KOMO reports that a "homeless man" was arrested by the Seattle Police Department "for attacking [a] father, [and] daughter" who were walking on 3rd Avenue toward the Cinerama. If they were heading to that cinema on Sunday, June 17 (the day of the incident), then their plan was to watch Incredibles 2, an animated film about a family of superheroes. The father and daughter were attacked by the homeless man for no good reason at all, claims KOMO. The homeless man was “acting erratic and aggressive.” Then something bad happened that might have involved a knife, and did involve a baton (a head was hit by it). The homeless man left the scene, and was later identified and arrested.

KOMO is, of course, owned by The Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is a conservative organization that owns lots of TV stations in the US. To give one example of its pro-rich agenda, SBG recently forced its TV stations to air a two-minute segment that defended what in essence is indefensible, Trump's family separation policy. So, it's not a surprise that it's running stories about crimes related to the homeless. The rich hate these people, and they want the productive members of their society to feel the same way about them. But let's go a little deeper into this hate. Let's take a dip.

The KOMO article on the homeless attacker also points out that this is the third such attack—an attack by a homeless person—in Seattle "in a month," and that our city's government, which is run by liberals, is doing next to nothing about this terrible and escalating crisis. Though KOMO has basically become a propaganda machine for the party of Trump, it isn't doing anything new or exceptional by generating hate for the poor and indigent.

Hatred of the rich is actually a very natural feeling. It springs from an innate sense of equality. The hatred of the poor is not obvious. It must be manufactured or culturally engineered (which is what I call social engineering). If you go into the human body, you will find that the feeling of equality is old and deep and forms the root of our animal's form of morality (my essay on Larry Clark's film Bully explains this hypothesis, which is backed by the evolutionary anthropology of Christopher Boehm).

What these news stories about the horribleness of homeless people are attacking is our animal feeling of equality, which forms the basis of our sociality, which is the foundation of human cooperation. The aim of these and like stories is to replace this natural feeling with a culturally manufactured concept of poverty and homelessness as an appearance and experience that can be explained entirely by character. It is believed that, if this story is repeated enough times, it will stick, and the cultural will be confused with the natural (the human social). For the most part, those on the Right have been successful at making it stick. The GOP would not exist for a day if the natural feeling of equality was day-lighted and expressed.

It is for this reason that the most obvious foundations of our sociality are evaluated negatively. There could be no human society as we know it without, say, dependency; and yet, as the theorist Nancy Fraser explains in her book, Fortunes of Feminism, it is stigmatized. And this stigmatization, according to her, is a recent development.

She writes that "the shift from a pre-industrial patriarchal usage [of] 'dependency' [as] a non-stigmatized majority condition, to a modern industrial male-supremacist usage, which constructed a specifically feminine and highly stigmatized sense of 'dependency'” occurred only a few hundred years ago. And now in our post-welfare state period, we have a "feminized sense of 'dependency'" that "attaches to 'deviant' groups who are considered 'superfluous.'" The current habit is to associate dependency with the people on the streets and also on welfare. But the idea is not to help, but to end their dependency, to cut them off. But only a little extra thought will reveal how bizarre this is. All of the evidence shows that we are indeed the animal that would have been terribly weak if, as individuals, we were fiercely independent or very strong.

And this is nothing less than the riddle of the human in our perverted world solved. The homeless on the streets of Seattle or the penniless migrants crossing the border with their children are actually much closer to the power (indeed, the superhero powers) of our hyper-sociality, and the rich with their cult of the individual are the farthest from it. And yet, somehow, we view the homeless as deviants and the rich as heroes. What a world. What a world.