I think that I have discovered what makes quite an essential difference between the haves and the have-nots.
The have-nots cannot validate in any way what is being communicated to them. Therefore, they either trust or distrust the source of information. Therefore, the have-not has no other option than to check WHO exactly said it, and believe it on those grounds. He must resort to trust or distrust other people. What typifies the successful person is that he believes the information, not because of who provided it, but because he is capable of validating it. For him, it does not matter at all who said it. That is totally immaterial.
The successful person uses well-understood methods to validate things. The highest level of statement credibility [1] is attained because all its untruth would exclusively be the result of the untruth in a set of underlying statements from which it can be derived exclusively, turtles all the way down. The second-highest level [2] would be the fact that you can repeatedly test the statement in order to look for counterexamples. In a third level, for facts that are not repeatable, he will try to corroborate many independent witness testimonies against such statements, in order to collect the surviving ones. At a lowest level [Y], he could possibly believe the statement just because it happens to be consistent. There it is a question of repeatedly putting the statement, and all its gory details, under the magnifying glass and to keep searching for inconsistencies that would reveal its untruth.
Formal validation methods: [1] math [2] science [3] history [Y] philosophy.
The schools do not teach this. They teach something else. They teach that the truth is in the textbook, or else, it is in what the teacher has said. The education system is truly an exercise in trusting sources, and not in validating statements on their own merit. In that sense, schools will rather contribute to push you below the Dunning-Kruger line than above. Formal education will keep you eminently manipulable. You see, a postdoc PhD is more often than not, impossibly manipulable. He conforms to inane, utterly stupid orthodoxies, and he even helps enforcing them.
Just like the presence of honey strongly attracts bees, and the presence of horse shit strongly attracts flies, and the presence of a herd of sheep attracts wolves, the presence of manipulable people will strongly attract manipulators.
The world of manipulable people looks insanely evil, as everybody they run into, are hell-bent on deceiving them, and are incessantly trying to rip them off. Consequently, they are right that they can pretty much not trust anybody. Entire industries spring up, with the sole purpose of making them believe in their lies. In the eyes of the manipulable person, the more believable someone sounds, the more likely that in reality he is a dangerous predator. That person is just a smooth talker. In fact, he is actually right about that. Sometimes, they do believe anyway, but then they very quickly come to regret it.
In those circumstances, it is exceedingly difficult to learn anything. The manipulable person has few professional skills, while the little money he has, always ends up being taken away from him. What’s worse, he has no hope whatsoever of ever fixing his problem. If a Messiah came along, to save him, he will probably not believe him, and he is right not to believe him, because all previous Messiahs have invariably turned out to be con jobs.
So, the manipulable person just resorts to coping. In fact, there is no need to learn anything, he thinks, because the little he knows, is probably everything there is to know anyway. If he does not understand something, it is surely wrong or at least irrelevant. People who say incomprehensible things to him, must be utterly dumb. Deep inside, he knows that he is the only one who is smart. Everybody else is an idiot.
Being a have or a have-not has never been about money.
Money is just a possible side-effect of doing something right. In and of itself, money is immaterial. It is the process that matters, and the have-nots use a process that is fundamentally no good, because achieving success invariably requires ripping off the other have-nots.
