I’m not sure living in the city off handouts, charity, and free tax payer provided facilities exactly promotes his no money philosophy. His life relies on the things he despises, if the economic collapse he predicts comes he will be among the first to starve to death.
Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans
I've heard the nobility of homelessness and joblessness expressed as an ethos countless times by people who wouldn't care for the work of living off-grid. I happen to work in a town with some of the highest taxes in the country that's also one of the most attractive places for indigent campers. The park across from where I live has become a tent city. I get the pleasure of paying for its "upkeep" while also having to step over needles and human waste every day. A natural extension of the philosophy that people who work for a living are amoral slaves, and that only the indigent are noble is, of course, that it's permissible to steal anything any worker drone has. When I got to the part in this article about his glee at erecting tent cities I really became disgusted. What's beautiful about it? It produces nothing of lasting value. It erodes the physical and social landscape. At best as a society itself, it's a drum circle, getting high, talking about the universe without doing anything much, and escaping. What future is there for anyone who wants all the parks filled with tent cities?
The one thing you can't do without money, without an economy, is take care of anyone else. You can give them things that other people gave you - castaways of castaways. But you can't produce anything new to help anyone. So what claims to be cooperative and egalitarian is really just parasitic.
Maybe it's not surprising that the largest effort made on behalf of parasitism is its attempt to disguise itself as something moral.
No, I think he's missing out on the best part of life - building creative things for others to enjoy and to improve their lives. And elevating the total refusal to add an iota of value to the world from your own existence into a form of sainthood is the apogee of lazy Gen Z culture, isn't it? I pity the guy, as any sane person should, but I also think it's grotesque that hangers-on are attracted to his lame opinions.
Did you read the article? He wrote and distributed multiple books, and is also coding some kind of video game on a flash drive with whatever computers he has access to. I would wager he's building more creative things for others to enjoy than most people who have jobs, and I say this as someone who would not give this man any money or food.
He's entitled to point out how he thinks tax he is paying is being wasted. Deriving multiple traits from this seems irrational. Especially given its based on a paragraph or two of text.
He also has an unhealthy relationship with money. Withholding money from being spent is immoral because that money is needed to pay debts and saving money causes unemployment. Spending all the money you get is moral. Of course you are allowed to spend your money on stocks and bonds to maintain real savings.
It's a pretty natural conclusion from many economics teachings that will highlight money only has value in the middle of a transaction and is virtually ethereal while sitting in any account.
It reduces the multiplier on money supply, which can be harmful in aggregate if it is sufficient to create a deflationary monetary environment. Given how little impact a single earner who isn't Jeff Bezos can make, or even Bezos himself in the face of offsets from central banks, I highly doubt any individual's savings efforts are doing any harm in practice.
You may as well say that taking any water out of the ocean is immoral because if all water was removed, the fish would die.
If you accept that living exclusively off the handouts of others is immoral, then saving money of course is not inherently immoral. It helps you not do that.
You're talking to someone who lived on the road for 10+ years and spent plenty of time in music circles on beaches discussing the nature of the universe. All of which came to very little. I don't work and earn to chase a new car. I do it to give my life meaning and to afford a good future for myself and my family. And yeah, I have every right to look down at the people who think they're being so smart by "not getting in that game". Even on the road, I always worked. I didn't do drugs regularly. And I never begged. I wasn't a parasite, like so many. Often, other travelers would look down on me for that. Where are they now? Lying in ditches, muttering to themselves.
In 99.99% of the cases, they weren't homeless by choice, or ideology.
But yes--most of them thought they were there by choice.
It must be some ego defense mechanism?
For some reason a disproportionate amount were former Programmers? I knew Jim Fox. He was a cocreator of Wordstar, but got zero credit. I watched him slip from employment to wearing a Penguin outfit playing a ukleee begging for change. We used to talk tech, and he would notice someone walking towards us. He would jump out, and do his dance. He was always positive. He once got a job. He went to Goodwill to buy a suit. (He thought he needed a suit for a startup.) He was fired a few days in. That whole cultural fit. He always used to tell me, I just hope I don't die of pneumonia in an alley. Well he didn't get his wish. He died homeless.
There is a saying amoung homeless, and it's this, "Homeless for a year, homeless for life."
