The technical problems of the poor (and the absence of technical solutions for those problems) are a symptom of poverty, not a cause of poverty. This book argues that the cause of poverty is the absence of political and economic rights, the absence of a free political and economic system that would find the technical solutions to the poor’s problems. The dictator whom the experts expect will accomplish the technical fixes to technical problems is not the solution; he is the problem.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said, “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.

the poverty of human intelligence has plenty to say, for inquiry employs more words than the discovery of the solution;

Hindus believe that mantras or devotional prayers are the solution to cracking life’s toughest karma including disease, poverty, and lack of love.

Poverty is created by barriers; we have to get around or break down those barriers to deliver solutions. But that’s not all. The more I saw our work in the field, the more I realized that delivery needs to shape strategy. The challenge of delivery reveals the causes of poverty. You learn why people are poor. You don’t have to guess what the barriers are. As soon as you try to deliver help, you run into them.

Charity has an embedded message of alleviating the consequences of poverty and not of eradicating it. As the evidence suggested, charity seems to be pervert form of social mechanism that validates contemporary social inequality maintained by neoliberalism policies under the capitalist ideology. It seems problematic that the world’s current ideology i.e. capitalism alienation is the main contributor of contemporary issues with poverty world-wide and the solution presented to this social problem is charity. In addition, charity seems to be the humanitarian side of a system that advocates and promotes exploitation.

In the nearly half-century since then, belief in the promise of education as the universal solution to unemployment and poverty has evolved hardly at all. The machines, however, have changed a great deal. Diminishing

I live in a time of fear and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror. The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse. This is the belief of my time. I do not share it. The numbers of people will rise, the pain of migration will grow, the seas will bark forth storms, the bombs will explode in the markets, and mouths fighting for a place at the table will grow, as will the shouting and shoving. That is a given. Once the given is accepted, fear is pointless. The fear comes from not accepting it, from turning aside one's head, from dreaming in the fort of one's home that such things cannot be. The fear comes from turning inward and seeking personal salvation. The bones must be properly buried, amends must be made. Also, the beasts must be acknowledged. And the weather faced, the winds and rains lashing the face, still, they must be faced. So too, the dry ground screaming for relief. There is an industry peddling solutions, and these solutions insist no one must really change, except perhaps a little, and without pain. This is the source of the fear, this refusal to accept the future that is already here. In the Old Testament, the laws insist we must not drink blood, that the flesh must be properly drained or we will be outcasts from the Lord. They say these rules were necessary for clean living in some earlier time. I swallow the blood, all the bloods. I am that outlaw, the one crossing borders. The earlier time is over.

Anti-capitalist intellectuals, both in Africa and abroad, endlessly repeat a victimhood narrative about Africa being poor due to slavery, colonialism, and ongoing exploitation. Yes, Africa has been victimized. But until and unless these same intellectual forces articulate and endorse the positive capitalist path forward—which will let us leave that past behind—they are part of the problem, not part of the solution. They are the bad guys.

Women in Bolivia are credited with one year of pension contributions per child, up to a maximum of three children. As a side benefit (and a more long-term solution to the problem of feminised poverty), pension credits for the main carer have also been found to encourage men to take on more of the unpaid care load.60 Which raises the question: is women’s unpaid work under valued because we don’t see it – or is it invisible because we don’t value it?

The liberal theory of the causes of crime—that it was born of racism, segregation, oppression, poverty, and disinvestment—painted a picture of the problem that required a set of solutions far above what the local beat cops could provide.

My parents were not entrepreneurs, but their thinking was entrepreneurial. My father told me never to come to him with a problem unless I also had a solution. “It doesn’t have to work,” my father said, “but you must think about solutions.

Jim was sometimes asked what single thing he’d do to end homelessness. On one of those occasions, he cited large population studies about the tight connection between health and educational status. If he had the power, he said, he’d pay public school teachers $200,000 a year and maybe thirty years later homelessness would become a rarity. Maybe what he called “the faucet” would be turned off. More often, he spoke of a more general solution—“What we need is a new war on poverty.

some nations have tried to bring about more economic equality in economically harmful ways, not through opening up free markets but through brute use of government power. Making equality a more important goal than overall economic growth is a mistake for a government, because merely distributing the same amount of wealth in different ways does not change the total amount of wealth a nation produces each year, which is the only way that any nation has grown from poverty to prosperity.

