One of my discoveries since the start of lockdown is that some people who talk about poverty and about the people at the bottom of the economic pyramid actually do not have the faintest idea of the realities, the social dynamics and lived experiences of people in these circumstances.
They know the statistics of poverty but don’t know the “smell of poverty”. Flaunting averages and charts, which in some cases have been choked to confess to an alternative reality, they forget, as the late Hans Rosling once put it to a Danish reporter, that “these are people, not numbers you are talking about”
They possess an outsider “etic” view and not an insider “emic” view of the situation.
To have the power to make decisions for these people based on an “outsider” view is extremely dangerous.
Context is crucial and without i, we fly blind through the maze of the difficulties our people face. That maze is multi-layered and multi-sided on a plethora of levels. It is, as Donald Schön so aptly described “… swampy lowlands, … situations which are confusing messes incapable of technical solution and usually involve problems of greatest human complexity”
We risk deep and dangerous repercussions if the shallow solutions for complex difficulties are embraced without humane checks and balances.