Meaning the mind is gone after living like they do. I have watched our local police departments make there guys life more miserable for 30 years.
I'm glad you weren't an entrenched homeless person.
The homeless we have need help. Most are not their by choice if you get them to let their guard down.
I do have some hope in CA. The government might actually do something besides jaw boning about what needs to be done.
Besides long term shelter, I hear talk of safe places to park, and sleep, without getting a ticket, or worse?
Homeless in Dunphy Park, got tickets for not obeying a rule. The ticket was $500. The issuing officer told the IJ, fee is high because we know they won't ever pay it.
I just threw up my hands.
How is issuing a ticket that can eventually turn into a warrant helping out anyone?
I done. I'm starting to get angry. Homelessness has always been a sore spot for myself.
This is a thoughtful answer. I should be clear that I draw a bright distinction between young traveling punks sleeping rough (often by choice) and people who are long-term homeless not by choice. I knew a lot of the former, but only encountered some of the latter as the graybeards in mostly young communities. And I'd say most of them still had some choice, they just didn't see a reason to go back to normal society.
I'm just objecting to the glorification of homelessness as an ethos, and the diminution of people who work as a consequence. I'm not saying the ethos is responsible for all or even most homelessness. It can, and does, draw some intelligent people into making really bad decisions, though.
I'd also add that I've known many people living rough who were happy to have work, and worked hard when they could. And I don't include them in any of what I'm saying about the ethics of surviving on other people's charity, because they indeed did not wish to.
It is realy easy to look down on people for all kinds of reasons. It is much harder to empathize with the challenges and point of views that are alien to your perspective.
Our society needs more people willing to take on that challenge instead of allowing their own insecurities to drive them into contempt.
There's a difference between being empathetic to those that have problems and need help and those that choose knowingly to opt out of the surface level of the system while still receiving its benefits.
While GP comment may be painting groups with an overly broad brush, I'm not sure I see any fault with the criticism of the specific type of person they describe, which does exist, even if it may not be all of that group (or even a sizable minority).
Any policy that is followed, such as "help and show empathy for those less fortunate" should be actually examined and understood, not just blindly applied. People that wish to participate in society but have fallen on hard times deserve our sympathy and help. People that have health problems that cause their situation deserve our sympathy and help. People that decide to opt out of most of our society and so remove themselves from most of the society deserve our respect, or at least our ambivalence. People that say they want to opt out of society but really just don't want to give anything to society (whether that's time, effort, restraint, whatever) but want to get some benefit of society deserve our scorn.
Far too many people get stuck following the actions of an ideology rather than the precepts. Not everyone that appears homeless is "less fortunate" in their own eyes, and giving to them is not necessarily helping in a way that the precept of helping those less fortunate espouses, but instead a way to trick yourself into thinking you are doing something good without having to put thought into whether you actually are.
In general, we could all do with a lot more introspection as to what our actions are actually doing and whether they serve the purpose we think they are. As a side benefit, a lot of bullshit from both sides of the political spectrum wouldn't survive the light of day some critical thought brings.
You seem to be aligning me with one side or the other. I think my criticism applies equally to the people who look down on people for particpating in the system as to those who call them parasites.
Critical rational thought can take you all sorts of violent and negative places if you don't make an effort to pair it with empathy and a genuine effort to understand the perspectives of those you are tempted to despise.
Giving in to "rational" dehumanization and hatred is not going to actually help anything and will probably make things worse.
> You seem to be aligning me with one side or the other.
I'm not sure why you think that, or even what the "sides" are in this case. I thought your response seemed a bit canned, so used it as a jumping point to talk about how I think a bit more critical thinking is good in some of these cases.
And critical it the operative word, not necessarily rational (as many seem to interpret it at least, to me rationalism without accounting for how it affects the human condition is somewhat worthless). The only reason critical thought would take you to violent and negative places is if you're doing it wrong. Lack of critical thinking leads to violence and negative places far more often from what I've seen.
> Giving in to "rational" dehumanization and hatred is not going to actually help anything and will probably make things worse.
This isn't about dehumanization. It's about not blandly lumping people together without forethought. That works for not assuming all homeless are drug addicts and criminals as well as it does for not assuming they're all completely upstanding citizens that for the quick right type of help could be your neighbor. They are an amalgamation of many people in many circumstances, and we should remember that and consider that.
