George Carlin says: "Consciousness is realizing that your poverty is not a lack of luck, but the result of a plan… They don't want you to be an evolved citizen, but an exhausted worker. A person busy with survival has no time to demand their rights."

In this profound statement, Carlin speaks not just about poverty as an economic problem, but as an intertwined psycho-socio-political system, meticulously crafted to produce a submissive, busy, and exhausted citizen. It's a bold reading of the collective mind of the modern era, where poverty is no longer a natural consequence of circumstances, but a systematic tool for control and the subjugation of consciousness.

From a psychological perspective, an exhausted person loses their capacity for critical thought. When an individual's awareness is confined to securing their next meal, consciousness transforms from a tool for liberation into a mere means of survival. This is the most dangerous form of alienation: when the mind reduces itself to the function of instinct. Here, poverty is not just material deprivation; it's a starvation of dignity and will. A person living under the constant weight of need suffers from what psychologists call existential burnout—a state of internal erosion that drives them toward submission and compliance instead of revolution and creativity.

From a social and political angle, poverty is managed as a tool of control, not as an economic flaw. Consumer societies are built on the principle of deferred gratification; citizens are given doses of false hope through advertisements, promises, and policies, keeping them in a perpetual chase after a mirage. It's a meticulous engineering of helplessness, mastered by the neoliberal system, by transforming the human being into a small cog in the production machine, surrounded by a vast array of distractions and fears. Thus, poverty becomes a function: the function of maintaining the existing order.

From an existential literary perspective, the text can be read as a cry against the slavery of the modern age. Here, poverty is not a transient event, but a spiritual state of inner extinguishment, where a person is reduced to a body that works without living, produces without owning, and is consumed without choosing. It is the new face of slavery; a slavery camouflaged behind a facade of freedom.

In deep psychological analysis, the intended poverty becomes not just a poverty of money, but a poverty of consciousness. When a person is programmed to believe that their misery is destiny, they themselves become the guard of the prison they are placed in. The system needs no walls when fear and deprivation are sufficient to build internal barriers. Thus, poverty transforms into an inherited psychological illness, measured not in currency, but by the degree to which hope has been extinguished.

It is a system of soft control, replacing iron chains with mental shackles. It exhausts the individual in the vortex of work and consumption until they lose their sense of time and meaning. And when Carlin says they don't want you to be an evolved citizen but an exhausted worker, he reveals the core truth: the conscious citizen threatens the system, the intellectual doubts, and the enlightened cannot be led.

From here, the conscious awakening becomes a revolutionary act in itself:

To realize that poverty is a policy, not an accident.

To understand that deprivation of time and knowledge is the most dangerous form of poverty.

And to practice consciousness not as an intellectual luxury, but as a silent resistance that creates itself by itself.