Month: October 2020

My Quora Answer to the question, “How is it possible that in this day and age there are still so many homeless people? Why isn’t the society helping them to stand on their feet?”

With capitalism comes the ideology that it’s every man for himself, a dog-eat-dog world, survival of the fittest, social Darwinism, etc. Also, there’s the sense of fairness or reciprocality between work put it and payment rendered, goods consumed. Homeless people don’t work, so why should they get any benefits? And a lot of people seem to think that homeless people don’t work because they’re just lazy and don’t want to work (I wrote more about that in Should you feel guilty when you decline to give a dollar to a homeless person asking for money? in the third-to-last paragraph), which makes people more disinclined to support them in any way. People put so much of their energy slaving away miserably at their jobs that they don’t like the idea of other people getting anything, like food to live on, for free.

Another factor is that people distance themselves emotionally from homeless people. I guess it’s just easier that way than facing the atrocity of what one’s looking at. They don’t see them as real people. In one study monitoring brain activity, it was shown that people actually register cars as being more human than they do homeless people. (I can’t find the reference now.) And more generally, people tend to live isolated lives in their own bubbles of comfortable lifestyle while not having or wanting to think about the plights of less-fortunate people, such as homeless people or starving people in other countries (or not to mention animals, such as those suffering in the horrifying factory-farming conditions that ultimately put the food on their plates..)

Another issue, I think, is that you can’t just take care of the existing homeless population. If you take care of all of them, you inevitably make it easier for other people not to work and to receive the same benefits, so your non-working population would grow considerably. So, not taking care of the homeless people is society’s way of protecting itself from incurring too much of a drain on the economy. This way, only those who really can’t make it in the workforce will not work.

How would it make it easier for other people not to work and receive benefits? Consider this: already there are tons of insurance and welfare programs, etc. for people who are unemployed or legitimately can’t work, but the thing is that there will always be people who can’t (or won’t) work for reasons not covered by the devised criteria for receiving those benefits. Every situation is unique, and you can only cover so many corner cases in your labyrinthine legislation of who gets free money.. And if you were too accommodating in your criteria, then too many people would be able to take advantage of those welfare programs and receive money just because they don’t want to work. And if they can, they will. I think this already happens to a large degree, at least in some places. My mom knows somebody who works for the passport agency here in Miami, and she says that approximately 90% of the Cubans are on disability..

Personally, I think we should have a universal safety net where everybody gets at least just enough money and services to live in a small and simple abode, eat, wash their clothes, buy basic necessities, receive basic health care, etc. If you want any more than the most basic necessities, then you have to go out and work for it. This would eliminate homelessness and also so much of the stress associated with working. As it is we’re always just one mishap away from ending up on the street..

Yes, it would cost a lot of money, but I think it would be worth it. After all, “any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members — the last, the least, the littlest.” -Cardinal Roger Mahony

But the problem is that most people just won’t go for it. I think they’re too selfish, or too immersed in the ideology of the every-man-for-himself world, or too preoccupied with fairness and getting their fair share of the labor they put into the system, or whatever. Definitely the Republicans, the more selfish of the two parties, would be more averse to this than the Democrats, but I think this idea may be too socialist even for most Democrats. Most Americans don’t know this, but America is so right-wing in general that Democrats in the US are pretty much the Republicans of other, more progressive countries.

Edit: Since writing this response, I’ve seen some number crunching, and apparently it’s totally impossible for the US to afford a UBI, at least if it were to support everyone. Whether it would have to support everyone is in question, though. Could it just support those who don’t work for whatever reasons? I’m not sure. As mentioned above, it’s possible that if anybody could get support without having to work, most people would choose not to work..

You did say something about helping them to stand on their feet. If this implies helping them to work again instead of just providing for them, maybe some of them could be rehabilitated to work, I don’t know what proportion of them. Definitely not all of them, maybe not even most of them. Even so, maybe we should have more programs aimed at getting homeless people back into the workforce. It’s pretty messed up that homeless people don’t even have a chance at getting jobs because they don’t have a street address, don’t have clean clothes, etc. Why we don’t already have such programs could include the factors I mentioned in the second paragraph.

My Quora Answer to the Question, “Should you feel guilty when you decline to give a dollar to a homeless person asking for money?”

Guilt isn’t a beneficial emotion for anybody involved. It’s self-judgement and self-condemnation, and judgement and condemnation are merely human follies borne of spiritual immaturity, at least on the part of culture. It’s the depriving of yourself of receiving necessary spiritual nourishment, or the “holding down” of oneself, in an attempted atonement for one’s perceived wrongdoings. In Conversations with God book 3 by Neale Donald Walsch, God and Neale have the following conversation about guilt:

Seek only to be genuine. Strive to be sincere. If you wish to undo all the “damage” you imagine yourself to have done, demonstrate that in your actions. Do what you can do. Then let it rest.