If you are going to split hairs between "rational thought" and "critical thought", you'll have to elaborate because the two seem to be pretty much synonymous.
Generally, anytime you find yourself looking down with scorn on something, that is a great indication that there probably is something you don't understand and an attitude of contempt certainly won't help you figure out what that is.
> If you are going to split hairs between "rational thought" and "critical thought", you'll have to elaborate because the two seem to be pretty much synonymous.
I thought my aside about "rationalism" did that. For some people "rational" is loaded, and since you brought it up, I wanted to address it somehow. Whether true or not, some people equate rational with rationalism, and rationalism with not accounting for feelings and how people are in reality.
> Generally, anytime you find yourself looking down with scorn on something, that is a great indication that there probably is something you don't understand and an attitude of contempt certainly won't help you figure out what that is.
I agree in the general sense. But the only way that can be true in every sense is if nobody ever deserves scorn, and I think we can agree there are plenty of people that do deserve it because of their actions, from the extreme such as rapists and murderers to the mundane such as narcissists that they deserve whatever good fortune they can find or take, regardless of impact on others.
If you agree there are people worth scorning, the question in not whether "generally" this is a time or not, but given the specific subgroup in question has been described as those that decide they don't want to contribute to society and state that as the reason to live mostly outside it, but then want to receive the benefits of society, deserve that scorn. That is, to be clear, and as has been stated previously a few times, not all homeless people, but specifically those mentioned by the original commenter.
If you want to make a case that those people are misunderstood and perhaps their reasoning is X, Y or Z, feel free to do so, and I'll consider it. If you just want to defend them because they're part of a larger group you think deserves help, or because you feel compelled to defend them on principle, I ask you what purpose that serves? Critically thinking about the subject and coming to a better understanding is laudable, and defending something to cause some critical thought is as well, but I think we're beyond the point you could say no critical thought is being given to this, so unless you have actual points to add about this subject, I'm not sure what merit is left in calling out negative assessments as inherently bad or based only on not understanding.
Another way of looking at this is that if I had said serial rapists deserve our scorn, would you say that I'm just not understanding the situation or the people in question? If not, then that's an example of when scorn is sometimes acceptable, and we're left with whether the subject in question is actually deserving of it. In this case, you aren't providing any evidence one way or the other, just making broad assertions about thinking.
I don't despise, dehuminize, wish violence upon, or lack empathy for crusty street kids, because I can fully relate to them. And when I was one - or at least traveled as one - I was one of the few who bore no ill-will toward the people who chose to have cars and homes and careers and children. When I was 22 I thought the careerists had a limited view of the world: I still do. I just realize now that the punkabestia have a limited view, too. As you say, no one should be blinded by their social status into dehumanizing anyone else. But by the same token, it's possible to arrive at the conclusion that some things lead to objectively less miserable personal and social outcomes than others, based on experience, without apologizing to people who are still blinkered by certain views.
I'm talking about an individual's relationship to society, not a born condition. It's a choice. This particular guy made it his life's mission to act in a parasitic fashion. No one's dehumanizing him, they're lionizing him. He's degraded himself more than any external characterization of him could do justice to. The word fits.
>You're talking to someone who lived on the road for 10+ years
>I have every right
>I always worked. I didn't do drugs regularly. And I never begged. I wasn't a parasite, like so many
>Where are they now? Lying in ditches, muttering to themselves.
Dude, you're a narcissist. You're free to change your values over time but no one else is? Maybe the next person squatting in your town square is a former you.
Once again, people have different values. Maybe that leads them to your hypothetical ditch, maybe it gives them motivation to be like yourself. Or maybe they find happyness some other way.
If someones choice of values leads them to wilfully and proudly become a parasite and a burden to the people around them, then they are the ones with the mental disorder.
> Maybe the next person squatting in your town square is a former you.
Maybe they are! And if they are, eventually I hope they stop listening to the romantic rubbish about what "freedom" consists of and what capitalist society owes them, as spewed by the leaders of camps and troupes who are mainly interested in keeping a parasitic lifestyle surrounded by runaway girls and boys who'll do what they say. Those
visionary camp leaders are the real narcissists. This one gives his game away when he talks about how he should be the one to manage the shit show when money is abolished. It's all wankerish nihilism dressed up as Marxist dialectics, with the dialectic controlled by someone with slightly more reading than their followers.
