Plato, in his great book about social justice the Republic, in 321 B.C., warned us that “Any State, however small, is in fact divided into two -- one the State of the poor, the other that of the rich – and these are [forever] at war with one another.” Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, in the Politics, went a step further. He stressed that, if the poor are driven to extreme hardship and deprivation, the conflict between the rich and poor may explode into violence and destroy the state. When the poor have nothing more to lose, the social contract that binds any society together may break down.
We should not have to re-learn this is ancient wisdom the hard way, but it seems we are prone to forget the past and are “condemned to re-live it,” as the philosopher George Santayana put it. (Or at least make it rhyme, after Mark Twain.) The French Revolution was, at bottom, about bread for the poor. And so were the Russian and Chinese revolutions in the twentieth century. More recently, the turmoil in the Middle East – ranging from the (mostly) disastrous Arab Spring to the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS and the flood of refugees – may in fact have been triggered by severe droughts and steep spikes in global food prices, according to an in-depth analysis by the New England Complex Systems Institute. Extreme poverty was the root cause, and many Middle Eastern governments were oblivious to the needs of their citizens and were unresponsive.
The War
Between the Rich and the Poor
by Peter Corning