You Deserve to Be Poor

What if I told you that your poverty is a punishment?

Not from the economy. Not from the government. Not even from the wealthy, hoarding opportunity behind gates you'll never unlock.

From God.

From morality.

From the universe itself, which knows what you are, which has weighed your worth and found you wanting.

What if I told you that your suffering is just? That you have earned every indignity, every hunger pang, every night spent wondering how you'll make rent. That somewhere in the cosmic ledger, your debts are recorded in red ink, and every hardship is merely interest coming due.

What if I told you that you deserve to be poor?

That's the cruelest lie of all. Not because it's the worst thing you can say to a human being—there are more vicious insults—but because it's the lie that makes all other economic violence possible. It's the foundation myth that allows the comfortable to sleep soundly, the exploited to blame themselves, the whole grinding machine of inequity to operate without protest.

If you believe that poverty is a moral condition—economic original sin—then you can believe anything. You can cut school lunches without guilt. You can step over bodies in the street. You can charge 400% interest on payday loans. After all, you're only giving people the consequences they've earned.

The lie is ancient. It predates capitalism, predates Christianity, predates civilization itself. Wherever humans have gathered, some have more and some have less, and the ones with more have always needed to believe that this arrangement reflects cosmic justice rather than cosmic accident.

Inspector Javert does not believe in redemption.

He is the law made flesh in Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, the stern embodiment of a universe where accounts always balance. For Javert, justice isn't a human invention. It's physics. Gravity doesn't forgive; neither does morality.

When he first encounters Jean Valjean, Javert sees only what the law tells him to see: a criminal. Valjean spent nineteen years in prison for stealing bread to feed his sister's starving children. Upon release, the law requires him to carry a yellow passport marking him as a convict—a scarlet letter, a permanent brand, society's insurance policy against ever again making the mistake of treating him as human.

Javert approves. Thieves steal. That's what they are, what they do, what they will always be. The passport isn't cruel; it's practical. Like putting a muzzle on a rabid dog.

So when Valjean transforms himself—builds an honest business, becomes a generous benefactor, adopts an orphaned girl out of pure love—Javert cannot accept it. This violates the fundamental order. The poor are poor because they are morally defective. The criminal remains criminal. If goodness could emerge from such soil, then what does that say about the soil? What does that say about the system that buried him there?

Javert spends decades hunting Valjean, not because the man is dangerous, but because his existence is intolerable. Valjean represents possibility—the possibility that circumstances, not character, determine fate. That the convict might be better than the inspector. That justice might actually be injustice in uniform.

When Valjean finally saves Javert's life, when the criminal shows mercy to the lawman who would destroy him, the inspector's universe collapses. He writes a careful report recommending reforms to the prison system—his first acknowledgment that the system might be flawed. Then he walks to the Seine and throws himself in.

He cannot live in a world where the poor might not deserve to be poor.

In Saint Petersburg, another man builds his philosophy on similar foundations.

Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Dostoevsky's *Crime and Punishment*, is a former law student living in crushing poverty. His mother pawns her possessions to send him money. His sister plans to marry a man she doesn't love to secure the family's future. Raskolnikov himself survives on thin soup and owes months of back rent for a closet-sized room.

But Raskolnikov doesn't see himself as a victim of circumstance. He sees himself as proof of a theory.

There are two kinds of people in the world, he believes. The ordinary and the extraordinary. The ordinary are "lice"—meant to live quietly, follow rules, reproduce. They exist to be raw material for history. The extraordinary transcend morality. They are Napoleon, Lycurgus, Solon—the men who write the rules rather than follow them.

And if you are extraordinary, if you are destined to reshape the world, then morality doesn't apply to you. You can kill if killing serves a greater purpose. You can take what you need from the ordinary people who wouldn't use it well anyway.

Raskolnikov murders an old pawnbroker who exploits the poor. He tells himself it's a philosophical experiment, a test of his extraordinary nature. Really, it's the logical conclusion of believing that some people matter more than others—that poverty reflects inadequacy, that wealth reflects worth.

The theory destroys him. Not the murder itself, but the thinking behind it. By dividing humanity into the deserving and undeserving, the valuable and expendable, he has hollowed out his own soul. When he finally confesses, it's not from guilt but from exhaustion. The theory that promised to elevate him has only revealed how ordinary he really is.

Dostoevsky shows us the endpoint of meritocratic thinking. If good people prosper and bad people suffer, then prospering people must be good and suffering people must be bad. From there, it's a short step to deciding that the suffering people don't really count. That their pain is just the universe expressing its opinion of their worth.

This is the intellectual architecture of cruelty, dressed up as philosophy.

The oldest version of this lie appears in the Book of Job.

Job is the wealthiest man in the East, the ancient equivalent of a billionaire. He owns seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen. He has ten children, countless servants, holdings across nations. By any measure, he is blessed.