A very distinct pattern has emerged repeatedly when policies favored by the anointed turn out to fail. This pattern typically has four stages: STAGE 1. THE “CRISIS”: Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterized as a “crisis,” even though all human situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely bad or threatening to get worse. Sometimes the situation described as a “crisis” has in fact already been getting better for years. STAGE 2. THE “SOLUTION”: Policies to end the “crisis” are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and “simplistic,” if not dishonest. STAGE 3. THE RESULTS: The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z. STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE: Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as “simplistic” for ignoring the “complexities” involved, as “many factors” went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors. Examples of this pattern are all too abundant. Three will be considered here. The first and most general involves the set of social welfare policies called “the war on poverty” during the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, but continuing under other labels since then. Next is the policy of introducing “sex education” into the public schools, as a means of reducing teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases. The third example will be policies designed to reduce crime by adopting a less punitive approach, being more concerned with preventive social policies beforehand and rehabilitation afterwards, as well as showing more concern with the legal rights of defendants in criminal cases.

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Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The

Why were self-imposed abortions and reluctant acts of infanticide such common occurrences during slavery? Not because Black women had discovered solutions to their predicament, but rather because they were desperate. Abortions and infanticides were acts of desperation, motivated not by the biological birth process but by the oppressive conditions of slavery. Most of these women, no doubt, would have expressed their deepest resentment had someone hailed their abortions as a stepping stone toward freedom. During the early abortion rights campaign it was too frequently assumed that legal abortions provided a viable alternative to the myriad problems posed by poverty. As if having fewer children could create more jobs, higher wages, better schools, etc., etc. This assumption reflected the tendency to blur the distinction between abortion rights and the general advocacy of abortions. The campaign often failed to provide a voice for women who wanted the right to legal abortions while deploring the social conditions that prohibited them from bearing more children.

We tend to seek greatness in our thinking, thus excellence walsk right past those solutions to our most pressing problems, those most relevant and most near. Like a man walking past a beggar, sure in his belief that he has no time. Vicinity of foundations are mighty important.

Giving money to poor people is not a sustainable solution to poverty. So how do you help poor people? Do you instruct, plan and order their lives with expertise and lots of government, or do you get them freedom to exchange and specialise, so that prosperity can evolve? Friedrich

Let us all say together: "We want to build a green economy strong enough to life people out of poverty. We want to create green pathways out of poverty and into great careers for America's children. We want this 'green wave' to life all boats. This country can save the polar bears and poor kids too.

REVIEW: Like a master artisan, Weisberger weaves together threads of anthropology, botany, ecology and psychology in an inspiring tapestry of ideas sure to keep discerning readers warm and hopeful in these cold and desolate times.Unlike other texts, which ordinarily prescribe structural (ie. social, political, economic) solutions to the global crisis of environmental destruction, Rainforest Medicine hones in on the root cause of Western schizophrenia: spiritual poverty, and the resultant alienation of the individual from his environment. This incisive perception is married to a message of hope: that the keys to the door leading to promising new human vistas are held in the humblest of hands; those of the spiritual masters of the Amazon and the traditional cultures from which they hail. By illumining the ancient practices of authentic indigenous Amazonian shamanism, Weisberger supplies us with a manual for conservation of both the rainforest and the soul. And frankly, it could not have arrived at a better time.

the economist John Bell Condliffe, saw what was happening, and warned presciently in 1938: ‘We face a new and more formidable superstition than the world has ever known: the myth of the nation-state, whose priests are as intolerant as those of the Inquisition.’ Condliffe saw autocratic power as the cause of, not the solution to, poverty. Much

To be a victim is to be forever frozen in amber by that person’s actions at that moment. Victimization only looks backward, never forward, which is why my family was incapable of moving on or redefining themselves. If I allowed myself to be defined by what my father did to me, it would put him at the center of my identity. He would have control over me for the rest of my life, even once he was gone. Yes, I was stuck in a box with a monster, but wallowing in indulgent self-pity wasn’t the solution; the task before me was to survive the monster without becoming the monster. In a way, I was lucky that my father was as awful as he was. He had no good qualities to negate. Had he been a better human being, I would have become a worse one.

In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing—they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else. I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

If it once became general, wealth would confer no distraction. It was possible no doubt to imagine a society in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries should be evenly distributed while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice, such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves. And when once they had done this they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past as some thinkers about the beginning of the 20th century dreamed of doing was not a practical solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly by its more advances rivals.

There are vast numbers of people behind bars in the United States—some two and a half million—and imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on. These issues are never seriously addressed. It is only a matter of time before people begin to realize that the prison is a false solution

The Ewells, then, are not bit players in our country’s history. Their history starts in the 1500s, not the 1900s. It derives from British colonial policies dedicated to resettling the poor, decisions that conditioned American notions of class and left a permanent imprint. First known as “waste people,” and later “white trash,” marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children—the sense of uplift on which the American dream is predicated. The American solution to poverty and social backwardness was not what we might expect. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of “loser” people on the larger economy.

If language and child care issues posed problems for otherwise solid candidates, the solution was not to reject those candidates but instead to provide them with help—whether English classes or onsite day care—to pull them through. This is a point I’ll be returning to in future chapters: we’ve seen time and again that mathematical models can sift through data to locate people who are likely to face great challenges, whether from crime, poverty, or education.

