Every anti-poverty activist in the world has probably had to endure hearing at least one cherished friend or family member express poor-bashing views. This often happens during Christmas get-togethers, when good-natured conversation can all-too-easily degenerate into prejudiced banter around the holiday table. With the holiday season closing in on us, let's take some time to understand the good-hearted poor-basher.

It's infuriating to hear economic predators say that the poor bring poverty down upon themselves. It's utterly bewildering when the same arguments are made by seemingly compassionate and ethical people. We expect cruelty from the selfish, but why do so many decent human beings ignore the role that social injustice plays in creating and maintaining poverty? Why do they refuse to seriously consider the overwhelming evidence that societal factors explain poverty far better than personal ones? These questions are important ones for anti-poverty activists, who, after all, are in the business of persuasion.

Anti-poverty activists usually assume that poor-bashing is motivated by self-interest, ignorance, or hatred. The arguments run like this: elites who poor-bash are promoting an ideology that protects their economic interests; middle and lower-class poor-bashers, on the other hand, are either deceived by elite propaganda or driven by base prejudice. While there is a lot of truth to these assumptions, there are situations where they don't explain much at all.

Imagine the following scenario: a boy from a poor and troubled family struggles hard to complete high school and put himself through university. Along the way he suffers a fair share of abuse and discrimination. He deals with this by studying philosophy or religion or self-help books. He volunteers his time and money to charities even after he secures a well-paying job. His eventual marriage is egalitarian and he is a kind and competent father. Throughout his life he continues to care about his society and to give of himself to make it a better one—and he continues to believe that self-reliance, personal responsibility, and hard work are the virtues that divide those who succeed economically from those who don't. Such a person—and we all know someone who fits this general profile—certainly qualifies as a good-hearted poor-basher.

It's blatantly unfair to call this person selfish, ignorant, or hateful. How, then, can his position be explained? Anti-poverty activists who can't answer this question won't be able to understand him or persuade him to change his mind. In order to understand this man's point of view, we need to remember three basic principles of human psychology.

First, emotional intelligence often conflicts with critical intelligence, and for very good reasons. Emotional intelligence keeps us sane, while critical intelligence discerns truth from falsehood. Sometimes, when seeing clearly would drive us to despair, emotional intelligence requires us to discard our critical intellect and to believe in illusions.

Second, those who believe that they have some control over their own suffering tend to fare better than those who don't. Nothing is worse for a human being than despair and self-contempt, emotions that thrive on helplessness. People who don't believe they have any control over their situations find it nearly impossible to gather the energy required to better their predicament.

Third, the more a person emotionally invests in a belief, the harder it is to change that belief even in the face of overwhelming conflicting evidence.

These three principles, taken together, explain a great deal about our hypothetical poor-basher. This is a man whose emotional intelligence has helped him make the best out of a bad situation. He convinced himself that he had more control than he actually did over his predicament. By exaggerating his own sense of power over his fate, and by downplaying the influence of external factors in his life he reduced his anxiety, increased his motivation, and was thereby able to take whatever opportunities life actually afforded him.

Of course, he was lucky life afforded him any opportunities at all, and he's lucky that the burdens he had to contend with weren't any heavier than they actually were. Our good-hearted poor-basher will have a hard time seeing this.

Having believed in useful fictions for so long, and having reached a position of economic security, he's predisposed to see only his own contribution to his situation, ignoring the role external factors played in his success. By minimizing the significance of these circumstances, he'll assume that he would have been able to overcome any ill fortune that might have, but didn't, come his way. Because this strategy has worked so well for him for so long, he's loath to give it up. Can we blame him? After all, it's kept him trying, and it's preserved his self-esteem. In a world where hopelessness devours so many people, these are hardly petty considerations.

Unfortunately, he's now prone to view everyone else through the lens of his emotionally useful, but factually incorrect, beliefs. Having ignored the injustices he himself has endured, he won't notice when others are treated unjustly. Having exaggerated the contribution his own efforts have made to his good fortune, and having downplayed the threat posed by possible misfortune, he won't understand when others are overwhelmed by circumstances beyond their control.

In Maps of the Mind , ( Collier Books, 1982) Charles-Hampden Turner writes that human folly is “less a consequence of badness in people or values than of misjudgement in combining values. The tragic hero triumphs, over-learns the winning value combination, and employs it in new circumstances with disastrous results.” Our good-hearted poor-basher has learned a set of values that, from the standpoint of his emotional intelligence, were indeed a winning combination. He's justifiably proud of what they've let him accomplish, and he unduly cherishes them. Because they're factually incorrect, they fail him spectacularly when he applies them to matters of social justice. His inability to recognize this failure causes him, a good person, to unknowingly perpetuate injustice.

When challenging his beliefs, anti-poverty activists had best remember that they're attacking the very principles that kept him whole during times when he might easily have been torn asunder. If we attribute his attitude to self-interest, ignorance, or hatred, he'll quite rightly assume that we don't know what we're talking about. If, on the other hand, we first acknowledge the emotional value of his commitment to personal responsibility, he'll be far more likely to listen when we point out the limitations of self-reliance.

Persuasion requires empathy and respectfulness. By remembering this, we'll ally ourselves with the good-hearted poor-basher's heart, and soon he might not be a poor-basher at all.

And that would be a Christmas present truly worth giving.

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