The People We Don’t See

BY SOFO ARCHON

Some people are invisible. They exist, yet, in a sense, they don’t exist at all.

You pass them often while walking down the street, but usually, you don’t look at them. Or you glance for a split second without really seeing them. Your attention is always elsewhere.

I’m talking about the homeless.

Although it would be possible to provide housing for every person alive, an estimated 150 million people lack a roof over their heads. Even in the most affluent countries, hundreds of thousands of individuals have no place to call home. In the United States alone, for example, more than 500,000 people live on the streets. Meanwhile, in the same country, roughly 18 million homes sit unoccupied.

This is one of the craziest and most disturbing realities of our time. Yet most people don’t seem to care. In fact, they tend to view homelessness as something normal, natural, and inevitable. Some even believe it’s the homeless who are to blame for having no home. In their eyes, the homeless are simply lazy and unproductive, with no goals or aspirations—hence, they deserve the way they’re living.

But research makes it clear that the homeless are generally disadvantaged individuals who come from low socioeconomic backgrounds and have experienced severe trauma. They are people who were never given the emotional, intellectual, or financial support needed to compete and succeed in our fierce economic system.

They didn’t choose to fail—they were forced to.

The homeless are victims of violence, though most people struggle to recognize this. When we think of violence, we usually imagine it as a direct, person-to-person act—for example, a man shooting another man with a gun. This is known as behavioral violence. But there is another form of violence that is subtler and harder to grasp: structural violence. It is defined as “preventable violence, death, and suffering caused by human-generated institutions, specifically socioeconomic inequality.”

Imagine being born in one of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods in your country. Growing up in such harsh conditions, you were subjected to repeated physical and sexual abuse throughout your childhood. To cope with this painful reality, you turned to alcohol and other psychoactive drugs.

By your teenage years, you had developed an addiction that was soon followed by schizophrenia—a debilitating mental disorder that prevented you from completing your education or finding employment. With no one to support you financially, you had no choice but to take to the streets at the age of 16. From then on, survival became your daily struggle, while your physical and mental health steadily deteriorated, making it nearly impossible to escape your circumstances.

That’s structural violence in action.

Seen from this perspective, homelessness is nothing more than a consequence of our unfair and inhumane economic system. Within that system, people are forced to constantly compete for money and resources, resulting in winners and losers—with homeless people arguably being the greatest losers of all.

To end homelessness, we need to change our economy. But to achieve that, we must first question the very foundation of our society—and that means questioning ourselves, since we are the ones who collectively make up society.

Yet we rarely dare to do this. We’re afraid to look in the mirror and confront both reality and the role we play in it, fearing that doing so might shatter our cherished illusions of who we are. So instead, we deny reality. That’s why we ignore the homeless: to avoid facing the truth we have long repressed.

As filmmaker and social critic Peter Joseph put it:

“The homeless and poor are really walking threats to the way most wish to think about the world. They are threats to the way most wish to think about themselves. They are society’s black mirrors, reflecting the vast denial of our human incompetence. To acknowledge them, is to admit a tragic fault. Consequently, people go out of their way to pretend those ghosts lurking about them really don’t exist at all.”

Next time you pass by a homeless person, I urge you not to look away too quickly. Pause for a moment and acknowledge them. Try to put yourself in their shoes and imagine what it must feel like to live as they do. Think about what they may have endured to end up on the streets and the hardships they must face every single day. Finally, reflect on what we, as a society, could do to alleviate their suffering and whether there is something you can personally do to help.