Homeless Nation

One of the most ghastly sights in America’s current societal breakdown is the throng of bungled humanity that adorns our urban landscape. This multitude is known as the “homeless.”

Is there a way out of this frustrating situation? Yes there is, but the first step must be to correctly name the problem and its component parts. As in so many other cases, the Left uses terminology that obscures the true nature of the issue. The word homeless itself is the chief culprit. Anyone who cares to walk the streets of almost any American city can plainly see that the “homeless” are an army of drug addicts, mental patients, petty criminals, and illegal aliens. If we can’t call them what they are, how can we begin to address the problem? As it stands now, with the Left in charge of the rhetoric, we are unable to formulate (sometimes even in our own minds) a coherent alternative narrative.

In the Before Times, when America was a functioning country, very little of this existed. Common sense provided the necessary tools: Vagrancy and panhandling laws were enforced; illegals were deported (or prevented from ever crossing the border); criminals were imprisoned; and the mentally ill and drug addicts were hospitalized or placed in some other institutional framework, far from the nation’s sidewalks.

Another obstacle to clear thinking on this matter is the very notion of mental illness. The Left has been adept at blurring this concept to the point of total confusion. They convinced everyone, back in the 1960s and 70s, that institutionalization was cruel and unnecessary. If someone is misbehaving, he just needs therapy. We’re all a little crazy, right? Who hasn’t had an episode or two over the course of a lifetime? With this muddled thinking, it’s no wonder the state psychiatric hospitals were shut down, and the patients released.

Similarly, most criminals, even those with an established pattern of recidivism, are now usually arrested and then dumped back onto the streets.

Today, those streets are overrun with masses of zombie-like creatures. Our public spaces are being destroyed. What kind of a society puts these desperate and dangerous people where they can threaten the safety of everyone else? The answer is, a society run by nutcases—of a different variety.

I am reprinting below a post I wrote, on the original AWOL Civilization blog (October 2007), that examines some of the ideological underpinnings of this issue.

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                                                        Burglary in Progress

In “progressive” circles, ordinary crime is viewed not as a real hazard that must be confronted in the same manner as other clear and present dangers, but as a type of socio-political dysfunction. A burglar, for example, is not seen as breaking into someone’s home and endangering life and property, but rather as displaying behavior that is caused by a flaw in the structure of society: unequal distribution of wealth, insufficient education, racism, etc.

According to this view, the primary danger involved is to the criminal, who is liable to be mistreated by a “system” whose raison d’être is to oppress the supposed class to which the criminal belongs.

After the Second World War, but particularly after 1960, this type of thinking became virtually unchallenged among the ranks of the caretaker class: social workers, public defenders, activists of one stripe or another, therapists, etc. At its core a neo-Marxist ideology, it began to exhibit new forms derived from post-modern psychology, typified by the work of the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness (1961).

Szasz’s work is multifaceted, but what is relevant here is that he relativized deviancy. This paved the way for the claim that mental illness is a social construct based on power relations. In other words, whoever is dominant in society determines who, and what behavior, is deviant. Under a capitalist system, so goes the argument, the oppressed classes are labeled deviant whereas the upper classes, who cause all the mayhem, are labeled normal.

Szasz’s theories, incidentally, helped pave the way for the release of numerous psychiatric inmates onto the streets—after all, mental illness is a myth—transforming them overnight into legions of “homeless” people.

The influence of Szaszian behavioral relativism has been immense. The perpetrator/victim relationship has been stood on its head. The victim is now the burglar, while the hapless homeowner, as a representative of the social class who makes the rules, becomes the perpetrator of imagined systemic crimes against the burglar and his brethren.

In this world of “progress,” it is the criminal who must be protected. This is closely related to the drive to advance the interests of deviants of all varieties. In any situation where a deviant causes damage and endangers the ordinary citizen, the Left steps in to shield the deviant and place the blame on society. Meanwhile, the deviant behavior is explained away or even elevated; for example, museums displaying graffiti as art. One is reminded here of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s memorable phrase, “defining deviancy down.”

From the point of view of the Left, violent anti-social behavior advances their cause. It demoralizes the majority, riddles people with guilt, employs hordes of caretakers and professional hand-wringers, and in general serves as a tool for blackmailing the West and delegitimizing its culture. When and if the totalitarian Left achieves unchallenged dominance in the West, perhaps we shall see Soviet-style cleansing of common criminals. Then they can say, “see, it was all due to capitalism.”