FWIW, I upvoted this comment. I agree it's fine for people to have different values. Eventually, me-on-a-beach will hopefully find values that lead toward self-actualization and personal growth, and away from sloth and the bitterness and wasted time of jealousy towards people who have more. In the interim I don't blame them, I just think their philosophy is childish and poorly conceived. If that makes me a narcissist, so be it.
> Dude, you're a narcissist. You're free to change your values over time but no one else is? Maybe the next person squatting in your town square is a former you.
This was exactly what was going through my head while reading their post. That, or that they are making up a BS backstory to gain some sort of credibility, but there is no point in that sort of speculating.
Please don't think I meant literally saving money to buy a lambo. More a general trend towards unhealthy materialism that is seen as only being a positive. ie my bank account is bigger than yours beause I'm better than you.
A parasite he may be, but people can do a lot more harm as part of the economy than that.
It’s simply a question of leverage, even something as seemingly pleasant as Disney World causes significant direct and indirect ecological harm in ways a homeless person doesn’t. And frankly you can find plenty of far worse examples than Disney World.
“you can't produce anything new to help anyone.” Suggests only economic activity is a benefit, as if talking to another person or giving a hug can’t enrich their lives.
Pointing out a moral standpoint is more harmful than what’s being criticized is hardly whataboutism. It’s a demonstration that taking part in the economy is not inherently superior rather than the posters personal preference. Which therefore directly counters their morality argument.
But it's not just about economic benefit. Most people don't work to afford toys for themselves, they work to support others. At the end of the article, this guy expresses sadness that he's estranged from his two children as a result of his choices, but then attempts to justify it by saying he's not going to let having children keep him from making a better world for his children - a world in which there is no money. I would think his kids would probably prefer having a father who was present for them than one who couldn't see them because he'd deluded himself into thinking that a complete lack of effort was his way of saving the world.
If you can't take part in your children's lives as a result of your choice not to take part in the economy, then you're sort of failing at both moral standards aren't you?
> If you can’t take part in your children’s lives…
That’s a question without an objective answer. For example some people are better off in the foster system. It’s an oversimplification to assume some kind of standard life for other life choices.
But by the guy's own standard, the most important thing for him is to make the world better for his children. Even at the cost of actually knowing his children. Subjectively or objectively they may be better off with him not in their lives, but I fail to see how that bolsters his moral argument for how society should work.
What moral standpoint does Disneyland represent? You've far from proved the net harm of Disneyland, but what has that got to do with homelessness in BC?
> It’s a demonstration that taking part in the economy is not inherently superior
sure, but this is a straw-man. The proposition isn't that participating in the economy is automatically of greater value, it's that not participating (other than to leech off it) produces non.
> What moral standpoint does Disneyland represent?
The GP listed doing anything productive as a moral stance, Disneyland is therefore part of that anything.
> net harm of Disneyland
Promoting millions to take longer trips and regularly visit the middle of Florida directly causes travel related pollution. Simply developing that land is harmful to the local ecosystems. Producing all the merchandising is similarly an issue.
> It’s possible to oppose this guy and Disneyland.
If you oppose Disneyland for environmental reasons you’re hard pressed to then support the most of the rest of the economy. I would welcome an argument that draws a line there without excluding say suburbs.
So does any activity that produces CO2, including natural forest fires, and breathing.
The whole idea that CO2 is harmful, came from modern scientific knowledge - also part and product of the economy/society. The same economy could come up with solutions e.g. carbon taxes or other tech advances.
You are taking a complex issue, CO2, the economy and its planetary effects, and turning it into a simplified concept of "harm". Humans have consumed some amount of CO2 forever, it's only an issue now because there are significantly more humans (who also create more CO2, but that's beside the point of the first).
Nothing about this the hobo lifestyle suggests it will produce a solution to this problem beyond the fact that it's unlikely to support communities of a certain size for other reasons.
> Supporting the odd philosopher poet is the exact function of society, in my opinion.
Have you considered that society should also be the natural predator of the odd philosopher poet so that their numbers do not become problematic for their environment?
Why would society need to even be a predator though? The whole point of society is that we organized into large enough groups that what the "natural order" was no longer applies: societies literally rise above the natural order by replacing that order with something we as society control.
