Why are some people homeless? Why does the problem persist throughout time and across cultures?

Learning about dominance hierarchies as systems helps see patterns beyond just what the eye sees. Take, for example, the observation that some cities in the US have greater homeless populations than others. People are quick to assign causality to correlation.

To understand helplessness and homelessness, it helps to understand freedom.

If freedom is ability to walk away without coercion or fear or risk of retribution, then people who lived where food and other resources were evenly distributed and all know how to live off of them, than egalitarian hunter-gatherers had more freedom than we do.

That distribution also put personal responsibility on every individual to maintain mutually agreeable relations with the people they lived with because any group could kick anyone who didn’t do so out without feeling like they were killing that person. If the person didn’t clean up his or her act, no group had to accept them.

So people had to learn to get along. That is, they had to acquire and practice virtue, or at least social and emotional skills.

When cultures formed around food surpluses and other resources that were stored and protected — that is, under dominance hierarchies — for a culture to kick someone out meant killing them. That punishment may have felt appropriate for some crimes, but not working doesn’t seem worthy of death.

Today many people say say everyone should get a job if they want to eat. That is, they should contribute to society, but problems emerge. Humans evolved to do everything necessary to stay alive, but not to do most things that modern jobs require. Modern society demands that people do things we aren’t built for. For those who can’t do those things, unless society wants to kill them by exiling them, it has to provide them food, shelter, and other means to live.

To some extent people can help them voluntarily with charity, but even if charitable people can help everyone homeless, doing so creates a perverse incentive for people to live off that charity, avoiding work. Incentive exists for more people not to work beyond what charity can sustain. Then people will increasingly live in streets to the point where others will insist government help, but government helping increases the incentive for people not to work.

The paradox of homelessness and dependence

We think civilization overcomes people being helpless to nature, but humans didn’t evolve being helpless to nature. Civilization makes people dependent on handouts by creating situations where some can’t contribute but those with necessary resources withhold them unless they contribute.

The condition where necessary resources are controlled create homelessness and dependence. Before food surpluses, everyone had to hunt or gather food themselves. If they didn’t, they could be exiled. Then they’d have to find another group that would help them or they’d have to fend for themselves.

Today, if some communities espouse caring for the helpless and homeless more than others, then helpless and homeless people will move to those communities. They didn’t create the problem, but the nature of the problem leads to it appearing there more. All those who control necessary resources contribute to the problem.

Simply saying, “We’ll help you but you have to work in some way that contributes to society” doesn’t solve the problem. If there existed places where people who didn’t fit into society could hunt and gather, societies could send people there (with some training) without it being a punishment. They could learn to live for themselves or with what groups they found or be personally responsible for what happened to them. As long as no place exists where some people control necessary resources, dependence and homelessness will persist.

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