The fundamental contradiction is here: "someone who is clearly not capable of making Right Choices" yet is "even a more genuine human being than your garden-variety obedient nine-to-fiver with a bullshit job and toxic family in 4 kinds of debt to cokehead bankerbros."
Many people can accept that someone is so incapable of making the right decisions that left on their own they might die. That since they're a danger to themselves and others, the state has to step in and take care of them.
The issue is that many of these people then turn around and argue that these people are capable of making their own decisions. Housing first in the U.S. gives these people apartment with no conditions attached. In a lot of cases, the people, since they are "clearly not capable of making Right Choices," make life hell for the other residents of the building, and usually aren't able to escape their problems.
There's a similar disconnect when people say "the shelters are extremely dangerous places, of course homeless people won't stay there" and then turn around and say "how could anyone think that putting a homeless person near them could increase their danger." Apparently, the homeless are the only ones who are allowed to consider the danger of being around homeless people.
Empathy is great. It would be nice if homeless advocates occasionally had empathy for other citizens as well.
A great many people who would be generally accepted as Successfully Schooled in the art of making Right Choices, when left truly on their own - and not out in the woods somewhere, but out here, in the very bowels of this right here civilization - would also rather quickly encounter misery and death.
Do you believe that what I noncoincidentally capitalize as "Right Choices" are actual right choices in some absolute, or at least universally shared, or at least non-self-contradictory frame of reference? I see them more like unilaterally mandated moves in some arbitrary social game that we all have, voluntarily or not, been recruited into (and which persists not in spite of, but because it is fundamentally nonsensical).
Of course, my viewpoint is incorrigibly biased by having witnessed manifestations of empathy significantly more often among the "dregs of society" than in what one would call "polite company".
Anyway, empathy is only the first step. Effecting systemic change takes significantly more right thought and right action than is generally permitted. And those aren't really things one can delegate. (I've found the lack of those things among the "down and out" vs. the "better off" to be about equal, the comparison I was making was along another axis.)
In other words, if the social safety net that you have experienced leads to the outcomes you describe, that means it's a bad implementation of a social safety net - not that we shouldn't have an actual one. Outside of Kafka, people don't just randomly wake up one day to find out they've somehow transformed into helpless monsters. It's a gradual process, and there are people at every step of the way, who are making the choice to allow others to slide into poverty and insanity, for the sake of not disrupting some comfort zone which may not even be particularly comfortable.
Many people can accept that someone is so incapable of making the right decisions that left on their own they might die. That since they're a danger to themselves and others, the state has to step in and take care of them.
The issue is that many of these people then turn around and argue that these people are capable of making their own decisions. Housing first in the U.S. gives these people apartment with no conditions attached. In a lot of cases, the people, since they are "clearly not capable of making Right Choices," make life hell for the other residents of the building, and usually aren't able to escape their problems.
There's a similar disconnect when people say "the shelters are extremely dangerous places, of course homeless people won't stay there" and then turn around and say "how could anyone think that putting a homeless person near them could increase their danger." Apparently, the homeless are the only ones who are allowed to consider the danger of being around homeless people.
Empathy is great. It would be nice if homeless advocates occasionally had empathy for other citizens as well.