Wealth, Poverty, Analogies for Life

Making Light has another fruitful thread, here, about perceptions of wealth among the rich. There's piles of good stuff in there (and a few of the inevitable conflicts-from-misunderstanding that always arise) – I remember one that struck me, from someone named Greg London (posted here at July 23, 2006, 01:23 AM):

I worked hard in college and grad school, but I didn’t earn the talent that made it possible to succeed—I was born with the potential.

"earn" is the flip side of "deserve" and whether or not someone thinks they "deserve" something, has, in my experience, had zip to do with reality, and everything to do with some missing piece of self-worth or self-esteem.

When you sit down to play a hand of poker with someone, you both agree that you're going to get dealt a random hand of cards, and start the game from there. Whether you "deserve" the hand you get or not generally doesn't enter a poker player's mind. At least not ahead of time. It's a weird combination of post-analysis and a person's ability to attach "value" to some randomly generated sequence of events that were completely out of their control and have it mean something about themselves that makes for the human drama called "deserve it".

Life is a weird game. You didn't even agree to play it. Someone just set you down at the table and dealt you a hand. The hand you got says nothing about you as a human being, your value, your deservedness, nothing. What does say something about you as a human being is how you play the hand dealt to you. Do you play the best you can with what you've got, or do you discard some cards and throw away a perfectly good hand? That's all you can control.

There's a scene from Good Will Hunting that cut through a lot of this. Two buddies grew up in a working class neighborhood. They're working in blue collar jobs. One guy has the IQ of a genius and knows it, but won't go to college for a number of reasons, one of which is because he feels he doesn't deserve his talent. His buddy has a talk with him at one point and says soemthing to the effect of: it's your job to make the best of what you've got. Until you do, you're squandering it on yourself, and you're insulting us.

(I have seen Good Will Hunting – that scene Mr. London speaks of is one of the best in the movie.)

(Also, I am reminded of one of the Odo quotes from Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Dispossessed", about deserving, and how pernicious the idea of it is.)