That means things like corporations, and working hard for your money, but also means things like "meaningless art", and allowing people with permanent disabilities to still live a normal life, where the fruits of society get to be enjoyed by everyone in society, skewed towards different demographics based on your favourite -ism. And it doesn't matter which -ism you subscribe to: the whole point of society is that we don't need this ridiculous "natural" nonsense. We beat it. It can stay outside. We replaced it with society.
>the whole point of society is that we don't need this ridiculous "natural" nonsense. We beat it. It can stay outside. We replaced it with society.
When the silent part is said out loud. "We" didn't beat anything, and "we" certainly aren't gods that managed to counter natural law, despite the current zeitgeist that likes to pretend it is so.
Humans are predators, and to pretend otherwise will be the folly of our species. One need not look any further than the political, corporate, or social elite to see what predators look like in so-called civilized society.
What a wonderfully Machiavellian and incomplete argument, given the history of societies all the way up to today. You'll go far, kid.
Next time though, don't make the classic mistake of talking about the group by talking about individuals in the group. Society is, and this one's confusing if no one taught you this before, not the same as the sum of the behaviour of individuals in that society. They're entirely different rungs on the ladder of abstraction.
Clever condescension, you'll go a long way with intellect like that, kid.
Nice job dropping 'given history' in there, you win! History shows that is a fantastic argument and adds significant value to your post.
Next time, though, try to use that big brain of yours to figure out how to address what I said instead of resorting to reddit level dialog and a straw man.
Did you genuinely believe that I was referring to every individual human? That's an awfully Machiavellian take on what I said.
Illustration counter to assertion (not an argument): "Of course humans have red hair, just google 'natural redhead'"
Society is, and this might be confusing if nobody's taught you this before, filled with people with disproportionate amounts of power, whether social, capital, political, corporate, legal, or other. This might be scary to your sensibilities, but predators are attracted to positions of power. I don't think anyone of consequence disagrees with this.
We obviously agree here, because you based your entire straw man on the fact that they don't represent every single human everywhere.
I would however like to understand how you think we beat 'natural law' and the predators with this mythical society when you also think that they are the richest and most powerful in said society.
Society "beat" predators? I think most people who have been victims of systemic or institutional oppression would disagree here. I know every police victim I have worked with sure would.
Or maybe I'm wrong and they are all just misunderstood when they beat, steal, lie, and kill the underclass while they destroy our planet and laugh about it.
Foraging scavengers, who figured out that the stone used to crack skulls of already-dead animals could also crack the one of animals that were still alive.
I mean, to some extend they’re self regulating. Few people have the stomach for a life like that so the total amount of philosopher poets is likely a function of your total population.
How many crazed homeless drug addicts per philosopher poet do you find acceptable? Is it somewhere near the current 10k to 1 level? Of course you are willing to patronize a cabal of homeless on your block as well.
Our society used to have places for these people, like farmhand jobs, cheap poor houses in the city, etc. Perhaps it is a failure on our part that we have now have nothing better for these people then a desire to push them out of sight. It seems they get a lot of blame for not being able to keep up with an increasingly demanding modern consumerist society.
> How many crazed homeless drug addicts per philosopher poet do you find acceptable?
I think the only acceptable number is zero. The philosopher poet clearly desires this life. The crazed homeless drug addict would much rather inject his morphine at home.
In other words, I think the fact that a drug addict is homeless is incidental. They should be treated because they’re a drug addict, not because they’re homeless.
Look: a “social Darwinist”! I should get a spotter's guide.
If society preys on philosopher poets, we don't get philosophy or poetry, our ethics never develops, and the fundamental principles of society don't improve, limiting how much technological progress can raise the standard of living. I personally call that a bad outcome.
I don't think it's accurate to claim that ethics follows moral philosophy, and certainly most philosophers would not endorse that viewpoint. Philosophy doesn't tell society how to improve or behave. Philosophy helps question and understand, it hasn't historically been a driver of change.
Driver? No. Heck, I hardly know any philosophers. But most of our big ideas were written down by a philosopher and then, decades later, read by to-be-important people at the beginnings of a social movement.
Social philosophy influences societal change, by providing ideas. Without philosophers, activists have to be more visionary than they already are, making them rarer.
(Moral philosophy, not really, I'll agree with you.)
