I caught myself saying this to myself when I had to accept that my financial situation limited my options and freedoms, and the words jarred as I realised what was implied; that people who are poor cannot expect choice or agency and sacrifice dignity in accepting whatever scraps society throws to them.
You’re not wrong to recoil from the phrase. It’s one of those bits of folk wisdom that sounds practical on the surface but rests on a whole scaffolding of assumptions about hierarchy, scarcity, and who “deserves” agency.
A few threads that might help make sense of why it feels off:
1. The phrase encodes a worldview, not a fact It comes from cultures where poverty was treated as a moral failing, and charity was conditional, paternalistic, and often humiliating. Medieval English Poor Laws, Victorian charity, and later neoliberal attitudes all cast “the poor” as people whose agency could be suspended because they were “dependent.” The idiom carries that logic: if you’re receiving help, you forfeit choice.
2. Other societies genuinely haven’t operated this way There absolutely are cultures—past and present—where being in need doesn’t strip you of dignity or options.
A few examples:
None of these societies are utopias, but they show that “beggars” as a fixed group is not universal.
3. The idea of “beggarly class” emerges from systems, not human nature Societies create conditions under which some people end up with no bargaining power. Capital accumulation, enclosures, colonial extraction, private property regimes, caste systems, and wage labour are the usual suspects.
In many hunter-gatherer and kin-based societies, “poverty” in the Western sense simply didn’t exist because:
4. And you’re right: the phrase assumes inequality is natural Most people repeat it without thinking, but the implication is clear: some people will always be desperate, and their desperation justifies stripping away their preferences.
This isn’t neutral. It’s a declaration about what kind of society is normal.
5. There’s a better way to think about it If you assume people should retain agency even when they’re vulnerable, then the phrase collapses. It becomes obvious that:
If anything, the societies that don’t treat people as “beggars” do so not because they’re perfect, but because they organise responsibility differently. They assume mutual obligation rather than conditional charity.
I asked if it could cite examples of deliberate government or community campaigning, marketing, or propaganda to further isolate and villainise the poor and what informed our beliefs about the poor.
There are contemporary examples, and they’re depressingly consistent across different countries. The pattern shows up whenever a society wants to justify inequality or defund public systems: you create fear, disgust, and moral judgment around the people who most rely on those systems. It’s one of the oldest political technologies we have.
Here are the threads that often get overlooked:
Not subtly—quite openly.
Different flavours, but similar insinuations: that poverty indicates moral failure, lack of hygiene, and threat.
This part has deeper roots than most people realise.
Many cultures historically linked poverty with bad character. Victorian England literally described poverty as a kind of “moral infection.” That logic never really vanished; it just secularised.
The 19th and early 20th centuries had huge public-health campaigns associating slums with disease. Some concerns were grounded (poor sanitation, overcrowding), but the takeaway wasn’t “fix the conditions.” It was “avoid the people.”
Those reflexes still exist in the collective unconscious.
Industrial-era elites used propaganda to frame poor workers as a looming threat—prone to riot, theft, and violence—because it justified harsh policing and surveillance.
This narrative echoes every time someone clutches their bag near a homeless person.
If poverty is seen as caused by structural forces, then anyone could fall into it. That’s terrifying. So people reach for stories that make the poor fundamentally different—dirty, irrational, unpredictable, criminal—because it protects the illusion of control.
Fear of “bad neighbourhoods” didn’t just arise organically.
These industries invented “redlining,” “blight,” and “slum” classifications to steer investment and enforce segregation. They sold fear of certain postcodes as a financial truth.
The messaging filtered into schoolyard talk, local news, and parental caution.
For decades, news outlets disproportionately reported violent crimes in poor or racialised areas—not necessarily because crime was higher, but because it drove ratings. It created the sense that danger lived there, not everywhere.
High-visibility policing in poor areas reinforced the idea that poor equals criminal. If you grow up seeing constant patrols and arrests in one suburb, you internalise the narrative.
Strangely, the rhetoric around “internal threats,” subversives, and neighbourhood decay fed into a broader mindset that danger comes from the marginalised and the poor. The “enemy within.”
If a society claims to be fair but produces extreme inequality, it has to explain that contradiction somehow.
There are two options:
1. Admit the system is unjust. or 2. Decide the disadvantaged are inherently flawed and dangerous.
Governments, media, and corporations have overwhelmingly chosen option two, because it requires no structural change.
Once you create the idea that “those people” are dangerous, unclean, irrational, or unpredictable, you can:
…and most voters won’t resist, because they’ve been conditioned to see the poor as a threat.