Seriously, why DO we hate the homeless?
Foundational BQE Works: Laziness Does Not Exist (part I)
This post is part of “Foundational BQE works,” an occasional series or “review” (more accurately, reaction) posts on what I’ve dubbed canon works for anyone wanting to develop their own “Big Quit Energy”: trying to beat workaholism, looking to set boundaries, seeking better zingers to fight back against workhumpers, or simply seeking better attitudes on work.
This post is the first reaction to Dr. Devon Price’s Laziness Does Not Exist. Find the full list of foundational works and their respective reaction posts here.
The best books have a knack for pointing out obvious truths that most of us fail to recognize until we’re nudged to think about them. Dr. Devon Price’s Laziness Does Not Exist fires out of the gate and, just ten pages in, states a most devastatingly obvious point: being homeless* is not a good time.
This should be obvious. Yet, the way we talk about the homeless misses it entirely. The lesson many of us are taught, that we shouldn’t give them money because “we’re letting them get away with not working,” imagines someone living it up, lounging on the sidewalk, pulling one over on us.
Enter Dr. Price (formatting and emphasis mine):
It enrages me to hear people saying these things because I know surviving as a homeless person is a huge amount of work…
Every day is a struggle to locate a safe, warm, secure bit of shelter. You’re constantly lugging all your possessions and resources around…you’re probably nursing untreated injuries…you never get a full night’s sleep…
You have to endure people berating you, threatening you, or throwing you out of public spaces for no reason. You’re fighting to survive every single day, and people have the audacity to call you lazy.”
Any of you stressing about being duped when giving a homeless person a dollar, you can rest easy that they’re likely putting much, much, much more effort (not to mention suffering) into their day than you are into yours.
When I hear rhetoric against the homeless (and the poor in general), it often revolves around them “not contributing” to society--of taking out value without putting any back in.
I’ll humor this for a second and pretend like it’s true that most homeless people don’t work (it’s not). If that’s your criteria for condemning someone, consider this non-exhaustive list of even bigger leeches on the system:
Royalty / Monarchy. They extract extravagant wealth from taxpayers without working.
Most CEOs. I’m not fully in the “all CEOs are bastards” camp, and I’ve seen a handful who care about their employees and put honest effort into their ventures. But most I’ve interacted with more or less stick to traveling around delivering cheery pep talks, giving business reporters empty platitudes, and cashing in their obscene and, I’ll say it, UNEARNED salaries.
Yours truly. At least when I’m at my job, “contributing.” You think I’m adding any value to anyone by making a comfortable living sitting at a desk, building dumb power point decks full of marketing buzzwords, and talking slick? On a good day, I put an ad into the world that doesn’t actively harm those who see it.
You get the point: one could argue that many of us don’t “contribute” to society and extract way more from it than homeless people. And yet, the latter have become an archetypal villain in our collective consciousness, at least in the Americas. Isn’t that weird, when you stop and think about it?
(Sidenote: another traditional American “villain” that I’ve never understood is the McDonald’s worker. Anytime someone is triggered by the idea of a minimum wage, they reflexively say “why should someone flipping burgers at McDonald’s make the same as me?” Putting aside that higher pay for others gives you more bargaining power and will probably raise your wage too….I don’t know dude, why should they not? What a weird fixation.)
Dr. Price proposes an explanation: turning someone into a villain by throwing the label “lazy” at them lets us avoid any responsibility for helping them.
It can be comforting (in a sick way) to dismiss people’s suffering like this. If all the homeless people [are so] because they’re “lazy,” I don’t have to give them a cent. If every person who’s ever been jailed for drug possession was simply too “lazy” to get a real job, I don’t have to worry about policy reform. And if every student who gets bad grades in my class is simply too “lazy” to study, then I don’t have to change my teaching methods…
The people we’ve been taught to judge for “not trying hard enough” are almost invariably the people fighting valiantly against the greatest number of unseen barriers and challenges.”
In a delicious twist of irony, we label suffering people as “lazy” because we, as a society, are too “lazy” to make any real effort to fix the source of their suffering.