Poverty 😌

No matter how hard one may work, if he constantly holds the poverty ideal, the poorhouse thought in his mind, he is driving away from the very thing he is pursuing.

Everywhere we see people trying hard to get on, struggling early and late to better their condition, and yet never expecting, or even hoping to be prosperous. They do not believe they are going to get what they are working for, and they do not.

These are the people who are always saying they "cannot afford" things. They cannot afford to send the boy or girl to school or college this year. They cannot afford the necessary clothes or the needed vacation because of the rainy day, which, like a specter, rises at every feast, on every occasion when they try to get some enjoyment or satisfaction out of the present. They are always postponing things till next year. But this "next year" never comes, and the children never go to the academy or college, and they never take the needed vacation, the travel in their own country, or the long-promised trip abroad. They keep forever postponing the enjoyment of the good things of life until they can "afford it;" and that time never comes for people of this apprehensive habit of mind, because they always want to lay up a little more for the future.

I know several people well along in years who are still pinching themselves not only on the comforts but even on the necessities of life in anticipation of the possible rainy day, for which they are always planning. They make life one long continuous rainy day, and little realize that they often tend to create the need for which they are perpetually saving.

“But where is our supply coming from? How are we going to pay the rent, the mortgage off the home, the farm? Where is the money coming from? What will happen to us if we cannot get it? Where are the children’s clothes coming from? How are we going to get the necessaries of life? Where is our supply coming from? Why can’t I get a job that will enable us to really live?” These are the questions multitudes of people all over the world are asking themselves. They express the acuteness of the suffering from the poverty disease, so apparent in every civilized country.

Nothing else gives human beings so much anxiety, nothing else is such a perpetual irritant as this fear of what is coming in the future, this dread of poverty, of not being able to provide for the necessities and the comforts of those dear to us, the fear of not being able to maintain ourselves and to rear our children in comfort and respectability. It demagnetizes us, drives away the things we want and draws to us those we dread. Job said, “The thing I greatly feared has come upon me”—that which I was afraid of has come to me. People who have an abnormal fear of poverty attract the very condition they dread and are trying to get away from because the mind relates with whatever it dwells on. Our doubts and hatreds and fears; the thing we relate with, we attract.

I asked him about his early training and education. He acknowledged that he had not made much of a preparation for his life work, because, he said, his father also had been a tremendous worker, had always tried hard to better his condition but like himself had never succeeded, and so he had come to the conclusion that success was not in the family, and that it was no use to spend years in preparing for a career, for there was no chance that very much would come to him anyway.

These two are types of people who are constantly heading toward poverty and failure in their minds, and then complaining when they have got what they invited. By the law of mental attraction they could not get anything but poverty and failure. Each had desired success and prosperity but had always expected the opposite. He had slaved and toiled in an aimless sort of way, belittling himself and his talents, with the inner belief that it was all he was good for anyway, and that if success by any chance ever came his way it would be a stroke of luck, and not because it was his due by inherent right.

No man can become prosperous as long as he holds in his mind the picture of limitation, of lack and want. We do not get things in this world which we do not believe we can get. We do not accomplish what we doubt we can do, even though we have the ability to do it.

I knew a boy in college who always felt certain he was going to fail in his examinations, and he did fail invariably. Yet it was due more to his fear, his terror, of failure than to a lack of ability or preparation in his studies. He had formed a habit of expecting failure, of predicting misfortunes, of looking and preparing for them, and so far as I know they have followed him through life.

In every community, in every occupation and profession, there are able, conscientious men and women who try very hard, so far as their actual labor is concerned, to get on in the world, but who don’t expect to get on. It is pitiful to see them toiling day after day, but always facing in the wrong direction. They are working for success in their vocations, working for a competence for themselves and their families, but all the time expecting failure, anticipating poverty, and living in an atmosphere of mental penury.

Instead of starting on their active careers with the victorious attitude, with the idea that their careers are to be a triumphal march, many, if not the majority of youths, begin with the impression that they are not victory organized. This is because they have lived in a failure atmosphere, and have absorbed the poverty idea. They have been reared with the fear of failure in their minds, a dread of poverty, a terror of coming to want.

One of the worst things about being very poor is the danger of becoming reconciled to penury, expecting it, holding the conviction that we shall always be poor, that there is no help for it. The habit of thinking we must remain poor because we are so is paralyzing.

Whatever we have accustomed ourselves to for any length of time tends to become a fixed mode of life. Multitudes of people have become so accustomed to their poverty environment, so used to taking it for granted that they are going to remain poor, that they do not take the necessary steps to get away from poverty; and they do not even know that the first step must be a mental one. Instead of this, they are all the time affirming their poverty, getting more and more deeply embedded in the poverty condition by their poverty thoughts and convictions.

