The End of Poverty

It was impossible not to feel our hearts burst as we watched the aftermath of last week's earthquake in Haiti.  We looked on with horror as an entire nation of people already on the edge of survival had their lives and their families stripped away from them. We sat helpless and heartbroken—praying, practicing, and breathing for the victims, trying to find a point of silence still enough to contain all this pain.

What we witnessed last week was tragic, and yet tragically inevitable.  Haiti is a nation without building codes and without a modern infrastructure, because Haiti is a nation without an economy.  It is truly maddening to know that there would have been far fewer deaths last week if Haiti hadn't been so morbidly impoverished—it is worth noting that the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco registered a 6.9 on the Richter scale, and killed 63 people.  Last week's earthquake in Haiti registered a 7.0, with a recent estimate of 200,000 casualties.

So what is really responsible for these deaths? Tectonic plates? Or poverty itself?

This is why we are so inspired by Martin Burt, whose Foundation Paraguay is one of the world's most innovative micro-finance organizations, used now in 27 countries and modeled by 50 institutions.  Martin employs an explicitly integral approach to poverty elimination, using 200 different measures for poverty to finally solve poverty in both its interior and exterior dimensions.

Poverty, Martin reminds us, is not only an impoverished standard of material living, but also an insidious misconception about human beingness: that we only are only rich in spirit when we are rich in wealth.  This misconception, prominent among the world’s rich nations, paradoxically exacerbates the suffering of the world’s poor because it encourages partial approaches to poverty, as if merely giving them more “stuff” will cure the poverty of dignity that always and everywhere accompanies the absence of human self-sufficiency.

Some of us had the opportunity to listen to Martin talk with Ken a few months ago, and we were all blown away by his story. It wonderful to see Integral theory being applied in such concrete and practical ways around the world—but more importantly, it was invigorating to see it used in a way that is directly improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. After all, you can spend a lifetime learning all the very best philosophies in the world, but if it doesn't actually help make this world a better place, it's just empty words.

Poverty elimination lies at the core of the integral spiritual impulse. It is impossible to consider yourself truly "spiritual" without caring about the poor, without opening your heart to suffering in all its forms.  It's important to remember that spirituality is more than a 1st-person experience—in order for our lives to be fully lived, we must allow our hearts to break open to the full suffering we are surrounded by, recognizing the basic human dignity reflected in every person's eyes.  But it's not enough to just feel it in the 1st person, or to open ourselves to love in the 2nd person—we must also act in the 3rd person, directly engaging the political, technological, and economic systems that continue to lock so many people into perpetual poverty, supporting the world with our wallets as much as we do our hearts.

Instant Insight

• Real poverty lives within. Poverty is an extremely low standard of material living that can include a lack of clean water, adequate food, shelter, clothing and productive employment. But the term also hides the poverty of developed citizens (you and me): that at its core we hold poverty as a misconception that inner human dignity equates with outer material wealth.

• We find our own dignity in our wealth, which exacerbates suffering for all. Paradoxically, because our own inner dignity is built upon our wealth we are ill equipped to help the world’s poor develop its own dignity. Even at low material living standards we can offer integral support systems that restore human interiors to the equation and foster inner dignity among the material poor. But those in the developed world actually perpetuate the suffering of poverty if we don’t change our own perception that human dignity is not available at all levels of material progress.

• They are us. We assume the material poor cannot help themselves. But they are us: all of us human beings at different levels on the spiral of consciousness, needs, material satisfaction, technological progress etc.

• Our models of reality forget that reality is what counts. Because we only see poverty as an exterior condition, we force-fit the complex reality of poverty to models, like purely economic models, or social system models, to simplify how we respond. Because these models are not integral—they don’t look at consciousness, behavior, culture and social systems as a “wholistic” affair—they insist that reality be reduced to fit what their model can account for. This often does more damage than good.

• Complexity yields results. By looking at poverty through all 4 integral quadrants mentioned above and 50 criteria, we see that there are 200 markers of poverty. Rather than making poverty overwhelming, these 200 factors give us a much more precise way to solve each problem in a precise way. It is only when we try to aggregate problems to a higher level of abstraction in order to simplify the situation do we get wrong solutions: abstractions of problems are actually different than the problem to be solved.