Sometimes homeless people are homeless "by choice," but -- and it's a big but -- most of them would choose something else IF something else viable were available to them. If they chose to be homeless, it was because it was the lesser evil.
A great expression I saw on r/homeless was "I didn't choose the choice." In other words, they made a choice -- a decision -- but if they had their druthers, they wouldn't have been homeless because there would be better options available to them. There simply weren't.
Homeless people tend to get a lot of flak off of other people who just assume that the homeless must be stupid, lazy, not trying hard enough, etc. This fact fosters a lot of organizations that are subject to The Shirky Principle: They tend to keep the problem alive rather than really helping people fix whatever is wrong and get their lives back.
When I was writing The San Diego Homeless Survival Guide, my mission statement was: Helping Homeless People Keep Their Freedom. In other words, their right to choose, their basic fundamental agency in life, their right and ability to decide for themselves.
When I write about women's issues, that's my same focus. How do I help women choose? How do I help women move towards goals and improve their baseline agency in life, their capacity and ability to decide for themselves?
At some point on Twitter, I saw a Black woman say about criticisms from White women:
In the book Reading Lolita in Tehran, the author, Azar Nafisi, tells tales of being a female college professor in Tehran. At one point, she got really mad at some of her female students for memorizing passages word for word to regurgitate on tests.
These were women so oppressed and so denied education and the right to think that they had no ability to do what she wanted them to do: Interpret the works and give their own opinions. Simply repeating it exactly was all they could do and they were extremely hurt that she attacked them for it because they greatly admired her and very much wanted her approval, but her expectations of them were out of line with reality.
People who have been denied agency and opportunity need at least three things to remedy that fact:
Good decisions are the ones that turn out well and there's always an element of luck involved in that, so it's wrong-headed to believe you can teach someone to make good decisions. You can do everything right and still have things not go like you expected. A good decision is one that is judged successful in outcome after the fact and no one ever has total control over the outcome.
But you can educate people -- i.e. give them information -- about good decision-making processes (in general and/or specific to a particular use case) and you can then give them breathing room to decide for themselves so they can actually practice making decisions via better processes. Both of those elements are essential to help people move forward without an excess of pain, suffering and lost opportunity.
This seems to be relatively rarely done for individuals whose lives are a mess for any reason. This seems to also not get done for oppressed groups of various sorts.
Instead, it's very often the case that if people aren't actively part of the problem -- taking advantage of vulnerable people and/or helping to keep them oppressed in some manner -- well-meaning types frequently recognize that "They don't really know enough about this to be guaranteed to get it right" and then conclude "I want them to get something good for once, so I'm just going to decide for them."
This denies such people the personal experience and growth needed to be able to keep gains once they've been made. At best, assuming -- and it's a big assumption -- that they were actually given some optimal something, it's like winning the lottery rather than getting rich through some other means.
People who win the lottery suddenly have rich people problems and do not have rich people coping skills. This is not a good thing.
When they were poor, they thought "If only I were rich!" because they felt like money was their biggest problem or even their "only" real problem and all other issues could be solved with enough cash. Then they win the lottery and it often does not go like they imagined.
A great expression I saw on r/homeless was "I didn't choose the choice." In other words, they made a choice -- a decision -- but if they had their druthers, they wouldn't have been homeless because there would be better options available to them. There simply weren't.
Homeless people tend to get a lot of flak off of other people who just assume that the homeless must be stupid, lazy, not trying hard enough, etc. This fact fosters a lot of organizations that are subject to The Shirky Principle: They tend to keep the problem alive rather than really helping people fix whatever is wrong and get their lives back.
When I was writing The San Diego Homeless Survival Guide, my mission statement was: Helping Homeless People Keep Their Freedom. In other words, their right to choose, their basic fundamental agency in life, their right and ability to decide for themselves.
When I write about women's issues, that's my same focus. How do I help women choose? How do I help women move towards goals and improve their baseline agency in life, their capacity and ability to decide for themselves?
At some point on Twitter, I saw a Black woman say about criticisms from White women:
You didn't make good choices. You had good choices.Some folks act like Blacks just didn't try hard enough or something that they have been oppressed in America for hundreds of years. Women also frequently get the same kind of garbage, like we just don't want it badly enough or something.
In the book Reading Lolita in Tehran, the author, Azar Nafisi, tells tales of being a female college professor in Tehran. At one point, she got really mad at some of her female students for memorizing passages word for word to regurgitate on tests.
These were women so oppressed and so denied education and the right to think that they had no ability to do what she wanted them to do: Interpret the works and give their own opinions. Simply repeating it exactly was all they could do and they were extremely hurt that she attacked them for it because they greatly admired her and very much wanted her approval, but her expectations of them were out of line with reality.
People who have been denied agency and opportunity need at least three things to remedy that fact:
- Better options available to them.
- Better information.
- Opportunity to practice making decisions.
Good decisions are the ones that turn out well and there's always an element of luck involved in that, so it's wrong-headed to believe you can teach someone to make good decisions. You can do everything right and still have things not go like you expected. A good decision is one that is judged successful in outcome after the fact and no one ever has total control over the outcome.
But you can educate people -- i.e. give them information -- about good decision-making processes (in general and/or specific to a particular use case) and you can then give them breathing room to decide for themselves so they can actually practice making decisions via better processes. Both of those elements are essential to help people move forward without an excess of pain, suffering and lost opportunity.
This seems to be relatively rarely done for individuals whose lives are a mess for any reason. This seems to also not get done for oppressed groups of various sorts.
Instead, it's very often the case that if people aren't actively part of the problem -- taking advantage of vulnerable people and/or helping to keep them oppressed in some manner -- well-meaning types frequently recognize that "They don't really know enough about this to be guaranteed to get it right" and then conclude "I want them to get something good for once, so I'm just going to decide for them."
This denies such people the personal experience and growth needed to be able to keep gains once they've been made. At best, assuming -- and it's a big assumption -- that they were actually given some optimal something, it's like winning the lottery rather than getting rich through some other means.
People who win the lottery suddenly have rich people problems and do not have rich people coping skills. This is not a good thing.
When they were poor, they thought "If only I were rich!" because they felt like money was their biggest problem or even their "only" real problem and all other issues could be solved with enough cash. Then they win the lottery and it often does not go like they imagined.