When you grow up without money, you grow up with opinions. The rich don’t need to think as much; the world agrees with them already. It is those of us who are poor, or at least who begin that way, who need to sit and understand how the world works—simply to live in it. It is we who fight the proverbial battles of right and wrong since we cannot afford the tariff to cross the bridge separating the two as often. Most can only afford to make a one-sided trip.
To put it differently, all cynics and romantics come from the same place, and all opinions begin as a way to understand the world, again, to only live in it. Ideology can be bought in a bookstore and then worn like a mask. It is opinions that say one of the most important words to have ever existed: but. It is opinions that doubt and split ideology apart and add the most crucial ingredient: nuance; this is how things are, but this is how things could also be. This sentence has all the truth in the world. It almost innocently makes two truths exist simultaneously, but it needs either the cynic or the romantic to use it and break ideology apart.
Of course, poverty is seldom of one type, and so if you remove the word money from the above passage and instead of it use the word privilege, things would still stand. I may be poor because I do not have money, and someone else may think they do not have a voice, and they, too, are poor. It is those who are rich, in any measure, who preach absolutes. And it is the job of the cynics and the romantics to say the most important word when someone suggests there is only one truth.
“Your absolute may be true,” they say, “but so is my doubt.”