On the other hand there is such a thing as a statist parasite (think politicians, bureaucrats, crony capitalists, etc.), and hobos with a belief they're superior to others and love to do virtue signaling as making a life decision to live until the end of their lives supported by others, directly or indirectly, is something very, very wise.
I think you misunderstand the scale at which I’m thinking.
This guy has amused me for, say half an hour of reading the article, and for a bunch more while replying to the comments.
It’s possible I would have been as amused by a corporate drone’s story, but it’s doubtful. I read enough of those, so the marginal utility of one extra story is very low.
That said, I’ve met philosopher poets on the street before, and the encounters are always memorable.
A guy of whom we have only embellished apocryphal stories, and who I have the suspicion either never existed or wasn’t nothing as portrayed afterwards.
The various “legends” around him like meeting Alexander the Great and dying at the same time are also suspect as hell.
And for all of that, what we have is what exactly? A philosophical justification for being an asshole I guess? The world would have been pretty much the same if he had not existed.
Socrates was a stonemason --- effectively a skilled labourer or tradesman, but not wealthy. He was a footsoldier. In a culture where most were slaves, he was a citizen, but not a member of the aristocracy (notably contrasting with Plato). His long-suffering wife Xanthippe complained of his failure to provide for the family, and Socrates lived simply.
Socrates as a citizen was likely the third of Athens' four classes: slaves, metics, citizens, nobles. Not destitute, but neither wealthy.
It is easy to radically underestimate how much food a human needs every day and how hard it is to acquire, especially when living a non-sedentary life as a hunter/gatherer.
Trying to accumulate 2000+ calories per day growing food requires a rather significant farm and skill (and weather); doing so with meat requires daily hunting, or a permanent storage facility with refrigeration (unless you like salt and pickled meat).
Doing this while trying not to die from exposure or injury is even more challenging.
I don't think that comment is underestimating it, but rather saying that living off the grid would be impressive because it's hard. Living off of charity or the work of others isn't impressive.
It's also a little harder these days with how barren the environment is, comparatively. The oceans and shorelines especially, past generations could walk on down and gather lobsters by hand. Good luck now. Maybe after a few hundred years of human population collapse.
I grew up on Long Island in 60's, which is a bay (called a "sound", like Long Island Sound) bordered by states CT, RI, Mass, and NY/Long Island. Many relatives caught lobster there, but no more. In the summer we would walk down to low tide and pull steamers clams out of the sand and cook them on holidays, along with periwinkles which are 4" snails (not the same as French periwinkles which are tiny!!) Now all areas are polluted and shellfish cannot be eaten. Is it crazy/sad? Yes.
Yes, and in the northern hemisphere at least, you quickly realize that foraging for plants is a waste of time. There just isn’t enough calories.
Re daily hunting, meat actually keeps for quite a while when hung in cooler temps (heat is not your friend when hunting). This is routinely done with eg deer. And it is easy to dry meat of all sorts, or even smoke it as that has the same effect and also makes it even more delicious.
There's a lot of plant and mushroom-based food to be had during the end of the summer, though, and one would have to forage for plants first thing when spring came in order to get a nutritionally complete diet.
That's far more complicated than you'd suspect, at least in the US. There are a litany of policies that criminalize self-sustainment. Granted I suppose one could consume pests without being harangued for poaching, but that doesn't mitigate property laws, and all property is owned if not privately then publicly and in either case most often requires license to be there, whether explicit or implicit. Certainly doing any reasonable amount of cultivation is seriously complicated by this. So you're legally barred from hunting, barred from cultivation, and you're left with scavenging or gathering and that's highly dependent on a number of factors. Granted the probability of being found out in the depths of the wild are minute, it is nonetheless a serious existential threat. Let's just say we're at the mercy of our captors.
Having addressed the question of legality of rogue individuals... And if an individual exploiting the wild is illegal, so is the group. Humans are social animals. Going it alone at length in the arboreal breast of mother nature would be extraordinarily taxing mentally for most people. That alone is a crucial disincentive, and with the legal disincentive it atomizes people and forces even the highest aspirants to dissolution of the ideal. And that's before the process is even allowed to occur. The impacts of each added person to a group of rogues would compound, and I'd posit exponentially. And with that impact the footprint naturally grows, and with the footprint the risk of detection. At the end of the day the risk assessment points to certain failure.
