[beeflet]

I am not opposed to helping homeless people, I'm opposed to this idea that humanity's main purpose is essentially to harbor as many people as possible who have no agency. I think that we should have greater goals far beyond that. Art, science, exploration. I don't know, take your pick.

Thanks to GMOs and the industrial revolution we have more food than any point other point in history. Almost no one works in agriculture anymore. In the USA we have food stamps and who knows how many pounds of government cheese preserved in case of an emergency. Who is still dying of hunger?

Thanks to vaccines and modern medicine, disease is hardly a problem anymore (with the exception of cancer, heart disease and other problems largely associated with OLD AGE). Who is really dying of preventable diseases anymore?

Still, we're told that hunger and disease must be eradicated before we do anything of importance. At what point can we say that we have done enough?

The homeless people i've interacted with are the bottom of the barrel of humanity, and are typically held back by serious mental illness or drug addiction. They don't have some rich inner world, they are just a blight on the public. The homeless largely drive people to avoid public parks or transportation. Why don't we have public transport anymore in America? Is it really logistically impossible, or is it simply that anyone who can afford to will avoid riding a train or a bus with deranged homeless people? We have public libraries, but they're not shrines to knowledge or places of public gathering as they effectively serve as an air-conditioned building for homeless people to jack off. And you know what, I don't blame them, they are merely individuals at the mercy of this incomprehensible brave new world we are building around them.

There's this star trek idea we have been fed that once we eliminate human need, there will be no more human suffering and we will all be free to do "more enlightened things". We already have a surplus of pretty much everything, and the result is that we are a society of wireheads, our lives lonelier and more meaningless than ever. How would this be improved by further star-trek technology? Holodeck, simulate a hundred prostitutes. Replicator, make me one hundred pounds of crack cocaine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUnu_U2yKXY).

When you look at the kinds of people who went out and explored the new world, it was always the groups of people that were most dissatisfied with society, the pilgrims, the prisoners and such. Those are the groups willing to take a chance for freedom and prosperity. I don't think the future of humanity will be like star trek, it will be more like the ender's game series where the explorers of new frontiers will be venezuelans or brazilians whatever 2nd-world groups of people who are currently having a bad time on earth, but still have the skills and resolve to explore beyond that. I think happiness itself is orthogonal to a having meaningful life, and we shouldn't pursue it directly.

I don't think the solution for drug addicts is more narcan. I think the solution for drug addicts is mortal danger. For the majority of human history, people did not live long enough for their vices to catch up to them. I would liken my attitudes towards the homeless to factory farming: even if the goal is to make the cows as happy as possible, the factory farm is still wrong. It's better to be a free, self-sustaining, wild animal, even if you are suffering than to be a happy cow on a factory farm.

[EMIRELADERO]

Why do you think that it would be impossible to make a society where

a) everyone gets to live like a king, unconditionally, from birth to death, and

b) people have the freedom to do and pursue what they want?

I don't see "some % of the population becoming lazy couch-living larvae" as a problem, because if they truly are "destined" to become that due to their inherent brain formation or whatever, then they were always going to do that no matter what (or drift off homeless in the streets in today's society). The only reason that's a bad thing is that society would then be missing a person who, in different circumstances, would be contributing with labor. But since in this hypothetical future utopia human labor is no longer needed, and that % of people were always going to be lazy or whatever, then there's no loss to be had by simply letting them be!

[6510]

You never hear people talk about what slavery did for homelessness. One can be quite deranged, if a mean and a bed are provided and we beat you with a stick you are motivated to do the manual labor. It is also a sound method to overcome addiction. If pampered people living the good life cant quit smoking, stop drinking, cant quit Valium, cant stop eating. What would it be like to wake up under the bridge with an empty stomach and a crack addiction?

I wont try to sell forced labor but if I had to chose between Fentanyl and picking cotton it would be a rather easy choice.

[IAmBroom]

Fortunately that choice is pure fiction.

No one has ever solved addiction with slavery, as you suggest. Just the opposite: many addicts have been forced by their addiction and circumstances into sex work, and some abducted sex slaves have been forced into addiction to control them.

You seem to have a rich fantasy about what life is like for the impoverished and addicted.

[6510]

Slavery is perhaps the wrong term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressment

[bccdee]

This is just slavery fanfiction. Mentally ill, uncooperative slaves would more likely have been killed to "send a message" to the others, and I expect functional addiction would be encouraged for manual labourers so long as it didn't harm productivity. I don't know what would lead you to draw assumptions like this (well, beyond the obvious).

[6510]

I find it quite paradoxical how a person making great effort towards taking care of themself can some how turn out worse than care from someone who doesn't care about you.

We've made a lot of progress collectively and want to help everyone but end up doing a pretty crappy job.

I know some people who aren't doing very well mentally and do some substance abuse. Their job preserves what little sanity they have left. The periods between jobs are sheer terror, they almost die and might lose their home.

[amanaplanacanal]

Is providing better mental health care for people off the table?

[bccdee]

> harbor as many people as possible who have no agency'

> Art, science, exploration. I don't know, take your pick

What's the point of art, then? Consuming art isn't "agentic," and the point of producing it is consumption. Ditto exploration—does discovered land serve any purpose in and of itself? Or is the point to see it and to live in it? And science—consider medicine. The discovery of a new medication itself is not the point; the point is that people take it and become better, which is not agentic.

Agency is a means to an end, and that end is experience. You can't justify life, individual or collective, in terms of agency.

> Still, we're told that hunger and disease must be eradicated before we do anything of importance.

Gee, I was unaware that we "hadn't been doing anything important" for the past 40,000 years of civilization.

> The homeless people i've interacted with [...] don't have some rich inner world

I don't honestly believe you've interacted with many homeless people that closely. I think you see them from a distance and assume they're basically urban wildlife. Mental health issues are not the obstacle to participation in society that you seem to think they are, and anyway, only a minority have mental health issues. And substance abuse—frankly, if I were homeless, I would probably take a lot of drugs too. What else am I going to do?

Homelessness is an extremely fixable issue, and countries that have supplied homeless people with long-term housing have seen their homeless populations vanish overnight. Obviously. What they're missing is homes. It's extremely difficult to get back on your feet without one, and the shelter system is completely inadequate.

> We already have a surplus of pretty much everything, and the result is that we are a society of wireheads

Do you have any idea how much rent costs in a big city? How much groceries cost? What are you talking about.

> I think happiness itself is orthogonal to a having meaningful life, and we shouldn't pursue it directly.

Then what's the point of living meaningfully? It doesn't sound like it's good for anything. "Meaning" gets thrown around a lot to indicate things we want to defend but cannot really justify on their own merits.