Question
Personal Bankruptcy: What is it like to be secretly broke?
Answer
Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire is a pretty interesting exploration of that condition. People hang on to a given social class as long as they can, and long after the means to sustain membership are gone. They keep up the pretense, and people around them collude to help sustain the pretense by never directly exposing the destitution, and even paying to keep up the facade.
A lot of late 19th and early 20th century British writing revolved around household situations where gentry fallen upon hard times live off the table scraps of their well-to-do relatives.
Before the days of impersonal models of social security, communities had a certain vested interest in making sure that their members, even if impoverished, were not left to fall into a lower social class, so they made sure their broke members had enough to at least maintain the right social facade.
Even today we see this. Broke graduates who can't find a job camping out at their parents' place, or couchsurfing indefinitely with friends for instance.
When this communal safety net breaks, things can get really unpleasant. There is a very disturbing Hindi short story by Munshi Premchand about a well-born family that falls upon really hard times. They are in deep debt to a loan shark, and are reduced to a single asset: a worn, but quality rug, that they use instead of a curtain on their main doorway. Neighbors advise them to get a cheap curtain instead of ruining a good rug, but they laughingly dismiss the idea, saying that back in the day when they were much richer, they always had expensive rugs for curtains. The family patriarch keeps up an increasingly desperate "all is well" fiction.
The story ends with the increasingly impatient moneylender finally declaring he is going to take the rug if he isn't going to get paid. When he grabs it, the entire community can see the completely destitute insides of the house, and the rags in which the the women (who don't go out in public -- the story is set in a traditional society where women are sequestered in purdah) are dressed. Even the moneylender is aghast at their plight. He drops the rug and walks away silently.
We live in interesting times today, with far less social capital. But our basic psychology hasn't changed. Even if there is no tight tribal community around us within which we can be ashamed, being broke feels like a shameful plight. Not because of its hardships but because of the social fall involved from a high class to an underclass. Dealing with the practical hardships of living homeless/dumpster diving are likely to be less demanding than dealing with the social fall.
A lot of late 19th and early 20th century British writing revolved around household situations where gentry fallen upon hard times live off the table scraps of their well-to-do relatives.
Before the days of impersonal models of social security, communities had a certain vested interest in making sure that their members, even if impoverished, were not left to fall into a lower social class, so they made sure their broke members had enough to at least maintain the right social facade.
Even today we see this. Broke graduates who can't find a job camping out at their parents' place, or couchsurfing indefinitely with friends for instance.
When this communal safety net breaks, things can get really unpleasant. There is a very disturbing Hindi short story by Munshi Premchand about a well-born family that falls upon really hard times. They are in deep debt to a loan shark, and are reduced to a single asset: a worn, but quality rug, that they use instead of a curtain on their main doorway. Neighbors advise them to get a cheap curtain instead of ruining a good rug, but they laughingly dismiss the idea, saying that back in the day when they were much richer, they always had expensive rugs for curtains. The family patriarch keeps up an increasingly desperate "all is well" fiction.
The story ends with the increasingly impatient moneylender finally declaring he is going to take the rug if he isn't going to get paid. When he grabs it, the entire community can see the completely destitute insides of the house, and the rags in which the the women (who don't go out in public -- the story is set in a traditional society where women are sequestered in purdah) are dressed. Even the moneylender is aghast at their plight. He drops the rug and walks away silently.
We live in interesting times today, with far less social capital. But our basic psychology hasn't changed. Even if there is no tight tribal community around us within which we can be ashamed, being broke feels like a shameful plight. Not because of its hardships but because of the social fall involved from a high class to an underclass. Dealing with the practical hardships of living homeless/dumpster diving are likely to be less demanding than dealing with the social fall.