So the next best thing is urbanized scavenging, not because it's the idyllic means, but because it's the only certainty. If you offered these people license to fuck off, I suspect they would do just that, perhaps not all, but most. I know if I was given license, alongside my friends, to get out of dodge we might just take up that offer. But the whole concept of real liberty, real autonomy, real independence - that's an existential threat to the status quo, to the system, and to the policy makers and corporations that own them, and to the very few of those who pull the strings.
Reminds me to recommend "Grapes of wrath" as a wonderful book to read, surprisingly relevant today, off my head there is the description about apples being too expensive to buy fresh so being sold to be canned... and the old guy having worked and suddenly having money in his pocket, not knowing what touse it for so buying some useless trinket....but maybe someone has a link for an online version so I could copy paste the relevant excerpts...
>if the economic collapse he predicts comes he will be among the first to starve to death.
Or among the last, being used to it by now. Beggars have existed under all regimes and all kinds of economic collapse. Cushioned middle class people however, didn't do as well under the latter...
Being in Victoria certainly helps with his lifestyle too. It's probably the best city in BC you could hope to be in if you're homeless. It's a nice city, there's lots of green space, lots of facilities around for the homeless, a relatively small actual homeless population then the tourist homeless population of young people camping for fun.
I really doubt he'd be able to maintain that lifestyle anywhere else. Definitely wouldn.t be able to live like that in Vancouver.
Hi, someone from Victoria who hasn't bothered to live there for a long long time.
You used to be able to enjoy nice parks with your kids without worrying about junkies living in nearby tents taking up what used to be sports fields throwing used needles into the playground. Now they put up warning signs for parents to sweep around to make sure that this isn't a problem.
I'm never going back, it's gotten that bad. I know so many people who have died from overdoses. It would have been a nice place around 12 years ago but after around the Vancouver olympics, the region has turned into some kind of black hole of misery and misambition outside of the wealthy condo social bubble and being on the wrong end of the ensuing wealth disparity. Unchecked money laundering on the housing market was a huge problem leading to this kind of scenario as well. Almost none of my friends who stayed there are the successful and happy ones. Even if you have like two decent blue collar jobs you may still end up living on a friend's couch for long periods of time just for a lack of affordable housing where your neighbors aren't doing shit like moving a stove at 4am because they dropped their flap of fent-adulterated heroin behind it (my own experience in the last apartment I rented before it really went to shit out that way -- that still cost me like 1000/mo)
Nice weather means that the rest of frozen canada sends their local problem drunks on greyhounds to live in the only region where they don't get found frozen to death in bus stops. They do this in the USA, too, quite sadly.
Have to admit, it was a few years ago now I was there. I was just mostly comparing it to the situation in Vancouver. A friend of mine lived there for a while before moving back to Edmonton. He described it a lot like what you say. Overpriced, not many jobs. He ended up couch surfing for a bit after he couldn't afford his apartment any more before he ended up leaving.
>Nice weather means that the rest of frozen canada sends their local problem drunks on greyhounds to live
Sounds like what's happened in the town I live in over the last 2 years or so. The problem's gotten bad. Though it's not so much drunks but fentynyl and meth addicts.
It is incredibly ironic that the very people that claim the system is bad, effectively cannot survive on their non-conformist lifestyle without the current system. In a way though, it's no different than a religion. Priests cannot effectively survive without parishioners giving them money. Priests likewise preach things about the modern era of morality are bad and we must change them. So if you think of these vagabonds as "roving priests" then what they are doing is of the same concept. Although the difference between a local priest and some modern hippie rhetoric is a priest has relationships with his congregants. The idealist vagabond does not. So it's much harder for them to garner any support.
Traveling Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia live solely on donations. They don't necessarily have an individual relationship with "parishioners" any more than this particular hippie does (probably less). Whether it's beneficial for anyone for too much of society's resources to be allocated to the practice is a question. If you view spiritual comfort and the pursuit of karma as a kind of social glue, then some amount of tolerance for it might be positive for society.