That’s easier said than done. Sometimes I feel so guilty.

Guilt and fear are the only enemies of man.

Guilt is important. It tells us when we’ve done wrong.

There is no such thing as “wrong.” There is only that which does not serve you; does not speak the truth about Who You Are, and Who You Choose to Be.

Guilt is the feeling that keeps you stuck in who you are not.

But guilt is the feeling that at least lets us notice we’ve gone astray.

Awareness is what you are talking about, not guilt.

I tell you this: Guilt is a blight upon the land—the poison that kills the plant.

You will not grow through guilt, but only shrivel and die.

Awareness is what you seek. But awareness is not guilt, and love is not fear.

Fear and guilt, I say again, are your only enemies. Love and awareness are your true friends. Yet do not confuse the one with the other, for one will kill you, while the other gives you life.

Then I should not feel “guilty” about anything?

Never, ever. What good is there in that? It only al­lows you to not love yourself—and that kills any chance that you could love another.

Elsewhere in Neale’s books it mentions that regret is the feeling that tells you that you do not want to do a thing again. Regret is a normal, healthy emotion, as opposed to guilt which is often employed instead.

I wrote more about the difference between guilt and regret here: To the Decriers of Anger and Regret

As for whether you should give the homeless person a dollar or feel regret about not giving it to him, if we go by the above text, it all has to do with whether that decision reflects who you really are and who you choose to be.

But personally, I think giving money to the homeless is the “right” thing to do. It signifies compassion, and it’s a better use of that dollar than whatever you would have spent it on because a dollar means a lot more to someone who has almost nothing than to someone who has a place to live, water, food, clothes, medical care, etc. The amount of wealth a non-homeless person versus the amount of wealth a homeless person has entails a huge imbalance, a travesty of justice. The least you could do is discharge that imbalance slightly by giving the man a dollar.

At least it’s a better use of that dollar than what you would spend it on for yourself if you consider other people’s well-being to be as important as yours…and why shouldn’t you? What makes you so special in the universe? What kind of a world is it where everybody is selfish and out to please themselves even at the expense of others? (I’m not necessarily implying that declining to do something charitable is “at the expense of” another—that’s arguable—I’m just saying that selfism on a collective level makes everybody hurt.) You could say that everybody has to look out for Number One first, because nobody else will, and there is some truth that, but taking care of yourself in the ways that only you can does not preclude correcting a gross imbalance of goods between you and another, and nor does it preclude significantly caring about other people on a fundamental level.

You could argue, of course, that the homeless person should get a job, or that it’s not fair that you work for that money and he would get it for free, but I think it’s idealistic to think that the homeless should just get jobs. Do you think that they live in the atrocious conditions they live in, suffering a lack of the most basic necessities of life, being reduced to wearing rags and begging on the street all day just because they’re lazy and hence prefer that to working? No, the homeless person always has some kind of psychological (or physical, or both psychological and physical) issues that make it impractical for them to work. Not everybody is cut out for the workforce; some people slip between the cracks of capitalism, and some of those people slip between the cracks of the welfare system, insurance and other such safety nets as well.

You could argue that it’s pointless to give a homeless person money because they’ll just use it for alcohol or drugs, but 1) you don’t know for sure what they’ll use it for, everybody needs a bite to eat now and then, so it’s better to err on the side of compassion than on the side of harshness; and 2) if alcohol is really what that homeless person wants to drown the pain away, even more so than the supposedly more useful things that he could spend it on such as food or soap, then who are you to say that it’s not worth it for that homeless person to spend a dollar on alcohol? Apparently, that’s what benefits him most in his situation, as they’re probably not stupid.

You could think that the homeless person is just going to continue to be homeless regardless of what you give him and therefore you’re not really helping anything, but regardless of that, the fact is that any amount of money you give will proportionately improve that homeless person’s life, even if only for that day, and that matters.

Why Racism, Sexism, Anti-Semitism, etc. are Fundamentally Irrational

The concept I’m about to try to impart is simple, though maybe asking of a little bit of sophistication to understand, but it’s absolutely revolutionary—or at least it would have the potential to be in a partially idealistic world (that is, a world idealistic enough that a good idea could change everything, but not idealistic enough that things still need to be changed).

Think of any particular group of people that tends to be disparaged. Blacks? Jews? Men? Women? Muslims? Boomers?

As long as the people in question don’t belong to that group by choice—say, for example, that they all exclusively have something genetically in common, or they all live in the same geographical area, or they all inherited their religion from their parents—it’s illogical to blame or fault them for their shortcomings or perceived shortcomings. (It may seem contentious that people inherit religions, but if the majority of people with parents of X religion end up being members of X religion, then being of that religion wasn’t really a deliberate choice, for the most part.)

