It's easy to be insightful when you were poor, yourself.

Check out, Down and Out in Paris and London

Orwell wasn't poor. He went to Eton.

He's more like the Greek girl in Pulp's song 'Common People'

Whatever he did he could call time on it.

That's not to say I don't admire his work for its obvious compassion.

Nothing in life is a choice. Free will is a social construct, or more precisely a moral one.

Poor people exist because of bad luck, whether in managing their money or the genetic lottery.

I'm all for abolishing both of these things. A society of genetically related clones would work great. A nation as a family. You'd meet a stranger and you'd know what they're like, even though you wouldn't know exactly who they are.

Having worked with many, I have to believe it's more a mix of things. There were certainly cases of hard luck, but it's also not hard to see that spending your paycheck on beer every week when you have no money is never going to improve things. In reality, it's more a mix of things, some bad luck and some bad choices.

Now it's true that some people can absorb a whole lot more bad luck than others because of their family, but I remember one guy in particular who was rather determined to send his life into a ditch in spite of having parents who were willing and able to do a lot of things to help him. He managed to do things like going to prison for beating his girlfriend and robbing her sister and endangering (and injuring) himself on the job.

So it's not all black & white like you're making it out to be.

EDIT: I do feel I should put in a counter-point, in that I also knew a guy who made about one bad choice and the rest was hard luck, so there's that too. Most people were more a mix and for whatever it's worth, I tried to help where I could. The guy who loved to drink had his cruddy old bike stolen one Christmas, so I gave him a brand new one. That was pretty important to him, as it was how he got to work. I put a headlight on it too, as he had to ride a lot at night.

>So it's not all black & white like you're making it out to be.

I'm not saying it's black and white. More of a greyish fractal, however, what is free will?

This is roughly what I've come to believe on free will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Free_will_as_a_pragm...

No one can deny we 'make' choices based on the way we think, feel and the environment we are in. And the way we think and feel is determined partly by environment, but mostly by genetics. You can look this up. 2 pairs of Colombian identical twins got mixed up. One set grew up in practically medieval lifestyle in a rural province, the other was raised in the capital. Despite completely different environment, their personalities were remarkably similar. From adoption studies, we know that something similar is the case for intelligence.

I think you misunderstand his point. He is saying that

1. if there is no free will then choices (and bad choices in particular) have to come from somewhere else.

2. that something is either unfortunate genetics or an unfortunate environment.

3. whichever of these is at fault should be fixed.

The thing about that is that we experience free will. By that I mean that most people perceive ourselves as being in control of ourselves, rather than being controlled by whatever else.

If you want to say that's an illusion or whatever, then you undermine empiricism and science with it. How many of our other perceptions about the world are unreliable and why can't this one be trusted?

That got weird quickly.