Often when people think of social involvement, they think of providing something that will meet people’s needs in some way. We will do something for the poor. We will provide for them food, furniture, help, education, skills, or whatever. These can all be good starting points. But we need to go further. Poverty is about marginalization and powerlessness. And some forms of charitable intervention can leave people marginalized. They can reinforce a sense of powerlessness. Something is done for the poor. They remain passive. They are not becoming contributors to society. They become more dependent on others. So social involvement is more than presenting people with solutions. Good social involvement is helping people to find their own solutions. We want people to be proactive in their lives and to regain their God-given dignity as human beings made to contribute to community life. So at the heart of good social action is the participation of those in

American politics is dominated by an enduring myth—that Democrats are the party of the common man; the voiceless, the powerless, the poor. That if you care about what happens to the least among us, you will cast your vote in the Democratic column. But the reality is this: the vast majority of voiceless, powerless and poor people are concentrated in Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, Atlanta, and America’s other large urban centers. All of them are run by Democrats and have been for 50 to 100 years. On the Democrats’ watch, these cities have become the equivalent of holding cells for the poor and minorities. Everything that’s wrong with America’s cities that can be affected by policy, Democrats are responsible for. There are poor to be helped, but Democrats have buried them deeper in poverty and powerlessness. There are minorities who seek opportunities, but Democrats have kept them second class citizens. Democrats have been the problem rather than the solution.

No one wants to be poor. In my view, and the view of many authors who have focused on poverty and practical solutions to it, we need to move beyond the industrial-era paradigm of giving them fish, or even the information-era paradigm of teaching them how to fish, and instead move closer to the cosmic paradigm of giving them the tools with which to create their own ingenious means of addressing their problems in their cultural context and their time, while drawing--at their convenience, not ours--on our dispersed knowledge.

We see throughout the world extremes of poverty and riches, abundance and at the same time starvation; we have class distinction and racial hatred, the stupidity of nationalism and the appalling cruelty of war. There is exploitation of man by man; religions with their vested interests have become the means of exploitation, also dividing man from man. There is anxiety, confusion, hopelessness, frustration. We see all this. It is part of our daily life. Caught up in the wheel of suffering, if you are at all thoughtful you must have asked yourself how these human problems can be solved. Either you are conscious of the chaotic state of the world, or you are completely asleep, living in a fantastic world, in an illusion. If you are aware, you must be grappling with these problems. In trying to solve them, some turn to experts for their solution, and follow their ideas and theories. Gradually they form themselves into an exclusive body, and thus they come into conflict with other experts and their parties; and the individual merely becomes a tool in the hands of the group or of the expert. Or you try to solve these problems by following a particular system, which, if you carefully examine it, becomes merely another means of exploiting the individual. Or you think that to change all this cruelty and horror there must be a mass movement, a collective action. Now the idea of a mass movement becomes merely a catchword if you, the individual, who are part of the mass, do not understand your true function. True collective action can take place only when you, the individual, who are also the mass, are awake and take the full responsibility for your action without compulsion. Please bear in mind that I am not giving you a system of philosophy which you can follow blindly, but I am trying to awaken the desire for true and intelligent fulfillment, which alone can bring about happy order and peace in the world. There can be fundamental and lasting change in the world, there can be love and intelligent fulfillment, only when you wake up and begin to free yourself from the net of illusions, the many illusions which you have created about yourself through fear.

The modern creed – or worse, the belief that there’s nothing left to believe in – makes us blind to the shortsightedness and injustice that still surround us every day. To give a few examples: Why have we been working harder and harder since the 1980s despite being richer than ever? Why are millions of people still living in poverty when we are more than rich enough to put an end to it once and for all? And why is more than 60% of your income dependent on the country where you just happen to have been born?24 Utopias offer no ready-made answers, let alone solutions. But they do ask the right questions.

We have known for some time that the poor and ignored were the nonvoters, alienated from a political system they felt didn’t care about them, and about which they could do little. Now alienation has spread upward into families above the poverty line. These are white workers, neither rich nor poor, but angry over economic insecurity, unhappy with their work, worried about their neighborhoods, hostile to government—combining elements of racism with elements of class consciousness, contempt for the lower classes along with distrust for the elite, and thus open to solutions from any direction, right or left.

Since the dawn of the twentieth century, we have been told that the federal government has the answers to solve all of society’s problems. We have been promised, by supposedly serious men who have sworn an oath before God and man, that if we just give Washington, D.C., more of our money and more of our personal freedom, the problems of poverty, illiteracy, racism, unemployment, crime, and corruption will all be solved. Today, each and every one of these problems is worse than it has ever been. The federal government and its blood-sucking bureaucracies do not have a solution to the problem, they are the problem.

