Ashamed of Being Poor: The Merciless Belief in Meritocracy

Studies show that the emotion of shame is a common denominator amongst people living in poverty. One explanation for why this is the case appeals to the belief in the meritocratic myth, which is the belief that one’s socioeconomic position is purely the result of merit. On this view, those at the bottom are shamed for being lazy and incompetent. However, the way in which the different key notions – shame, poverty and meritocracy – hang together remains underdeveloped in the literature. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a more fine-grained notion of how the three connect. First, it demonstrates how two influential conceptions of poverty – relative and absolute – both understand poverty as the inability to appear in public without shame. Then the paper argues for a relational understanding of shame and explores three archetypically shameful situations – (i) disappointed expectation; (ii) exclusion; and (iii) unwanted exposure – in the context of poverty. The paper concludes that, under the spell of the meritocratic myth, shame takes on a particular individualistic form; one is very likely to falsely believe that poverty is one’s own responsibility and that ‘the poor’ are only themselves to blame for their situation.