Then, in a single day, he loses everything.

Raiders steal his livestock. Fire consumes his property. A great wind collapses the house where his children are feasting, killing all ten. Finally, he is struck with painful sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. He sits in ashes, scraping his skin with pottery shards, and wonders what he did wrong.

His friends arrive to comfort him. Instead, they torture him with theology.

Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent?" says Eliphaz. "Or where were the righteous cut off?

The logic is perfect, brutal, ancient: God is just. The universe rewards virtue and punishes vice. Therefore, if you are suffering, you must have sinned. The only question is what you did to deserve this.

Job's friends spend chapter after chapter diagnosing his moral failures. He must have oppressed the poor, withheld charity, corrupted justice. His children must have cursed God in their hearts—that's why they were killed. His wealth must have been ill-gotten—that's why it was taken.

They are building the prototype of the prosperity gospel three thousand years before Christianity. If you have much, God loves you. If you have little, examine your conscience. Poverty is always a punishment; wealth is always a reward.

Job refuses to accept this. "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," he says. But he will not confess to crimes he didn't commit, will not accept that his suffering proves his guilt. He knows—*knows*—that he lived righteously. The equation his friends are pushing doesn't balance.

When God finally appears, he doesn't explain Job's suffering. He doesn't reveal some hidden sin. Instead, he questions the very premise: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" The universe is vast, strange, beyond human understanding. Justice and injustice, blessing and curse—these human categories cannot contain the reality of existence.

Job arrives naked, will depart naked. What happens in between—the wealth, the loss, the restoration—is not a moral transaction. It's not earned. It's not deserved. It simply is.

This is the answer that terrifies Javert, that destroys Raskolnikov's theory, that makes Job's friends so desperate to find hidden sin: maybe nobody deserves their fate. Maybe the poor are poor because of circumstance, not character. Maybe the rich are rich because of luck, not virtue.

Maybe the whole story we tell ourselves about deserving is just a story.

I grew up believing I deserved what I got.

When my family had money—briefly, in the boom years—I believed we'd earned it through hard work and smart choices. When we lost it—quickly, in the crash that followed—I believed we'd brought it on ourselves through weakness and poor planning.

The narrative was clean. Comforting. It suggested that if I worked hard enough, made smart enough choices, built thick enough walls against weakness and poor planning, I could control my fate.

It took me years to see the lie embedded in that comfort. Because if I deserved my struggles, then everyone deserved theirs. The homeless man outside the grocery store deserved his cardboard sign. The single mother choosing between rent and groceries deserved that choice. The family bankrupted by medical bills deserved their bankruptcy.

I was using my own pain to justify the world's cruelty.

The truth is messier, less satisfying, more frightening. Most of what happens to us is accident—the accident of where we're born, to whom, with what genetics, in what economy, under what government, during which historical moment. The accident of a diagnosis, a layoff, a market crash, a war.

Some people work tremendously hard and remain poor. Some people work barely at all and become rich. Some people make terrible choices and prosper anyway. Some people make careful choices and suffer nonetheless.

This isn't moral relativism. Actions have consequences. Choices matter. Character counts. But the connection between virtue and reward, vice and punishment, is much weaker than we pretend. The universe isn't keeping score.

Accepting this doesn't make us powerless. It makes us responsible—not for the outcomes we can't control, but for the kindness we can choose. Not for deserving our fate, but for deciding what to do with it.

The lie serves a purpose, of course. It always has.

If poverty is a moral failing, then wealth is a moral achievement. If the poor deserve their suffering, then the rich deserve their comfort. The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as intended. The comfortable can remain comfortable without guilt. The uncomfortable can blame themselves instead of demanding change.

But the lie is expensive. It costs us compassion—for others, for ourselves. It makes us cruel to the struggling and desperate to prove our own worth. It transforms every setback into evidence of personal failure, every success into proof of moral superiority.

Worse, it makes us brittle. When the inevitable reversals come—and they come for everyone, eventually—we have no framework for understanding them except self-blame. We become our own Inspector Javert, hunting ourselves with the logic that says suffering proves guilt.

There is another way. Job found it, sitting in his ashes, refusing to confess to crimes he didn't commit. He acknowledged the mystery, the uncertainty, the fundamental unknowability of why things happen as they do. He stopped trying to solve the equation and started trying to endure it.

This isn't passive acceptance. It's active humility. It's the recognition that we are all naked, vulnerable, dependent on forces beyond our control. That our wealth or poverty, our health or sickness, our joy or sorrow might say nothing about our character and everything about our luck.

And in that recognition, perhaps, we might find something better than the lie. Something like grace.

The universe doesn't owe you wealth. But it also doesn't owe you poverty. You are neither blessed nor cursed. You are human, dealing with the hand you've been dealt, doing what you can with what you have.

That's not a judgment. That's just a fact.

And facts, unlike lies, you can build on.