I have to say, I agree with the traditional Christian practice that discourages this sort of monasticism, called gyrovagues[0] in the West. The more usual forms of monasticism, although they accept donations, are expected to me more or less self-sufficient on a daily basis, and thus less parasitic on society. Either a monk would live in a monastery and work to support the monastery, possibly selling some of the products to the outside world, or a monk would live on their own in the wilderness, only occasionally meeting with a priest and generally actively avoiding donors, at least for the first few years. An exception is anchorites, who generally spend all their time in prayer and do rely on donations, but they generally don't move around from place to place.
Even the large monasteries over time became less favored by the populace in Europe, since they had acquired enough land through donations over the centuries that they often began to act more like landlords.
In summary, those who wish to live outside of normal society, particularly economically, should strive to avoid being parasites, and, failing that, should not move from host to host.
The only difference is, at least in my experience, many hippies don't actually do the things necessary to create change. They are individuals touting a known consensus. It's the reason why green measures generally fail in politics but stupid things like protecting the second amendment are upheld strongly. There is no centralized institution to fight for these beliefs. This is why you see the Freedom From Religion Foundation actively fighting against many religious bills. It has a goal, the ability to garner funds, and a means to support people to achieve them. Most hippies are just getting by and eventually wake up realizing they need a job to survive once the donations wear out because they don't have a stable supply of people believing in their individual cause.
"The system" is just the full stack of human avarice. The eradication of which had proven to be nontrivial throughout recorded history. As soon as someone wants more than the next guy, you have a system.
Why is it ironic? The system may be bad, or it may not be, but the fact that it is virtually impossible to survive completely outside it is not evidence of it being bad or not.
Maybe one could see it as a form of civil disobedience ... surely it counts that the person lets another person take the job he might have taken and ultimately uses less resources than the average worker (commute, buying power, paper trails etc) ... also one might argue those opting out help push up wages... I personally am in favor of working as little as possible, outlawing"big corporations" encouraging artisans and entrepreneurs and veggie farmers...
I don't know what to say to the poster about the druggies.. except maybe have some compassion and consider maybe society should reach out and help more (maybe he lives in the US where the recent oxycodone epidemic was caused by the permissivness of said society)
Yes, he receives handouts, but you left out his values of simplicity, community, and such.
Jeff Bezos, the Walton family, and many peers also live off taxpayer money and impoverish poor communities by siphoning money from them, plenty of regulatory capture.
We could probably 10x the number of “handouts” as you call them, at least in the US, and nothing would change.
We’ve auditioned it already: $4T in stimulus, the $600/wk employment checks, etc. What negative negative impact really did that have on an average person’s day to day life? “Handouts” made pay rise for the first time in decades.
Even the landlords. I don’t know any landlords who are on the street because of the rent forbearance and eviction moratorium - and I don’t even agree with those policies.
Inflation is bad for lenders (i.e. people keeping deposits in USD). People who work get paid based on their real value which means their pay rises if inflation rises. Of course it maybe difficult to get a raise for your current job but switching jobs will get you a raise that catches up to inflation.
Note that there has been a shift in bargaining power since 1980 that is closing. That gap is not the result of inflation because inflation alone doesn't give employers bargaining power. If anything it increases bargaining power of employees vs the old job because the new job always pays more in nominal terms.
It's also incredibly bad for pensioners, and often there's a lag between cost of living increasing and wages increasing that can be quite painful until things equalize, which sometime never happen.
I think pensioners would be covered as “lenders”. I interpreted lenders to mean those who have savings or are the beneficiaries of savings, such as pensioners, in addition to the obvious meaning of entities that hold fixed-rate debt as an asset.
I don't understand if we can say this inflation isn't just the surge of people who didn't spend a lot on travel/eating out/etc. now splurging on all the things + constraints on goods like cars due to the pandemic causing supply chain issues. It seems to me to me a relatively temporary, same as how the April 2020 market dip didn't really mean anything come April 2021.
Yes, I don't really get why this often gets dropped. I would assume inflation goes down next year if the supply chains get better again.
A lot of the inflation I saw in the pandemic was perishable products where the supply was cut in some way or another. As long as people that want it badly can afford more they'll pay more for it. This is inflation, but it's not clear whether the money supply or the supply chains are the reason. The money supply was high in the preceding years as well, not leading to such high inflation.
The USA was a fine place to live, many people happily gainfully employed, many investment accounts booking gains, labor and capital coexisting in harmony, when inflation was double what it is now.
Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans