When Poverty Becomes Humiliation

There are forms of poverty that are not primarily about the lack of money.

They are about being left outside.
About losing face.
About being seen as less worthy.

For many years I have worked in social work, both in Norway and internationally. Some experiences remain with us more deeply than others. My stays in Brazil and the encounters with people living in the favelas outside Vitória are among those experiences. Not because I met “the poor” as a social category, but because I met human beings living with a persistent experience of humiliation.

There is a difference between poverty and humiliation.

A person can live simply without losing dignity. Many people do exactly that. There is silence, warmth, and human richness in many poor communities. I have encountered this both in Brazil and elsewhere. Fellowship, humour, care, and vitality can exist in the midst of material hardship.

But when poverty becomes social exclusion, when people over time are treated as less important, less intelligent, less beautiful, or less valuable than others — then something else happens.

Humiliation emerges.

And humiliation is not merely a feeling.
It is also a social experience.

In the favela area where we carried out a larger public health study, people lived with violence as part of everyday life. Murders, disappearances, and fear were not abstract phenomena but concrete realities. At the same time, life there was also about work, families, religion, hope, and attempts to create an ordinary life under extremely difficult conditions.

I remember the narrow streets.
The red earth.
The sound of dogs barking at night.
Music flowing through open windows.
Children playing football in small open spaces between the houses.

And everywhere, people.

People trying to live their lives with whatever dignity remained.

On one of the home visits, I arrived at a small shack where an elderly woman lived alone. The house was little more than a few wooden boards and a corrugated metal roof protecting her from the strongest heat. Yet she welcomed us warmly. As we were leaving, she returned carrying a large plastic bag filled with mangoes from a nearby tree.

She had almost nothing.
Yet she gave.

I still remember the feeling of standing there with that bag in my hands.

It was not simply a gift.
It was dignity.

Perhaps that was also where I understood something important:

Human beings do not lose their humanity because they are poor.
But they may lose faith in their own worth if society over time treats them as insignificant.

It is easy to explain violence solely through crime.
It is more difficult to ask what happens to people who throughout their lives experience being pushed downward in society’s invisible hierarchies.

Modern societies often speak about freedom and equality. Yet human beings constantly compare themselves with others. We see how others live, what they own, how they are treated, what opportunities they are given. We see who is listened to and who is ignored.

This is how the experience of social positioning emerges.

In Brazil these differences became visible in a brutal way. Some lived in brick houses with stable income and better infrastructure. Others lived in areas with poor water supply, weak sanitation, and high levels of violence. These differences also existed within the favela itself.

What made the deepest impression on me was perhaps not the poverty itself, but the way people carried this reality in their bodies.

The shame.
The silence.
The unease.
The constant feeling of not quite belonging.

Here I believe modern societies often misunderstand poverty. We think economically when perhaps we should think existentially.

Martin Heidegger writes that human beings are always already thrown into a world. We do not fully choose the conditions of our lives. Some are born into security, others into insecurity. Some grow up with access to education, language, and networks. Others grow up in environments where violence and fear are part of everyday life long before they can reflect philosophically upon it.

Yet modern societies often continue to live with the illusion that everyone fundamentally begins from the same starting point.

Perhaps this is one of the greatest illusions modern societies tell themselves.

For inequality is not only about money.
It is about access to a future.

In the favelas we met people living close to the margins of society. Yet we also encountered pride, strength, and care. Many women held families together under conditions that would have broken far more privileged people. Children attended school. People worked whenever work was available. Neighbours helped one another.

There was a generosity there that deeply moved me.

Not generosity because people possessed much.
But because community still mattered.

Perhaps this is precisely what becomes difficult to understand in modern individualistic societies:
That people with very little materially may sometimes possess a richness of human relationships that wealthier societies gradually lose.

This is important to say.

Poverty does not make people less moral.

But long-term humiliation can slowly destroy hope.

And when hope is broken down across generations, violence, despair, or withdrawal easily emerge.

This does not mean that violence can be explained simply. Human beings are always more than their surroundings. Yet societies create emotional landscapes. Some environments nurture trust and belonging. Others nurture shame, fear, and powerlessness.

In our research we became deeply concerned with precisely this: the relationship between humiliation and violence. Not as a simple causal explanation, but as an attempt to understand how social experiences settle within human beings over time.

I also remember the encounter with CEPAS — the health and study centre located in the middle of the area. The building itself was modest, yet it represented something far greater than itself. It represented an attempt to create dignity.

Professor Pedro Fortes and the people around him were not merely trying to treat illness. They were trying to build community. Medical students walked from house to house speaking with families about health, living conditions, and everyday life.

Something happens when people are treated as human beings rather than statistics.

I learned much from this in Brazil.

In Norway we are often deeply concerned with systems, methods, and procedures. These things matter. Yet in the favela it became clear that social work is also about presence.

To be seen.
To be addressed with respect.
To experience that one’s life matters.

Perhaps this is where practical philosophy truly begins.

Not in grand theories, but in the ways human beings encounter one another.

Martin Buber described the difference between I–It and I–Thou. Human beings can be treated either as objects or as living subjects. In many modern institutions, people in vulnerable life situations risk being reduced to cases, diagnoses, clients, or numbers.

But no one wishes to be a number.

This became especially clear in the encounter between Norwegian and Brazilian academic culture. Our Brazilian partners sometimes reacted to the way we wanted to anonymise people in research. For them this was not merely “informant number four.” It was dona Maria — mother of four children and an active participant in the local community.

At first I did not fully understand the reaction.

Later I began to understand that this too was about views of human beings.

In some cultures the individual stands more alone.
In others, the human being is understood first and foremost through relationships.

Perhaps modern Western societies still have something to learn here.

For when people lose relationships, they often lose parts of their dignity as well.

It is easy to speak about poverty from a safe distance.
Much harder is it to understand what it feels like to live with persistent social invisibility.

Hannah Arendt wrote that human beings need a public space in which they can appear as significant persons. Perhaps this is one of the most destructive aspects of long-term poverty: that people gradually lose the sense that they possess a voice that matters.

Not only economically.
But existentially.

They are no longer seen as people whose experiences the world needs to hear.

Then silence easily emerges.

And silence can be dangerous.

For people who no longer experience themselves as participants in society may lose faith both in community and in the future.

Some of this, I believe, we also see in Europe today.
Not only in the favelas of Brazil.

Modern societies constantly create new forms of social comparison. Through media, advertising, and social platforms, people are continuously reminded of what they are not, what they do not possess, and what they have failed to become.

Perhaps this is why humiliation has become one of the most underestimated social experiences of our time.

We speak much about economics.
Less about dignity.

Yet human beings do not live by economics alone.
They also live by recognition.

Therefore, I believe that social work in its deepest form is not merely about helping.
It is about protecting human dignity.

About meeting people in ways that still allow them to experience themselves as participants in the world.

Perhaps this is ultimately what I learned most deeply in Brazil.

In the midst of violence, poverty, and unrest, I also encountered people trying to hold on to something profoundly human:
care,
community,
pride,
presence,
and the hope of a better life for their children.

I still think about the elderly woman and the bag of mangoes.

Not because the gift itself was large.
But because it carried within it a quiet human truth:

Dignity does not necessarily disappear with poverty.

But it can disappear when people over time are treated as though their lives matter less than the lives of others.

Perhaps, then, practical philosophy does not begin in theories about human beings.

Perhaps it begins in the way we see one another.

In the way we listen.
In the way we enter a home.
In the way we receive a gift.

Even when it comes from a small shack with a corrugated metal roof in a favela in Brazil.