The early years of multitudes of children are saturated with the poverty suggestion. They breathe a poverty atmosphere. They hear poverty talk perpetually. They acquire a poverty vocabulary. Their fathers and mothers are always talking poverty, bemoaning their hard conditions, complaining that they were born poor, and must die poor. Children reared in such a mental environment get a sort of poverty habit from which it is very difficult to get away.

The facing toward poverty and despair, heading toward hopelessness and failure, is the worst thing about poverty. The fixity of their conviction that they cannot get away from poverty, their resignation to it, their firm belief that they can never rise into prosperity,—these are the most distressing things about the very poor. There is a tremendous difference between the prospects as well as the mental attitude and the facial expression of a poor boy on a farm who dreams of the day when he can go to college, who pictures himself there, who believes with all his heart that his dream will be realized, and the prospects, the mental attitude and face of another boy similarly situated, who also longs for an education, but has abandoned all hope of ever going to college, or ever getting away from the grinding drudgery and monotony of the farm which he hates.

Most poor people have about the same attitude toward poverty that those who are constantly ailing have toward health. Habitual invalids never expect to be well. They are always anticipating the development of some disease, looking for the symptoms, imagining that they are going to have this or that physical disability or disease. The way to have health is to think it, expect it, visualize it, to realize that health is a positive everlasting fact, and disease is only negation, the absence of health, which is brought about largely by a wrong mental attitude, by self-thought poisoning, by disobeying the laws of health. If we are going to be well, we must think vigorous, robust, cheerful, healthy thoughts, and we must observe the laws of health. We shall have the same degree of health that we give to our mental health model. It is our visualizing of health that brings the expected condition. It is the same with poverty.

Not long ago a poor man told me he would be perfectly satisfied if he could be assured that he would never have to go to the poorhouse, that he would have enough to provide the bare necessities for his little family. He said he never expected to have anything better. He was satisfied that it was not intended for him to have any luxuries. He had always been a poor man, and he always expected to be poor.

Now, this is just the thing that kept this man poor, for he was a hard worker. He always expected to be poor. He did not expect anything better. He merely worked for the bare necessities of life, did not expect anything else, and of course he only just managed to squeeze along, making but bare subsistence. This attitude of the poor toward poverty tends to increase it, to aggravate their disease. So long as one holds the poverty thought he is making himself a poverty magnet, and continually drawing to himself unfortunate conditions.

If you are in the clutches of a poverty so dire that it robs you even of the desire to get away from it, you are cursed with self-thought poisoning. This is what mars and embitters so many lives, driving away happiness, health, and prosperity.

Poverty is usually a disease. It is just as much a disease as is smallpox or tuberculosis. It is just as abnormal to the human being as any disease of the flesh. So is failure. Fear, worry, and anxiety are all mental diseases, from which few human beings seem to escape. But we are gradually finding an antitoxin for the virus of those diseases so fatal to efficiency, health, happiness, and prosperity.

The Bible tells us “The destruction of the poor is their poverty.” Every investigator of slum life in our big cities, every record of the lives of the unfortunate poor in our midst proves that this is an absolute truth.

Extreme poverty is a scourge that draws its victims down from depths to lower depths; that makes life a bitter struggle for the bare crumbs that hold body and soul together. When these are not forthcoming it drives the weak, despairing struggler to crime in order to keep himself from starving, or if he is still too proud to steal, beg, or go to the poorhouse he ends his life, rather than wait for the slow cruel process of starvation to quench it out. Every year poverty claims tens of thousands of innocent victims among the little children who die of disease and neglect in damp, foul cellars where the sun never enters. It sweeps them into mills and factories were robbed of the rights of childhood, they become warped and twisted men and women, full of bitterness, discontent, unrest, and unsatisfied ambitions and longings. It drives multitudes to crime, to insanity, to death. In short, poverty is responsible for more ignorance and crime, more discontent and unhappiness, more suicides and ruined ambitions, and more wrecked hopes and homes than almost anything else. Verily “the destruction of the poor is their poverty.”

The poverty disease, the poverty curse, is not a decree of Providence. It is largely the result of ignorance. Every human being on this earth could be living in comfort if they knew the powers locked up in themselves and were willing to work and make the best use of them. If the poverty antidotes were as generally known as are the poison antidotes there would be no poor people.

Human beings in the aggregate are in much the same position regarding the poverty antitoxin as the medical profession in regard to newly discovered antitoxin for some terrible disease. Physicians do not know how to apply it safely and effectively, and until practice has established its great value its use is limited. When the knowledge and the use of the poverty remedy become general the disease will be conquered.

Is it not reasonable to believe that, having conquered so many of the enemies of the race by intelligent thought and scientific methods, we can conquer them all by similar means? Poverty is a plague, a mental disease which can be conquered by intelligent scientific methods. We know its causes and we can remove them. They are largely mental.