The Haves and the Haven'ts (Pt 1)

Here is the relation between poverty and genius, which results in refinement when surplus is added to the equation.

The distinction between the have and the haven't is broadly speaking simple. One has leftovers; the other lacks. This foists different survival attitudes on them. With their material advantage, the haves become managers. The lack of the haven'ts make magicians out of them.

"Pickings from the teeth don't fill the belly", says an Igbo saw, and a member of the haves holds with this. Flush with plenty, he doesn't care to look between the crack for what falls through. A filled bowl of goodies, and ever-filling bowl of goodies invites him to do no more than dip into and eat from it. Even if he must address this bowl with imagination, this hardly goes beyond mundane accounting: how much is consumed, what can what he consumes be exchanged with and the current exchange rate, and at what point he gets filled. He would stuff his face from a heap of M&Ms until he feels sick and wonders how much groundnuts he will get in exchange for a bowl of candy-coated chocolate.

It is only when his supply runs low and lack begins to loom that what's left disturbs his dulled head and his grey matter fires up. Every unit of material is examined for yet undiscovered potentials. He begins to wonder whether eating half as fast will fill him twice as much, if what's scraped from the back of this teeth and licked off will add up to something, or if transforming into another form will increase its yield by some value per unit. At this point, regarding a fistful of M&Ms, the haven't peels off the candy coating to sweeten soaked garri in the morning. The chocolate interior, dissolved in water, he reserves for "bread and tea" at night.

To try something new with resources, while more conducive to be practiced by the endowed, could not have been developed by him. For his lack, the haven't often had a thousand needs for a single item in his hand, and employed them to a hundred purposes. (With this tendency to put meager means to enormous ends, one notes that mathematics is not a thing for the poor--at least, basic arithmetic. With his life on the line, as is usually the case when he lacks, maths will do him little good) It may suffice the rich to eat his cake at a normal rate, but driven by mortal need, the poor will try to eke out a round thirteen from an even dozen, a magical ability that impresses even the rich. To the plenty of the haves, the haven'ts have a fitting comeback: the tweaking of the accepted limit of materials.