alt Hacker NewsThis flies in the face of my own experience travelling all over the world, where the poorest people would offer me extreme generosity and not accept anything in return.
Maybe it's bias because I'm an "exotic" white guy in many areas and not just a random down on their luck average guy from their own region.
I've also been offered generosity by rich people, as well, but, I will generalize, that mainly came after I demonstrated some proof that I didn't actually need their generosity
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> This flies in the face of my own experience travelling all over the world, where the poorest people would offer me extreme generosity and not accept anything in return.
orrrr maybe poor people you've encountered are poor exactly because they are generous in competitive environment - and non-generous became rich and successful
Maybe it's country dependent. I have seen what you describe in countries where christianity is the dominant religion and most people in those countries something like 70 to 80 percent identify with it. And religion in those places is most prevalent among the poor, so much so there is a direct relationship between poverty and religion, the more religious, the poorer.
Have you ever been to truly starving places? Not taking about poor countries, literally starving places, like, Syria in WWI. Where if you don't steal from your neighbor, your kids will die of hunger. That's the kind of environment where compassion is a luxury. A lot of China was like that _even if for a short time_ in the last century. That leaves deep scars.
Not a lot of the world is like that today, you'd have to go pretty far out of anything considered tourist-friendly to see conditions similar to Mao-induced famine.