The noosphere is the human-made sphere of human knowledge. All the ideas of humanity live in this sphere, and if humans went extinct, so would the noosphere.

Physical manifestations of the noosphere are libraries, text messages, satellites, ethernet cables, broadcast towers that rise like cowlicks.

Homelessness in the noosphere is a complex and intriguing world. Our understanding of homelessness is not just derived from direct observations but from the data collected through tools like the Point in Time (PIT) Count, the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), and numerous research projects that measure homelessness from local to national scopes.

And despite this homelessness data in the noosphere, conjectures exist that range from stigma to apologetic. Some people believe that homelessness is caused only by choices, and others believe that it is only caused by circumstances. If you believe in one and not the other, you are wrong. The combination of choices and circumstances yields homelessness. Drawing any other conclusion by direct observation or complex data is fallible. We’ve heard the stigmas, so I’m writing about apologetics today. 

Today, I heard a chief political officer of a very populated Texas county say that no one can be blamed for their homelessness. I’ve also heard this ridiculous claim in this news source and this news source. The chief executive officer of my city’s largest homeless shelter claimed, “People don’t choose to be homeless,” and “Nobody chooses to be homeless.” In one article, she wrote the following:

Here are some of the true faces of homelessness: the single mother who desperately tries to make ends meet but falls short; the young adult who aged out of foster care at 18; the middle-aged woman fleeing domestic violence and looking for a safe place; the 50-year-old man who suffered abuse as a child and turned to drugs to erase the trauma only to land in prison for things he never dreamed he was capable of doing.

These people, and so many others, walk the campus of Haven for Hope every day. Their faces are just like mine and yours, but with different trauma, different experiences and different support networks. Their faces are ours, just under different circumstances. Homelessness can be a result of trauma in their lives, and they end up homeless because of that unresolved trauma.

What these comments have in common is that both require the assumption that people have no agency in their lives—that people who are homeless are lost sheep with free will akin to ricocheting bullets.

The goal of such claims is to turn people into feckless and oppressed victims, to subordinate them, to impoverish them more than they are so that they are eligible for government-funded programs.

What these claims suggest is even more insidious. If people don’t become homeless because of choices, then they cannot claim they escaped homelessness because of their choices. These are white savior, colonizer attitudes—that poor people are worthless idiots who must be utterly dependent on those with political power. This power is never shared other than through paternalism. This should all make perfect sense when the chief political officer referred to homeless people as “the least of us.”

We have more homelessness data than ever, but homelessness wisdom is scarecly found. One human cannot liberate another human by subjugating them with welfare and making the basis for that welfare the absence of sovereignty.