The very fact that all of the people from that group have the same negative or perceived negative trait in common, or not even all of the people but that there exists a statistical tendency in the group, necessarily implies that the causes of that trait trace back to the same things that cause the group to have the very traits that place it into that group, and those are things that (as we’ve defined earlier) are congenital and therefore out of the control of the people of that group.

For example, say there’s a race of aliens in the Andromeda galaxy that think that humans are just awful, crude, barbaric, selfish, evil, etc. The very fact that humans tend to be this way and the alien species doesn’t, implies that there are overall factors in the human context—be they environmental, genetic, cultural, or whatever—that statistically cause humans to be that way. Otherwise, there would be nothing to stop the statistics of human traits and the statistics of the alien traits from being the same, just due to the normalizing nature of statistics.

One might argue that if the problems are cultural then they’re our fault, but it makes no sense to blame a culture since that’s an abstract concept; it only makes sense to blame individuals, and as long as the culture is the reason (hypothetically, let’s say it’s the sole reason) for them being that way, then that implies that if one of those aliens were born on our planet he’d probably turn out just as selfish, evil, etc. as humans. Similarly, if a radical feminist who wants to kill all men were born as a man, she’d probably embody the traits of men that she despises.

Of course, there are philosophical issues surrounding the question of whether anyone “could have been born” as someone else: whether that implies a soul that exists pre-birth, whether such souls exist, and not to mention whether people/souls actually do choose what context (such as race, species, gender, culture, or religion) they’re born into. But my bringing up the idea that someone “could have been born” in a different context (as a different race, etc.) is merely a tool of thought or thought experiment, an intermediary concept to bring us closer to the real nugget here which is that any statistical variation between groups implies variation in their engendering contexts or natures. The individual presumably does not choose this context or nature (such as his having been born in the Milky Way galaxy, or of his humanness) and is therefore not at fault.

While my reasoning doesn’t depend on it, if you believe in the concept of oneness—that we’re all ultimately one consciousness differentiated only on a surface level—then that brings you that much closer to the concept of faultlessness. It means that a man is the radical feminist who hates him, the human is the alien who despises humanity, the black guy is the white supremacist, just simultaneously living in another experiential context that causes him to act however he does.

One thing worth delving into is the case where a group of people is grouped together by the choices of living persons. For example, the group called “cops” is the group of all people who were attracted to that profession and chose it. So, if a lot of cops are bullies, you can theoretically still place blame on them (notwithstanding the aforementioned concept of oneness) because they may have chosen to become cops because they’re bullies. While statistically a certain number of individuals may grow up to be bullies, there’s no statistical accounting for which individuals did and why.

Or is there? You could conceive that the bullies being bullies is just a slightly outlying example of the default nature of humans that, relative to the Andromedans, is barbaric, evil, etc. So, as long as a superior species exists, where most or all members of the species are basically good-natured, you can say that any or at least most people who are “bad apples” grew up to be bad applies because they were unfortunate enough to be born humans. Similarly, if there’s an even holier intelligent species somewhere in the cosmos, even those few faults or outliers the Andromedans have can be blamed on the fact that they happened to be born Andromedan. So basically, the very possibility of a perfect race proves that everybody in the universe is innocent.

Unless there are souls and the choose the context it’s born into. But even if that’s the case, it’s probable that they choose to be put into challenging and possible corrupting contexts for the sake of growth or some other noble purpose, rather than that they’re just bad-natured souls. If souls exist, they would naturally exist on a more sublime level, closer to the divine, than the ego from which evil originates.

Note that my bringing up souls and oneness in this essay doesn’t mean my argument is a basically mystical argument; these mystical considerations are merely asides. The fundamental argument remains strictly rational. Likewise, my bringing up of aliens is merely an example. It could just as easily apply to, e.g., males versus females.

Now, going back to the assertion that we’re all ultimately of one consciousness, it bears mentioning that in this case we can forgive the individual who has a negative trait or does a negative thing that doesn’t necessarily trace back to a factor of the group they were born into, because if we’re all one then that necessarily means that we would likely do exactly the same things they did/are doing if we had metaphorically walked a million miles in their shoes.

If you don’t believe that, that’s fine. There’s still the rational fact that it makes no sense to blame an entire group of people, or an individual within a group of people that expresses that group’s negative trait(s), where being in that group isn’t a choice. And there’s the even further argument that if there’s even the possibility of a perfect species in the cosmos, then every bad apple in every other species is necessarily the hapless product of having been born into a less-than-ideal context; either that or the perfect species deserves no praise and only condemnation because they could have been a less-than-perfect species doing less-than-perfect things, but that would be slightly absurd, and we might as well default to positivity.

And not only should perpetrators of evil deeds be forgiven (at least if they did it because of their race, sex, religion, species, etc.), we should have compassion for them and their having been afflicted by such ugliness. This way we all support each other, and doing so will speed up our evolution as a species by a thousand-fold. Perhaps, with all the healing that would subsequently take place, utopia could actually be reached.