Social entrepreneurs are among the most dynamic engines of the cooperative movement. Where corporate moguls work for personal enrichment, these civic-minded business leaders work for the cooperative equivalent, which is a desire to generate community self-reliance, abolish poverty, and enhance community economic well-being by improving housing, food, transportation, energy, health, finance, and a host of other products and services. Their motivations are not selfishly financial; they are far deeper, rooted in both the human spirit and the pervasive sense of community that human beings have striven to express throughout history. As the economist Jean Monnet once said, “Without community, there is crisis.

For myself I hold to the opinion that the qualities of the leading statesmen in a state, whatever they be, are reproduced in the character of the constitution itself. As, however, it has been maintained by certain leading statesmen in Athens that the recognised standard of right and wrong is as high at Athens as elsewhere, but that, owing to the pressure of poverty on the masses, a certain measure of injustice in their dealing with the allied states could not be avoided; I set myself to discover whether by any manner of means it were possible for the citizens of Athens to be supported solely from the soil of Attica itself, which was obviously the most equitable solution. For if so, herein lay, as I believed, the antidote at once to their own poverty and to the feeling of suspicion with which they are regarded by the rest of Hellas.

The prevailing discriminatory practices during the sixties, whose targets were working people, women, and people of color, were atrocious. Thus, an enforceable race-based -- and later gender based -- affirmative action policy was the best possible compromise and concession. Progressives should view affirmative action as neither a major solution to poverty nor a sufficient means to equality. We should see it as primarily playing a negative role -- namely, to ensure that discriminatory practices against women and people of color are abated. Given the history of this country, it is a virtual certainty that without affirmative action, racial and sexual discrimination would return with a vengeance. Even if affirmative action fails significantly to reduce black poverty or contributes to the persistence of racist perceptions in the workplace, without affirmative action, black access to America's prosperity would be even more difficult to obtain and racism in the workplace would persist anyway.

Absolute solution comes from absolute problem, ultimate certainty comes from ultimate uncertainty, total acceptance comes from total rejection, complete perfection comes from complete flaw, ample richness comes from ample poverty, foolproof protection comes from unyielding danger and unlimited liberty comes from unlimited restriction. Each one is coincident of another as dark is coincident of light. To such a degree, never try to escape from them.Rather bravely and wisely engage to sort them out . You know, these wonderful stuffs fetch for its tail all wonderful-reverse-stuffs, making your life tested and dignified. Never give up rather wake-up, have a great shower, eat, dress up and join in the struggle. Neither dishearten yourself nor give ears to others' words, just keep faith on you, believe your own intuition and keep the struggle going... I am damn sure, Success, it must lay its head eventually beneath your noble feet as a flunky of order execution and will crown you as the king." Many Cheers from Lord Robin

Thus when people object, as they do, to me and others pointing out that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer—by commenting that wealth is not finite, that statist and globalist solutions and handouts will merely strip the poor of their human dignity and vocation to work, and that all this will encourage the poor toward a sinful envy of the rich, a slothful escapism, and a counterproductive reliance on Caesar rather than God—I want to take such commentators to refugee camps, to villages where children die every day, to towns where most adults have already died of AIDS, and show them people who haven't got the energy to be envious, who aren't slothful because they are using all the energy they've got to wait in line for water and to care for each other, who know perfectly well that they don't need handouts so much as justice. I know, and such people often know in their bones, that wealth isn't a zero-sum game, but reading the collected works of F. A. Hayek in a comfortable chair in North America simply doesn't address the moral questions of the twenty-first century.

There is, however, another avenue of utopian thought, one that is all but forgotten. If the blueprint is a high-resolution photo, then this utopia is just a vague outline. It offers not solutions but guideposts. Instead of forcing us into a straitjacket, it inspires us to change. And it understands that, as Voltaire put it, the perfect is the enemy of the good. As one American philosopher has remarked, “any serious utopian thinker will be made uncomfortable by the very idea of the blueprint.”23 It was in this spirit that the British philosopher Thomas More literally wrote the book on utopia (and coined the term). Rather than a blueprint to be ruthlessly applied, his utopia was, more than anything, an indictment of a grasping aristocracy that demanded ever more luxury as common people lived in extreme poverty. More understood that utopia is dangerous when taken too seriously. “One needs to be able to believe passionately and also be able to see the absurdity of one’s own beliefs and laugh at them,” observes philosopher and leading utopia expert Lyman Tower Sargent. Like humor and satire, utopias throw open the windows of the mind. And that’s vital. As

IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s. For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession. After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.

It's always useful to make lists, ranked by either occurence or severity, single out each, one by one, trace the pathways of each fallen 'domino', and make active efforts to make sure each preceding domino stay upright. It is unfair to smash the last domino, just because we can't clearly see how they fell to begin with. With regards to crime, those who have enough food, acceptable shelter, and ability to acquire basic status and recognition within immediate groups - may be less prone to violence and crime. Though there are other reasons for crime to occur, it is often related [in one way or another] to physical, mental, social or economical wellbeing. Crime is desperation, actions of distress. Violent criminals may not be angels, but reality is, their state of mind very likely gradually became less and less empathic due to their subjective experience of society's inability to recognize the real need for greater stability within certain communities. It may be easier said than done, but small efforts to raise the poverty line, projects and development - showing that society truly cares, may be the only viable solution. Employing good rolemodels [in the right places] may be especially effective. Effort, great, small.

Just as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's statement "Property is theft" is usually misunderstood, so it is easy to misunderstand Benjamin Tucker's claim that individualist anarchism was part of "socialism." Yet before Marxists monopolized the term, socialism was a broad concept, as indeed Marx's critique of the "unscientific" varieties of socialism in the Communist Manifesto indicated. Thus, when Tucker claimed that the individualist anarchism advocated in the pages of Liberty was socialist, he was not engaged in obfuscation or rhetorical bravado. He (and most of his writers and readers) understood socialism to mean a set of theories and demands that proposed to solve the "labor problem" through radical changes in the capitalist economy. Descriptions of the problem varied (e.g., poverty, exploitation, lack of opportunity), as did explanations of its causes (e.g., wage employment, monopolies, lack of access to land or credit), and, consequently, so did the proposed solutions (e.g., abolition of private property, regulation, abolition, or state ownership of monopolies, producer cooperation, etc.). Of course, this led to a variety of strategies as well: forming socialist or labor parties, fomenting revolution, building unions or cooperatives, establishing communes or colonies, etc. This dazzling variety led to considerable public confusion about socialism, and even considerable fuzziness among its advocates and promoters.

What if you can't help but judge life negatively? What if yesterday felt awful, today feels awful, and tomorrow is likely to feel awful too? What if you are poverty stricken, coughing up blood, incarcerated, alone, under siege, helpless, and hopeless? How absurd is it to ask you to make meaning and choose the meanings of your life? Don't you need medicine, money, and a friend more than some hard-nosed philosophy? Aren't you better off with a romantic movie, a pitcher of beer, and a dream of heaven rather than a demanding, soul-searching regimen? Doesn't natural psychology make little or no sense in your circumstances? ... It may be the case that someone who has a hard life is exactly the sort of person who would benefit from a philosophy that respects the hardness of reality and that proposes solutions, especially if that person is smart enough to understand the alternatives. That isn't to say that there won't be days when all of us need meaning to amount to more than this, to something more profound and important, to something that better soothes us and helps us forget that we are bound to suffer and that we will cease to be. The natural psychological view does not controvert the facts of existence, and there will be days—many days—when even the staunchest heart wishes that it could. We boldly stare at the facts of existence—and on some days, each of us will blink. Adherents of natural psychology know that days like that are coming.

But there was a lacuna in Nehru’s concept of science: he saw it exclusively in terms of laboratory science, not field science; physics and molecular biology, not ecology, botany, or agronomy. He understood that India’s farmers were poor in part because they were unproductive—they harvested much less grain per acre than farmers elsewhere in the world. But unlike Borlaug, Nehru and his ministers believed that the poor harvests were due not to lack of technology—artificial fertilizer, irrigated water, and high-yield seeds—but to social factors like inefficient management, misallocation of land, lack of education, rigid application of the caste system, and financial speculation (large property owners were supposedly hoarding their wheat and rice until they could get better prices). This was not crazy: more than one out of five families in rural India owned no land at all, and about two out of five owned less than 2.5 acres, not enough land to feed themselves. Meanwhile, a tiny proportion of absentee landowners controlled huge swathes of terrain. The solution to rural poverty, Nehru therefore believed, was less new technology than new policies: give land from big landowners to ordinary farmers, free the latter from the burdens of caste, and then gather the liberated smallholders into more-efficient, technician-advised cooperatives. This set of ideas had the side benefit of fitting nicely into Nehru’s industrial policy: enacting them would cost next to nothing, reserving more money for building factories.

Economics today creates appetites instead of solutions. The western world swells with obesity while others starve. The rich wander about like gods in their own nightmares. Or go skiing in the desert. You don’t even have to be particularly rich to do that. Those who once were starving now have access to chips, Coca-Cola, trans fats and refined sugars, but they are still disenfranchized. It is said that when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought about western civilization, he answered that yes, it would be a good idea. The bank man’s bonuses and the oligarch’s billions are natural phenomena. Someone has to pull away from the masses – or else we’ll all become poorer. After the crash Icelandic banks lost 100 billion dollars. The country’s GDP had only ever amounted to thirteen billion dollars in total. An island with chronic inflation, a small currency and no natural resources to speak of: fish and warm water. Its economy was a third of Luxembourg’s. Well, they should be grateful they were allowed to take part in the financial party. Just like ugly girls should be grateful. Enjoy, swallow and don’t complain when it’s over. Economists can pull the same explanations from their hats every time. Dream worlds of total social exclusion and endless consumerism grow where they can be left in peace, at a safe distance from the poverty and environmental destruction they spread around themselves. Alternative universes for privileged human life forms. The stock market rises and the stock market falls. Countries devalue and currencies ripple. The market’s movements are monitored minute by minute. Some people always walk in threadbare shoes. And you arrange your preferences to avoid meeting them. It’s no longer possible to see further into the future than one desire at a time. History has ended and individual freedom has taken over. There is no alternative.

As it happens, the term “white skin privilege” was first popularized in the 1970s by the SDS radicals of “Weatherman,” who were carrying on a terrorist war against “Amerikkka,” a spelling designed to stigmatize the United States as a nation of Klansmen. Led by presidential friends, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather terrorists called on other whites to renounce their privilege and join a global race war already in progress. Although their methods and style kept the Weather radicals on the political fringe, their views on race reflected those held by the broad ranks of the political left. In the following years, the concept of “white skin privilege” continued to spread until it became an article of faith among all progressives, a concept that accounted for everything that was racially wrong in America beginning with its constitutional founding. As Pax Christi USA, a Catholic organization, explained: “Law in the U.S. protects white skin privilege because white male landowners created the laws to protect their rights, their culture and their wealth.” This is the theme of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the most popular book ever written on the subject, and of university curricula across the nation. Eventually, the concept of white skin privilege was embraced even by liberals who had initially resisted it as slander against a nation that had just concluded a historically unprecedented civil rights revolution. This was because the concept of white skin privilege provided an explanation for the fact that the recent Civil Rights Acts had not led to an equality of results, and that racial disparities persisted even as overt racists and institutional barriers were vanishing from public life. The inconvenient triumph of American tolerance presented an existential problem for civil rights activists, whom it threatened to put out of work. “White skin privilege” offered a solution. As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained: “white skin privilege is not something that white people necessarily do, create or enjoy on purpose,” but is rather an unavoidable consequence of the “transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society.” In other words, even if white Americans were no longer racists, they were.

Just before the world ended, people hated the word moist. Poverty was still a problem. Terrorism was a big issue at the time. Genocide was always happening somewhere. But you had to be careful when using the word moist. It was acceptable if you were describing cake, but if you used it in any other sense you were sure to get a talking to. Most people didn’t know a terrorist personally. If we had, then maybe more of us would have told them off with stern words and clever slogans. You couldn’t yell at poor people at all. It wasn’t acceptable. You couldn’t even wonder out loud why they were poor without being an insensitive ass. You couldn’t even suggest a new solution to the problem without being labeled horrible things. Perhaps it was this lack of outlet that caused so much frustration regarding the word moist. We couldn’t do anything about international terror or rampant poverty, but we could always chastise a friend for using a word that made them uncomfortable. Maybe this is why so much effort was put into hating the word. They scorned their friends whenever it was used and followed the scorning with a two-minute rant about how much they hated the word. They spent time and creative resources developing flowcharts for when the word was appropriate and clever cartoons to express just how much it annoyed them when it was used outside of cake references. They shared all of this on social media and built a wall of criticism that kept people in check. We could shut out what we didn’t want to hear. We felt free to berate anyone who thought different than us. By doing this, we fought the good fight. We were activists despite our inactivity. Moist was a line drawn in the sand and we stood behind our walls daring anyone to cross it. It may seem silly now. It may seem that our outrage was misdirected, but it made us feel safe. We stood behind our walls fighting our own battles against the things that offended us most. Times were good as long as the real problems were well outside our walls.

The police are no solution, but they are, as it were, the final solution. It matters what you see as the problems in need of solving. Is it the people or the conditions? Is it blackness or anti-blackness? Is it poverty or the poor?

We are connected, members of a shared nation and a shared economy, where the advantages of the rich often come at the expense of the poor. But that arrangement is not inevitable or permanent. It was made by human hands and can be unmade by them. We can fashion a new society, starting with our own lives. Where we decide to work and live, what we buy, how we vote, and where we put our energies as citizens all have consequences for poor families. Becoming a poverty abolitionist, then, entails conducting an audit of our lives, personalizing poverty by examining all the ways we are connected to the problem—and to the solution.

Sometimes the exacerbating factor is so acute that it can render the direct solution nearly useless—but solving the exacerbating factor is always inadequate in the absence of the direct solution.

