Since belief is all important, it is important for you to guard your thoughts if you want to thrive, and as your beliefs will be shaped to a very great extent by the things you observe and think about, it is important that you should carefully govern to what you give your attention. And here free will comes into use, for it is by your will that you determine upon what things your attention shall be fixed.
If you want to become thrive, you must not make a study of poverty. Things are not brought into being by thinking about their opposites.
- Health is never to be attained by studying disease and thinking about disease;
- Righteousness is not to be promoted by studying sin and thinking about sin;
- and no one ever thrived by studying poverty and thinking about poverty.
Medicine as a science of disease has increased disease;
religion as a science of sin has promoted sin,
and economics as a study of poverty will fill the world with wretchedness and want.
Do not talk about poverty, do not investigate it, or concern yourself with it. Never mind what its causes are; you have nothing to do with them.
Do not read books or papers which give circumstantial accounts of the wretchedness of the tenement dwellers, of the horrors of child labor, and so on.
Do not read anything which fills your mind with gloomy images of want and suffering.
You cannot help the poor in the least by knowing about these things, and the widespread knowledge of them does not tend at all to do away with poverty.
What concerns you is to thrive
. Do not spend your time in so-called charitable work or charity movements; most charity only tends to perpetuate the wretchedness it aims to eradicate.
I do not say that you should be hard-hearted or unkind and refuse to hear the cry of need, but you must not try to eradicate poverty in any of the
conventional ways.
Ayn Rand said, “There is a great, basic contradiction in the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was one of the first great teachers to proclaim the basic principle of individualism – the inviolate sanctity of man’s soul, and the salvation of one’s soul as one’s first concern and highest goal; this means – one’s ego and the integrity of one’s ego. But when it came to the next question, a code of ethics to observe for the salvation of one’s soul – (this means: what must one do in actual practice in order to save one’s soul?) – Jesus (or perhaps his interpreters) gave men a code of altruism, that is, a code which he told them that, in order to save one’s soul, one must love or help or live for others. This means, the subordination of one’s soul (or ego) to the wishes, desires, or needs of others, which means the subordination of one’s souls to the souls of others.
This is a contradiction that cannot be resolved. This is why men have never succeeded in applying Christianity in practice, while they have preached it in theory for 2,000 years. The reason of their failure was not men’s natural depravity or hypocrisy, which is the superficial (and vicious) explanation usually given. The reason is that a contradiction cannot be made to work.”
You cannot hold the mental image which is to make you thrive if you fill your mind with pictures of poverty and all its attendant ills. Poverty can be done away with, not by increasing the number of well-to-do people who think about poverty, but by increasing the number of poor people who purpose with faith to thrive.
The poor do not need charity; they need inspiration. Charity only sends them a loaf of bread to keep them alive in their wretchedness, or gives them an entertainment to make them forget for an hour or two. But inspiration can cause them to rise out of their misery. If you want to help the poor, demonstrate to them that they can thrive. Prove it by thriving yourself.
Put poverty behind you, and put all that pertains to it behind you, and “make good.” Thrive. That is the best way you can help the poor.
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