by beeflet | 2025-04-30 02:54:48+00:00
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.