A is not the same after I’ve chosen B—after I’ve chosen B, A is measured by the standards which made me choose B. In other words, the reasons we make a choice do not preexist our choice: we only know the reasons why we chose A (or B) once we made the choice. Let’s take a decision in fighting the pandemic when we confront a choice between A and B: A prioritizes the economy, B prioritizes health. Advocates of A claim that, if we choose B, we may first save some lives but, in the long term, the costs to the economy will generate more poverty and even more health problems. (The problem with this reasoning is that it automatically assumes that the same economic system will persist.) Advocates of B claim that, if we choose A, not only there will be more suffering and more deaths, but due to the prolonged health crisis, even the economy will suffer more in the long term. There is no neutral way to compare the two options, so, maybe, after making a choice (say, of B), the solution is to look at B itself from the imagined standpoint of A—in our case, how prioritizing health appears from the standpoint of economy. This brings us to the true problem: since, obviously, the existing economic system cannot stomach such prioritizing of health, how should we change our economic life so that we can avoid the debilitating dilemma “lives or economy”? And the same goes for sexual difference: for a man it is not enough just to take women’s side—he should ask himself: how do I choose to be a man so that, as a man, I can avoid oppressing women?

There are vast numbers of people behind bars in the United States—some two and a half million—and imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on. These issues are never seriously addressed. It is only a matter of time before people begin to realize that the prison is a false solution. Abolitionist advocacy can and should occur in relation to demands for quality education, for antiracist job strategies, for free health care, and within other progressive movements. It can help promote an anticapitalist critique and movements toward socialism.

These remarks reflect the expansive reach of the discourse on law and order, which since the 1970s tended to conflate "crime" with civil rights protests in the South and with the widespread turmoil generated by racism in the North. The moral panic produced by this discourse increasingly meant that the "law and order" slogan served as a proxy for more explicit calls to suppress Black movements and ultimately also to criminalize indiscriminately broad swaths of the Black population. By 1994, the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, produced by global economic shifts, was having a deleterious impact on working-class Black communities. The massive loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector, especially in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, had the result, according to Joe William Trotter, that "the black urban working class nearly disappeared by the early 1990s." Combined with the disestablishment of welfare state benefits, these economic shifts caused vast numbers of Black people to seek other—sometimes "illegal"—means of survival. It is not accidental that the full force of the crack epidemic was felt during the 1980s and early '90s. During this period there were few signs of governmental effort to address the circumstances responsible for the rapid impoverishment of working-class Black communities, and the 1994 Crime Bill was emblematic of the turn to carceral "solutions" as a response to the impact of forces of global capitalism. As Cedric Robinson has pointed out, capitalism has always been racial capitalism, and the Crime Bill was a formidable indication that Republicans and Democrats in Washington were united in their acceptance of punitive strategies to stave off the effects of Black impoverishment.

The persistence and brutality of American poverty can be disheartening, leaving us cynical about solutions.

It is so sad, that poor people are not fighting for solutions , but are fighting the opposition. Every time you try to point them the problem and a solution. They ignore you and chose to ask you on which side are you on . Not knowing that we should be divided to be conquered by the enemy.

Poverty is rooted in broken relationships, so the solution to poverty is rooted in the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection to put all things into right relationship again.

It is so sad that Africans, we only unite to do bad things. To break the law. To loot. To destroy someone's life or to bring others down. We never unite to fight our oppressors. We never unite to bring solutions. We never unite to support each others business and we never unite to eradicate poverty or problems we have in our society.

War, takes people's minds off thinking about poverty, famine, greed, heartache, egotistical societies, wealth and much more. Yes, war is the solution to all of man's problems and the answer for those who profit from it.

Superheroes are like...a Band-Aid, right? Slapped over symptoms of a way bigger problem. But they don't heal the symptoms. Just hide 'em.' Whether it's Superemacy or poverty and drugs and everything else Jav blogs about, it can't be fixed by beating people up in the street. Wild that anyone thinks that's a solution. 'Lyss, you wanna be a real hero, then forget all that crime-fighting bull. Stay here, help folks who really need it. Plenty of them around Bridgebrook. Do—I dunno, social work and soup kitchens. It's not as glam, but it does way more good.

People turn shit into sugar all the time—shit that’s a lot worse than whatever we’re dealing with. We’re talking physical disabilities, racial discrimination, battles against overwhelmingly superior armies. But those people didn’t quit. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves. They didn’t delude themselves with fantasies about easy solutions. They focused on the one thing that mattered: applying themselves with gusto and creativity. Born with nothing, into poverty, strife, or the chaos of decades past, certain types of people were freed from modern notions of fairness or good or bad. Because none of it applied to them. What was in front of them was all they knew—all they had. And instead of complaining, they worked with it. They made the best of it. Because they had to, because they didn’t have a choice.

There are vast numbers of people behind bars in the United States—some two and a half million—and imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on. These issues are never seriously addressed. It is only a matter of time before people begin to realize that the prison is a false solution.

The solution to poverty is not the pocket but a life lived for a God-given purpose. Purpose begets happiness, abundance, fulfilment, and a great sense of self-worth.

The solution to poverty is not the pocket but a life lived for a God-given purpose. Purpose begets happiness, abundance, fulfilment, and a great sense of self-worth.

