Why does our society cater to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? Why are doors already open for the rich, but locked and guarded for the less fortunate?

Alfonso Llanes, studied at Florida International University

Answered just now

This is a heavily loaded question that penetrates deep into mankind’s struggle with survival at the top of the food chain. The answer involves the study of many disciplines beginning and ending with the philosophy of being an imperfect human striving for the betterment of the kind. How did rich people get rich and what is the reason for poverty? If humans were still hunting and gathering like other animals wealth as we know it today would not exist. Our innate ability to solve problems, build tools and have the dexterity to use them is what differentiates us from other living organisms. There is a unique ability across all living creature that we all share in common:

Organization in groups, packs, herds— to hunt and feed together but most importantly— for the protection of the species. Humans like any other roamer of the planet Earth come in different colors, sizes and abilities. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic among humans is emotional behavior which is where the real breakdown of differences among people occurs.

The ancient Greeks are credited with methodically studying and documenting many of the questions that peoples organized as nations, states and city-states have been asking for millennia. Plato’s allegory of the cave is the most famous and telling how people’s senses can become misguided into false assumptions which result in long lasting beliefs in magic, sorcery, mystics, and guesses about life, death which lead to other questions such as where do we come from and what are our individual values regarding creed, religion, superstition, tribalism and other isms. Many deep philosophical thinkers have explored and continue to struggle with these same universal but unanswered questions.

This is of course the long answer to the original premise about the existence of wealth and poverty among humans for other dwellers of the planet do not share the same sense of being rich or poor. It follows that in a line of our human biological make up of the “will” in one extreme we have brute force and at the other intelligence. It must be that somewhere in the middle lies the central distribution of humanity between one extreme and the other; in other words, we are all the product of a combination of traits with dominant genes defining individual character joining others that share our beliefs.

Many philosophers have tried to describe the origin of wealth among them Karl Marx holding his ideology as the explanation and Adam Smith on the opposite side. Moreover, human conduct as individuals and as groups has also been the occupation of many thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to John Maynard Keynes and in modern times, Tom Friedman among others.

One must consider as the organizing principle that all treasure comes from the environment that is then converted by human labor into capital. That must be the origin of wealth however the distribution of a newly acquired treasure through a human-made organization embedded in a societal compacts has been the venue and profession of politicians. This design of the body politic is for the benefit of those in charge no matter how cleverly a social compact is thought out for dividing the wealth will keep the largest share as part of their human nature. This inevitably leads to the conclusion that the alternative for not having a “biased” system is one put together with artificial intelligence “programmed” by another robot AI entity. Nonetheless, it sounds like science fiction trying to tame human flaws but perhaps some day will see the “light” out of Plato’s cave.