Philadelphia is a powerful and brilliantly done movie that makes the point that extreme discrimination causes social death for the object of prejudice. These two clips (below) capture a critical scene of the movie where a homophobic black lawyer decides to take the case he previously turned down in part because he recognizes the subtle but damning social cues typical of ugly discrimination, having experienced it his entire life due to his skin color.

I experienced this same sort of thing first-hand while homeless. At one point, I wrote about the fact that I couldn't manage to make real friends while homeless, even online. People either actively sought to take advantage of my vulnerable situation or actively excluded me socially in important ways, presumably because they were concerned that they would get taken advantage of by me if they didn't.

I had a prior history of people trying to take advantage of me and doing little or nothing in return. This is perhaps a universal experience, but was never so baldfaced or extreme before in my life as it was while I was homeless.

People largely dropped polite pretext, recognizing that I often had no real recourse. With few exceptions, authorities largely colluded with classist prejudice against me. Seeking help was potentially a means to make my problems worse, not better.

This was notably super bad on Metafilter where the moderating staff was a very, very large part of the problem and actively encouraged other members to both exclude me socially and mistreat me. It was notably not true on Hacker News, where the moderating staff did an amazingly good job of treating me fairly and equitably under especially challenging circumstances.

It's notable in part because there is substantial overlap in membership between the two forums, so you can't reasonably chalk it up to HN simply attracting a better class of people, so to speak. This helps make it clear in my mind that moderation was the critical difference there.

Social Death means there are endless small barriers to normal participation in society which, cumulatively, result in a de facto scorched Earth policy. Among other things:

You get thrown out of eateries and other public spaces.

You can't get people to hire you, which makes poverty inescapable.

You can't get your social and emotional needs met, which is literally crazy making, then people blame your intractable and extreme poverty on the fact that "homeless people are all crazies and junkies."

As touched on in the old blog post linked above, my realization that homelessness was a form of social death was triggered by reading stories of intentional disappearances, which often involve faking their own death. I wrote about it to share the thought that homeless people may be able to borrow ideas from such stories for how to deal with similar logistical challenges.

People who fake their own death wind up relying on cash, prepaid debit cards and gift cards instead of a bank account. They often have prepaid phones. Such items are also frequently used by homeless individuals.

But it actually goes a lot deeper than that. Homeless people fairly frequently have the same kinds of overwhelming social, financial and legal problems that prompt some people to fake their own death in hopes of cutting the Gordian Knot they find their lives tied up in.

I can't say what separates those who fake their own death's from those who wind up homeless. Perhaps people with more of a sense of ethics end up on the street rather than trying to game the system. Or perhaps people wind up homeless instead of faking their death in part because they lack large life insurance policies to try to draw upon.

Regardless, I can say confidently that most homeless people are dealing with dramatic personal stories. Those stories frequently involve social drama, like actively looking to escape an abusive family.

Unfortunately, simply being homeless seems to convince people you don't matter. So people tend to think it couldn't possibly be the case that you are a significant negative focus of someone with more money and power than you, which is almost everyone except other homeless people.

This view of the homeless population implicitly or explicitly suggests that no one in housing, much less anyone in a position of authority, could be part of why they are homeless. My experience is that the opposite tends to be true.

Homelessness seems to all too often involve such drama and malicious actors having a corrosive impact on your life. It makes me think of the plot to the song I shot the sheriff where the antagonist of the story commits murder in the face of a corrupt authority making his own life wholly untenable.



I have a long history of dealing effectively and quietly with social drama. I was sexually abused as a child by two different relatives and I got away from them by getting married at age 19 to a guy whose one dream was to have a military career.

I supported his career and it took me all over the world, keeping people at a distance who otherwise would have likely had a seriously corrosive influence on my life without really meaning to. Most people had no idea that I was quietly escaping both a personal, private hell and potentially headline-making drama of a sort that all too often is how such things get resolved, if they get resolved at all.

That personal history both contributed to me eventually being homeless and helped me figure out how to resolve my own problems so I could get off the street and begin getting my life back. Careful and quiet social pruning was a really big part of successfully doing so.

I've tried to write about effectively escaping terrible social problems and starting your life over. A compendium of some of that writing is here.

I've also tried to write about physically relocating to start your life over. I've tried to write about it as a topic in its own right, but the reality is that moving elsewhere can be an effective tactic serving a larger overall strategy for "weeding" your social life. For many people, the desire to move elsewhere is at least partly rooted in a desire or need to do such weeding.

In family therapy, it is generally recognized that the therapist is dealing with a dysfunctional family system. When family therapy starts, there is usually one person being blamed as The Problem, often a misbehaving teen.

Therapists refer to the individual being scapegoated as the presenting problem. They see their job as dealing with the larger social fabric. You can't "fix" a misbehaving teen without fixing the parental problems that are involved in such an outcome.

A person's life is the sum of the larger social fabric of their life converging on one person. A homeless person typically has had many other bad actors in their life which helped land them there, yet most people simply blame the homeless person as someone who behaved badly, obviously.

I don't think I've ever seen an explanation for the choice of title for the movie referenced at the start of this post, Philadelphia. It is set in the city of Philadelphia, but I have always assumed the real reason is because the name is Greek for brotherly love.

Maybe someday we can recognize that a lack of brotherly love -- ie positive, constructive social ties and community connections -- helps not only cause homelessness but keep it intractable. So helping people establish healthy, constructive social ties is a critical component of resolving the problem, if only because it cures the social death that helps make homelessness so hopeless and intractable.