Are poor people responsible for their condemnation, personal torment, and poverty?
The lower classes are made into the image of Sisyphus as punishment for their social impurities in the face of accepted standardized ideal systems.
They are forced to give themselves over to a life of purposeless work as punishment for the rest of their lives in order to merely subsist by working at the yoke of others.
Society can maim and kill.
Indeed it is in the its power over life and death that it manifests its ultimate control over the individual.
Society determines the manner in which the human organism is used in activity; expressivity, gait and gesture.
Social existence depends upon the continuing subjugation of biologically grounded resistance in the individual, which entails legitimation as well as institutionalization.
The individual continues to expirience himself as an organism, apart from and sometimes set against the socially derived objectifications of himself.
The state sees individuals as obsolete when they can no longer find luxory in their existence. They are seen as worthless anachronisms.
The state has everything indexed, categorized, and tagged with all deviants outside of the idealistic code reduced to confining enslavement.
Subjective appropiation of identity and subjective appropiation of the social world are merely different aspects of the same process of internalization, mediated by the same significant others who have control over individuals througout their lives.
The lower classes are seen to have no applicable function beyond servitude and consumerism.
Definitions of reality that are subjective become enforced by the police.
Society is an ongoing dialectical process composed of externalization, objectivation, and internalization.
To be in society is to participate in its dialectic.
The individual is not born a member of society. He is born with a predisposition toward sociality, and he becomes a member of society.
Every individual is born into an objective social structure within which he encounters the significant others who are in charge of his socialization.
These significant others are imposed on him.
Their definitions of his situation are posited for him as objective reality.
The significant others who mediate this world to him modify it in the course of mediating it.
They select aspects of it in accordance with their own location in the social structure and also by virtue of their individual, biographically rooted idiosyncrasies.
Roles are forced upon people in state societies often by coercion or violent force if one doesn't get the opportunity to "choose" their lifestyle.
Institutions are there, external to people, persistent in their reality, whether they like it or not, they cannot wish them away.
They resist their attempts to change or evade them.
They have coercive power over people, both in themselves, by the sheer force of their facticity, and through the control mechanisms that are usually attached to the most important of them.
The objective realities of institutions is not diminished if the individual does not understand their purpose or their mode of operation.
People may expirience large sectors of the social world as incomprehensible, perhaps oppressive in their opaqueness, but real nonetheless.
Since institutions exist as external reality, the individual cannot understand them by introspection.
It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity.
In understanding the context of what has been posted above we must understand that a person does not have choice if there exists no options for them to choose form as a person does not have any choice especially when they are bombarded by previosly held social exigencies.
Subject: Are poor people responsible for their social condemnation? 
Fri Jan 02, 2009 11:27 am
