The Relativity of Wealth - Part 2

This is a continuation of a previous post which can be found here

Now I want to explore further how pride, envy, shame, etc... as they apply to a persons finacial/material situation are determined more by comparison made to others rather than arising independantly from a dissatisfaction with their objective f/m situation.

Let's consider a person who lives in the United States. This person lives on the "wrong side of town" in a very simple 900 square foot house and drives a rusty old car. We will call this person "Person-A". Now let's add someone else to our thought experiment. We will call this person "person-B". Person-B lives in a 6000 square foot house, owns several nice vehicles, a boat and vacations frequently.

In this thought experiment lets focus on person-A, how he views himself and his resulting satisfaction with his f/m situation. When "A" lives in a place where he regularly encounters "B" and others like him, he will very likely view himself as poor and he will be generally dissatisfied with his f/m situation. This dissatisfaction will most likely breed shame, resentment, envy, covetousness, etc... In this example "A" is subject to shame, envy, and covetousness while "B" it subject to pride.

Now let's shake things up a bit. Let's pluck "A" and all his belongings up and put him in an area where the difference between him and the others he lives around is proportional to the difference between him and "B". Only in this situation "A" is the person at the top of the scale. Remember, we have made no changes to the f/m situation of "A". We have merely changed the evironment he has grown up and lives in. Now he is at the top end of the scale. In this situation he will no longer feel shame, envy or covetousness when he makes comparisons between himself and others. In this setting "A" rather than being dissatisfied, will be quite happy with his f/m situation. He will now have to guard his heart against pride.

What have we learned? For one, person-A's dissatisfaction never really had anything to do with his actual situation at all. But the most important thing we learned is that Person-A is not poor. No matter what situation you put him in.

So who is really poor? I will attempt to answer that question in part 3.