Pope, Powerwalker Extraordinaire

 There's this hospital.  It sits next to a train station.  Both of them are fairly new, glass and steel.

I was walking to the shopping mall, some fifteen minutes away, when I was stopped by a man.  He was rather heavy set - whether it was due to fluids or because he was just a big man, I couldn't tell.  Stained white singlet.  Scraggly beard.  There might've been some bits of vomit, or alcohol stuck in his beard.

Whatever the case, he smelled of alcohol.  He was clearly drunk.  He carried a half  crumpled pack of beer - VB I think it was.  The green one, at any rate.  In his other hand, he had what I presumed to be the rest of his belongings.  Maybe a sleeping bag, maybe a couple more knickknacks in another duffel bag.  He was wearing shorts, and flip flops, holding together in fairly chilly weather.  

He asked me where the hospital was.  I decided to lead him there.  I walked faster than him - as expected - I had only a backpack, he had three heavier items.  I offered to help him carry his two duffel bags.  He stopped, reached to hand them over to me, then pulled away.  It was a natural reaction to a decidedly unnatural situation.  He had probably been robbed before.

We continued on our way to the hospital.  He was confused, finding it difficult to keep track of direction.  He kept mentioning how he should've stayed on the train, how he should've stayed at the station.

We were about two thirds of our way through our journey when he became impatient.  You can't blame him.  He'd be walking for ten minutes or so with me, and god knows how far he walked before that.  He was carrying quite a bit of cumbersome kit, in cold weather whilst not wearing any warm clothes.  He wanted to know where the station was.  I tried pointing it out.  He didn't seem to fully understand.  He turned around.  I pointed out the station to him.  He seemed happier.  Hopeful, at least.

He turned a bit towards me, and stuck out his thumb.

"I'd shake your hand if I could."

We continued walking.  We had to cross a bridge, one that I had pointed out earlier, to cross the train tracks.  He mentioned something about thinking that I was going to murder him.  I gave a slight chuckle.  What else could I have said?  You can't blame him.

We were about two minutes away from the hospital entrance.  We passed another man - possibly a patient.  He had essentially the same build.  Clean shirt, clean shaven.

"Everything alright?"

"Yeah, everything's fine."

It's an absurd situation, isn't it.  All the while, he, the man I was leading, was more afraid of me than I ever could be of him.  The circumstances of life were such that he was the one worried about being robbed, about being murdered.  In no situation during that trip, did I feel like I was in any real danger, even when he grew impatient.  He had no real power there - I knew where the station and the hospital were.  What was he going to do, wander off into the night?  I had a place, an actual place, to shelter in at night.  I was protected from the elements, well nourished, warm.  He didn't.  And yet that question was directed at me.

We reached the main entrance.  There was an old lady in a wheelchair out there, cigarette burning softly in her mouth.  He thanked me.  I told him to go to hospital.  He told me he had a spot to sleep behind the hospital.  I told him to go to hospital.

"They'll give me a bed for the night."  The rest was unsaid.  They'll give him a bed for the night, and then what?

He told me they didn't care.

I could not say anything else.

I bid him goodbye.  I reached for that same hand.

"I'd shake your hand if I could."

I walked over to the station, and took the bus home.  And as the bus passed the hospital, and as I saw that old lady again in her wheelchair, I saw that he was long gone.

***

Now, the question, dear readers, is:

Was this man a bad person?

You might express shock at my question - indignation, perhaps.

But look at this man as he presented himself.  He was a middle aged man, smelling distinctly of alcohol, and he was holding a box of beer cans.  He lacked all the vulnerabilities people gush about - he wasn't a newly homeless single mother.

He seemed fit enough - certainly his liver and pancreas who have experienced their fair share of woes, but if there were workhouses, he'd be fit for them.

At any rate, you are right to express indignation on his behalf.

The question, then, is not whether or not he is evil, but rather the methods through which evil is formulated.

First, let us examine what is considered evil.

I would like to propose that evil is the passive signifier - the real active force is that of cultural disgust.

Disgust is relatively easy to explore - we've all felt it at some point in our lives, whether it's directed at food that's off or when you see a duck.  Or some shit.

The force of cultural - or sociocultural - disgust is then that same feeling imposed on social groups, structures and the people within them.  This act of wanting to be free of them, of wanting a permanent distance from them is what generates the concept of evil.

Now, this is not to say that the people deemed evil by the cultural zeitgeist are passive - they can fight against such attitudes, and/or they can, through the process of schismogenesis, further delineate themselves from wider society on those very same lines of disgust.  And everything in between those poles, et cetera et cetera.

And this is expressed when populations are compared to diseases or vermin - think of the Jewish and Tutsi rats, homosexuals and HIV, etc.

This is expressed when the poor and homeless are viewed as lazy or deserving of their conditions.

This is expressed when, for homelessness to be empathised with, the subject must be identified with certain other frailties - the reason as to why sob stories are told about the newly homeless who didn't do anything "wrong".

This is expressed when people are uncomfortable about talking about mental health, about suicidality, when they see people as having an experiential chasm.

When people talk about youth crime, and how the kids are stealing cars, how they're scared for their new European cars, it's partially borne out of disgust for these feral kids.

And as such, these people are disgusting.  And as such, they are evil.  As such, they are bad people.

This is a wonderful concept.  If these people are bad people, then surely bad things must happen to these people.  And they do:  homeless people are homeless - their crime and their punishment become one and the same.  Mentally ill people die sooner, and live worse lives.  Juvenile delinquents are trapped by the justice system, such that the majority of so called recalcitrant criminals come from those cohorts.

The failings of the system - the formulation of housing as a commodity as opposed to a right, the complete failure in creating robust mental health systems, the uneven application of processes designed to keep kids out of prison - can be reframed as the workings of a just system.

More than that, these are the functions of a "natural system".  If these people are bad, they must be inherently bad - their circumstances are the results of moral failings.  The system, in punishing them, takes on the corresponding properties - it naturally punishes the naturally evil.

Thus, these systems perpetuate the notion that they are natural - and hence inevitable.  The modern state, and capitalism, are therefore fated to be.

This also serves a psychological role.  We define ourselves proactively, yes, but we also define ourselves against others reactively.  In that same process of schismogenesis, if they are evil for being homeless, for being mentally ill, for being a caught criminal, and we are none of those things, then we must be good.