El Gringo wrote:
I have to disagree a little with this generalization gringo. Poverty by itself does not cause these kinds of problems. I think poverty in the midst of wealth may. Its when you have a mixture of well-to-do and not-well-to-do that you have problems. Both from exploitation and greed/resentment. If you look at societies where you have only poverty, you see very little of these kind of problems, especially crime.Society decays for any number of reasons. Poverty is the worst. I think perhaps, nudity in society is not a cause but an effect of other problems. Julius Ceasar said that "Poverty is the mother of all crime." Poverty fosters immorality. Decay stems from poverty not from nudity. To think that society will be destroyed because of nudity, is absurd, narrow-minded, even ignorant.
-el gringo
Of course this is not always true either. I have personally visited a town in Mexico that I would say is as poor as anything I have ever seen, yet the people were very content, despite their lack of comforts/wealth. They were'nt starving or anything, but they had no running water, no electricity, no toilets, no phone, no access to medicine/medical care, were extremely remote, had no real protection from the elements aside from a simple mud hut, yet I have never seen a place where people respected each other as much. There was ABSOLUTELY no crime. It was unthinkable, there was no cultural precedent for this nor did it come up in people's minds of how to gain from taking advantage of others. What you had was a neighbor helping neighbor mindset that prevented people from falling through the net. Government was non-existent (thank goodness), with very little communication with the outside world.
Its been quite a few years since I've been there, but I had seen something similar in another town, and it fell apart when their wealth increased due to government intervention, roads, electricity, running water, etc. In that example, all of a sudden a new generation was brought up exposed to more wealth and the knowledge of even more wealth in the big cities and the cultural resistance to crime slowly decayed.
So its more complicated than just poverty, there are other elements in the mix that make people in those circumstances react in immoral/unethical ways.
rg