Your potential to create wealth is found between your education on how to make money, and your willingness to live in poverty. By education on how to make money, I am referring here to the many skills you need to acquire for a job, in communication, but also organizational and ethical skills. By willingness to live in poverty, I am referring here to the sacrifices you are willing to make. You see, people fear poverty as if they could avoid it, but the one who escapes it faster, is the one who embraces it better. This means spending as less as possible in your habits, not worrying about what others think of you, and committing yourself to become a servant, even a slave, to your higher self. The reason why so many people struggle to accumulate wealth, is because they are avoiding both of these things just mentioned. They don't want to work, for themselves or others, they aren't willing to make sacrifices, they care a lot about what others think of them, they don't want to save any money, they spend without any sense of responsibility, and they also have no interest in investing on their education, either through formal means or by reading books. Most people don't read, they are waiting for the world to offer them the solutions they want, and the trust luck and shortcuts more than they trust their own capacity to achieve things with their own efforts. That's why they can't get to where they want in life. What I just said, can be applied to any other area of life. Even a good marriage requires education on how to make it work and sacrifices to make it work, and just as much as a dog will require you to sacrifice your time and learn better ways of communicating with him. Your own existence depends on a balance of an education on opportunities and a commitment to find them. So what is the most imbecile thing anyone can tell you? The most dumb persons you will ever find, are those who tell you the exact opposite of what I just said, and in doing so, separate everything in different categories. They will say that happiness doesn't require wealth, or that wealthy individuals are miserable. They will say that love requires luck, or that education isn't necessary to become successful. And you have quite a bunch of idiots in this world, marketing their foolish views on others, as if they were absolute truth. You tend to buy into such views with the love and attachment you feel for them. Thus, be wary of the merchants of incompetence. They will try to sell you the most stupid ideas about life. And if you trust them, you will fail, and keep on failing, until you realize you trusted the wrong people. If you think education is expensive, know that stupidity is a lot more. It can cost you an entire existence in the dark. The path to enlightenment is a path of integration, while the distance is measured in segregations. Stupidity is found in the relativity of everything. The dumber one is, the more he or she will think in terms of differentiations. The wiser one is, the more he or she will focus on the similarities and correlations, because enlightenment is found in an upward route towards oneness.

Humanitarian Arithmetic (Sonnet 1354) If it takes $300bn to end world hunger, and 7 trillion to fund the next AI wonder, how many people have to starve to death, to feed the appetite of the cyberworld? If Britain's NHS costs about $200bn, and US military costs 800 billion dollars, how many have to suffer from sickness, for the tribal chiefs to feel secure? If it takes $20bn to end homelessness in the US, and trillions to colonize Mars, how many have to sleep in cardboard boxes, for heirs of billionaires to breed on Mars? You don't need to be a Ramanujan or Euler, to solve this simple arithmetic equation. But you do need a living human heart, to take responsibility for the solution.

Finally, a word about blockchain technologies and bitcoin:  first, there have been initiatives to use blockchain to document land titles.  Without claiming that it is a magical solution, transparent public ledgers that cannot be altered without a record of such alteration is certainly a solution worth exploring in nations with notoriously bad recordkeeping systems and pervasive corruption. Second, bitcoin is invaluable in nations with significant inflation and currency controls that prevent citizens from bringing capital in or out. In order for entrepreneurs to create prosperity in Africa, they need the freedom to deploy their choice of currency and to move capital freely. In many African nations, there are sharp restrictions on capital flows. But businesses often need to shift capital from one use to another quickly and frictionlessly.Many in the West have come to associate bitcoin with speculation, especially after the spectacular collapse of crypto exchange FTX. They are unaware of what it is like to live in a nation with weak financial institutions and, in many cases, chronically high inflation rates. Bitcoin is also a path to liberation from the CFA, a French-controlled currency that is currently used by fifteen nations and 180 million-plus people.

In a world where change is constant and uninterrupted, believing that the centralized planning of scientists, politicians and state bureaucrats is more efficient than the spontaneous order of human cooperation, in the search for solutions to disease, climate change and the end of poverty, is so intensely naive that even the purity of a child will seem wiser.

9. Service to the Poor. Here at SoulBoom, we don’t like the word “charity.” It implies the worst kind of service to the needy—pity for “those poor, poor people” who don’t have stuff, so we patronizingly hand out sandwiches and juice boxes and knapsacks to the “have-nots” and do nothing to change the imbalanced, unjust systems that led to this poverty mess in the first place. Nothing against soup kitchens, but foundationally, the solutions to poverty must go beyond a meal and temporary housing. Therefore, our new faith will ask all its followers to work in substantive ways to prioritize and empower the disenfranchised—providing mental health services, access to addiction services, community centers, job skills, education, and opportunity. And yes, juice boxes and sandwiches when appropriate.