Somebody who is in a state of high-functioning homeless poverty (to the extent you can be mentally healthy at all in such a state) tends to have a personal space boundary defined by a strong trash/not-trash filter for what level they have.
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I'm not trying to make a moral point here, though obviously I have views on such matters. I'm kinda groping verbally around the sensory subject to find words for the phenomenology here. It's literally hard to describe such a scene with words.
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You end up using too many words, and none are quite right. It's like being unable to stare directly at the sun or the void, where "stare" = apprehend with words. The verbal mind kinda slides off the scene, and you're left with just the sensory imprint of a consciousness corpse.
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James Carse had a great bit in Finite and Infinite Games talking about how there's no trash in nature. It takes the ordering effects of the civilized, self-possessed mind to create a trash/not-trash boundary in the environment. And human bodies can cross that boundary.
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Once as a teen, I saw such a person (un-person?) sitting in the middle of a busy street with honking traffic going around him, drivers yelling at him. I thought he'd fallen, so I dodged traffic to go into the street to try and help him up. He screamed at me and refused to get up.
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That 1-minute incident made a pretty powerful impression on me and has stayed with me since. I can now tell when somebody is merely in a bad condition, versus kinda not there at all, having dissociated out of the situation entirely, letting their personal space unravel.
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It was also a very powerful early lesson (I think I was 14 maybe) in the limits on one person being able to help another person, who's been mentally destroyed to the extent of not being a person at all in any normal sense. They are beyond help because they don't exist in a way.
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I used to be a bit of a bleeding heart liberal kid before that incident, but I think that turned me very cautious about trying to help people. That sense that you can only help someone when they are "there" to be helped... you see it in weaker forms in less extreme situations.
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A bit of shorthand/heuristic for this is via Maslow's pyramid. In order for one person to help another at level n, the latter must *exist* at level n+1.
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Replying to
There is a level below physiological needs.. something like, ontological needs? When it's not there, you lack the capacity to run a personality. In some sense, you are not fully human.
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yeah, something like that... a disintegrated self lacking even a bootloader to get going at self-construction

