Societies consistently construct narratives that assign blame to those who occupy marginal positions, even as they depend structurally on their existence. Numerous sociological studies confirm that poverty and unemployment are not simply outcomes of individual failings but consequences of systemic factors. William Julius Wilson in When Work Disappears (1996) demonstrates how the erosion of stable employment in urban America was not a product of individual choice but of economic restructuring and capital flight. Loïc Wacquant in Punishing the Poor (2009) argues that neoliberal states maintain their legitimacy by criminalising poverty, turning structural vulnerability into moral failing. More recently, Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton in Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neoliberalism (2006) highlight how social systems implicitly rely on unpaid and undervalued labour, disproportionately borne by women and the poor. Together, these works illustrate how social systems sustain themselves by extracting value from marginalised groups while simultaneously casting them as threats, burdens, or moral failures. The unemployed, the disabled, and the poor are therefore not incidental outliers but essential components of how societies reproduce themselves.
This logic reveals a paradox at the heart of collective life. Systems generate continuity not by balancing stability but by displacing instability onto others, onto margins, onto the very people whose exclusion sustains the whole. It is an entanglement in which every affirmation of belonging depends on a simultaneous expulsion. Continuity arises not from harmony but from structured asymmetry, where the vulnerable are both scapegoat and support beam. Meaning and value, under these conditions, are not absolute but emergent from the recursive process of attributing worth to some lives while denying it to others. What appears as cohesion is therefore an orbit of mutual constraint: those inside the flow of daily life feel secure only because others are positioned outside, carrying the weight of exclusion. In this sense, societies are not unified wholes but dynamic fields of tension, sustained by their own disavowals, bound together by the very fractures they refuse to acknowledge.
References
- Bezanson, Kate & Luxton, Meg. Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neoliberalism. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.
- Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Duke University Press, 2009.
- Wilson, William Julius. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. Vintage Books, 1996.
Daedelus Kite 
One reply on “Social (in)Security: Criminalising Poverty”
The trajectory of contemporary communications and political systems suggests that exploitation is not confined to the poor or visibly marginalised but increasingly extends to those whose primary distinction is high intelligence. Where once the social system depended upon scapegoating poverty or disability, it is now turning toward the clever, the independent, the genuinely thoughtful. Intelligence itself begins to appear deviant, suspicious, or even pathological when it resists the simplifying currents of populist slogans and algorithmic reinforcement. The very capacity to see differently, to question or to resist, becomes grounds for exclusion. What was once a survival advantage—cleverness, criticality, insight—risks being reclassified as a liability in cultures that increasingly normalise conformity and distraction.
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This slow inversion resembles the parable of the frog in the boiling pot. At first, there is no obvious harm—cleverness is tolerated, sometimes even celebrated, provided it serves existing hierarchies. Yet as the system adjusts its own tolerances, each increment of suppression goes unnoticed until the environment itself becomes lethal to intelligence. The danger is not only to those who are clever but to all of us, for when the system turns intelligence into deviance, it erodes the very feedback loops upon which collective survival depends. What emerges is a society that punishes thought while rewarding noise, one in which the water is already heating, and most of us have not yet realised how little time remains before it boils.
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