Do we have a duty to help the homeless? This is obviously a matter of opinion – if you don’t think that your money or effort should go towards helping the homeless, I doubt that anything that I say here will sway that.

This was the recurring theme on the The Good Place (one of my favorite shows): “What do we owe to each other?”

Just this week my wife had a discussion with somebody very close to her who said that she had recently watched a documentary that proved that the homeless are only homeless because they want to be homeless. If true, this would be a very comforting belief because:

• It absolves us from taking any action.
• It assures us that we or our loved ones could never encounter homelessness because we would never choose it.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Of course there are cases where some of the mentally ill do not want to control their illness through medication, but even this is a complicated issue, and the majority of the homeless do not suffer from serious mental illness (and would certainly prefer not to be homeless).

I have met many people (mostly Christian) that strongly believe that the homeless should be helped, but not by the government.  They believe that charities (usually Christian) should help people and people can donate when they feel like it (sort of like President H.W. Bushes’ Thousand Points of Light speech, which proved to not work very well). This confused me at first, but makes more sense when viewed as the hero/victim/villain paradigm. The paradigm is:

In any given situation, everybody sees themselves as either a hero or a victim in their own story – they are never the villain. This usually holds true even for hardened criminals.

Donating money or effort to a cause makes them feel like a hero, whereas they feel that paying taxes that go towards helping that same cause makes them feel like a victim. (I don’t agree with this sentiment, but it helps me understand it better).

For example, a family close to me falls strongly into the above category. What I don’t understand is that they have at least one adult child who is so far on the spectrum as to be unemployable. This is OK as he lives at home and they provide for him, but I wonder what they believe will happen when they are no longer able to provide this assistance. They do not want the government to help him, and I’m guessing that churches won’t provide long term care, so aren’t they saying that they are ambivalent to the idea of their child experiencing homelessness?

This is what most confuses me – the ultra-Darwinian types often only apply the Darwinian logic to adults – rarely to children and almost never to fetuses. If they believe that heroic efforts are warranted to save every fetus (regardless of birth defects), shouldn’t they also be willing to provide some semblance of life for those fetuses after they grow up to be disabled adults that are unable to work? If not, aren’t we just planning for a huge escalation in the homeless population down the road?

It is estimated that 12% to 19% of the homeless have autism. Since adults with autism currently make up less than 1% of the population, this leads me to guestimate that autism increases one’s chances of homelessness by 1,200% to 1,900%.

The number of children with special needs is growing, and as noted in Part 2, it is getting harder and harder for individuals to provide for themselves. Many of today’s children will not grow up with the faculties needed to compete in the workplace. Without proper safety nets, many will end up on the streets.