The real cause of human poverty

Following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Acharya Prashant: Where does poverty come from? Do you see anything in the entire existence that is poor, except human beings? There is the grass on the ground, is it ever poor? When there is rain, it is green. And when the Sun would be beating hard, the grass would just hide beneath the surface, with its roots intact, only to emerge back again in the rains. There is no poverty. It does not cry, “I am short of resources.”

Birds, animals, trees — nothing is ever poor. Nobody needs to go out, fight, earn, save, secure the future; not at least as much as human beings do. Nobody has as much knowledge as human beings have and yet it is only the human beings that are dying of starvation, of poverty, of war, and of ten other things.

Hundreds of millions of human beings have died because they did not receive enough food. You would have not heard of hundreds and millions of animals dying this way. They don’t.

Where does poverty come from?

Poverty is not at all natural.

Poverty is just the dual opposite, rather, the dual partner of greed.

If a few humans are seen begging, it is not because there is something wrong with them, it is not because they did not go to…