I was kind of hoping you'd respond. One look at your profile page was enough to dispel the two assumptions I made (Doctor of Iranian descent :), but that was ex

I was kind of hoping you'd respond. One look at your profile page was enough to dispel the two assumptions I made (Doctor of Iranian descent :), but that was exactly my point. There are things we can't know categorically, and there are lots of things we don't know because we are deeply limited and don't have experience with them. Regardless, we can still imagine arguments, which can lead to knowledge, and that is a much better approach than rejecting/dismissing behaviors we don't understand. For the folks who fled to the woods, they were shot at by the Bolsheviks, which you were probably not shot at- so you can't assume your experience relates to them (and the Bolsehviks murdered millions of people during and after the time they fled, which is probably very different from when you fled). Not all people who fled the Bolsheviks went into the woods (my grandfather went west eventually to America), but these people had already been leaving on the periphery of the forests, so retreating into it probably made sense to them because they already knew how to live in it (they would have probably been as bewildered trying to live in the west as my grandfather would have been trying to live in the forest). Likewise with homeless people in America- they live on the streets in the culture they know how to live. They don't retreat into the forest probably because they don't know how to survive there, and similarly probably do not know how to work as a fast food cashier, office worker, or lawyer when they have no money or housing (and all the other prerequisites for participating in the economy). My hunch is that you are blaming them for their condition when this is much better seen as a cultural, social and economic failure rather than a personal one. If entering into the economic trap of poverty is a possibility in our society, we should at least educate people how to survive- at least if we're not going to take the time to fix the obvious failings in our economy I.e., don't blame this on religious zealotry or personal failings- those traits seem largely circumstantial, in the absence of a caring and equitable society