“Poverty,” as J. K. Rowling rightly observes, “entails a thousand petty humiliations and hardships; it is romanticized only by fools.”
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I’ve encountered the myth of the happy poor most amongst elites and intellectuals from South Asia and South America. And I can’t help but suspect that it’s a way of rationalizing the extremes of wealth and poverty in those places.
It brings to mind the way slave owners in the Old South used to go on and on about how happy their Negros were. Or the way that every annoying douchebag from Saudi Arabia goes on and on about how the women are actually running everything.
Two heuristics: (1) The more the guys in a place—usually guys sitting around doing fuck all—tell you that the women really have all the power, the less power the women actually have. (2) The more a country’s elites tell you about how happy their poor folk are, the less happy they actually are. “Poverty,” as J. K. Rowling rightly observes, “entails a thousand petty humiliations and hardships; it is romanticized only by fools.”
—John Faithful Hamer, The Myth of the Fuckbuddy (2016)
Originally Published on CommittingSociology.com
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