Religious Thinking. Why governments can't see vulnerable people's humanity; nor their own.

If they're going to spend all that money to enact solutions, why not spend money on real solutions? It's because most people in power ... don't want to solve the problem. The problems of society create two-path opportunities. One path leads to responsible discovery, maturation, and healing. The other path is an opportunity to be righteously violent "champions" against imaginary forces of evil. In fact, we're witnessing a late stage of that path, unfolding right now w/ the Reich of MAGA. Our seats of government are *mostly* occupied by Christians. Granted, many Christians are standing up AGAINST MAGA. But it's a mess their religious culture created. So it's partly their own mess they are trying (and failing) to help clean up. Christians are people trained by their religious culture to: a.) see the world as "US" and "Thems", b.) to imagine a world where libertarian free will is "true" (which gives religious minds permission to blame the victims of corrupt systems), and c.) to think violence is a necessary evil, for those who seek to create a "righteous" kingdom. As it applies to America's epidemic of homelessness, ... Kidnapping vulnerable humans and then locking them in tiny cages ... isn't a real solution. Bullying and killing homeless people aren't true solutions either. Nobody wants to be "homeless" in the usual sense of that word. I phrase it this way because there is a positive version of "homeless", when brave and adventurous souls seek to live life untethered. But in this case, we're talking about the common and unfortunate version of being unhoused. Consider the song "Beautiful Loser" by Bob Seger.

What made the character (the guy the song is about) a "loser" was that he wasn't fully invested in EITHER of those viable options. "He wants his home and security". But he also "wants to live like a sailor at sea". Stuck in "dreamer" mode, he never fully committed to either path. He never committed, in action, to either way of life. A version of that problem can be seen in Christian culture.

As a result, he remained fully at the mercy of the charity of others. Now, that works out GREAT for empowered predators who sit atop parasitic authoritarian hierarchies. They rely upon a helpless sheep class who celebrate their own disempowerment as a virtue, and who wait for "rescue" that will never come. We aren't told the backstory for Bob Seger's Beautiful Loser. But the parallels are striking. His own habitualized helplessness forced him to remain humble, because only very likable people are shown much charity; even from friends. For him, personal charm was both 'in his nature' and also a necessary survival skill. And while that song never mentions this, it was almost certainly due to unhealed childhood trauma; - the very same sorts of trauma that religious systems are cleverly designed to create "in the name of God". -Which, again, helps ensure a desperately needy lower class, ever-primed to be taken advantage of. This song speaks truth to power about people who never manifest their own amazing potential. So he remained beautiful, as a person, in his dreamer-charm, and in his social graces. But he stayed a loser because he never manifested his true potential. [#Relatable] Ironically, being unplugged from the societal gears ... does have some silent benefits. ONLY THEN can ANYONE have any hope of transcending the cultural paradigm they're surrounded by. As a result, some such people grow in ways (for some, very quietly; For some, very vocally) ... that no other life-path makes possible. In some ways, it's wonderful. But in some ways, it's a curse. It will cause such a rare person to become extra-lonely, as their journey of personal development so deeply diverges from the people they share this world with. This effect of "divide" worsens greatly if they fall into homelessness.

People become (and/or remain) homeless for many different reasons. Many of those people need help building a durable foundation for a new life. With that help, they'd be fine on their own, ever after. But that help won't come when a society cannot see those people's humanity. So then, it falls to us to help them see it.

Others may need a lifetime of special assistance, due to permanent limits they cannot transcend. Failing to provide whatever help people need ... is the same as killing them. We should be treating that as the attempted slow-assassinations that it is. This means that many of our politicians and police officers are guilty of crimes against humanity. We should stop enabling that. The truest measure of any society's health and maturity ... must be measured in how that society treats the most vulnerable. This is why we need to collectively outgrow the magical thinking that is embedded in the notion of "Libertarian Free Will". PHYSICS determines how people feel, reason, and behave. Society is a machine. That machine should be evaluated by the "output,"; the types of people it creates, as measured by the health, attitudes, and behaviors of those people. To generate better results, we need to keep improving the social machinery. To improve the social machinery, we must rely on scientific understandings (guided by compassion and collective accountability) to inform our social strategies. Science (not magical thinking) provides our ever-evolving understandings of human psychology, sociology, and every other type of health. Maximizing good health is how we maximize good function. Maximizing good function is how we maximize the flourishing of all human social and societal systems. That, in turn, optimizes every metric that good government is appointed to concern itself with. Instead, we spend far more money, time, and human energies on fake-solving our problems ... than what it would take to actually solve them.