| Being poor is only synonymous with being stupid or inept if you are a materialist pain in the ass Puritan who thinks "hard work" is a virtue.
This is a modern and shekel-grabbing attitude that can only ever even arise from modern economic orders that invert the relationship between aristocracy and labor. In better days, better men were not burdened by work and were thus free to develop their better nature; knights, for example, would have been crappy knights if they had to spend 10 hours a day managing their lands and competing with their neighbor's pay roll deductions from his most recent serf layoff spree. Today, the aristocracy, if you even want to argue we have one, is the aristocracy for the opposite reason, exactly BECAUSE they spend 10 hours a day hunched over their shekels, plotting how to steal more from their neighbors.
Not wanting SUVs and cell phones and fancy lawn-mowers and clothes shithead women wear on TV is not a mark of any vice. Neither is refusing participation in a soulless economic order that demands you waste your life accumulating worthless paper that can buy worthless machines.
"Die! Fall upon your sword. Fall upon your knee.
Die like your Son, nailed to his Tree.
Die by my hand. Die in my heart,
plucked from the Ice;
forever cold." |