People from most classes, when they are young, are out to find a vocation and try to do well at it. The people I knew when I was young were all out to be doctors or lawyers or professors (noone I knew wanted to go into business, because the working class and the petit bourgeois were the classes we were all rising out of) and most of the young men did just that, becoming what they wanted to be. That applied to women as well, who also became doctors and lawyers and professors although one young woman I knew didn’t think she could become what she wanted, which was a Rabbi, not possible at the time, and so she became a law professor instead. The same was true of people who did not expect to do better than the working or middle class. They too wanted to take up a place where they could have an occupation that filled up their time with purpose even as it supplied the living that enabled them to support their families and so made of them successful people, coming home after work to the house or apartment that they paid for and to a dinner with their children and a few hours of television before retiring to bed and arising the next day for another long session of work. That is the round of life for most people of most classes.
There is another class of people, a very small class, and I do not mean the very rich, who do not seem to have to work for anything but in fact still have to find a way to make their lives purposeful, both in their occupation and their private lives, nor do I mean people who do not care to live bourgeois lives at all, but at one time went to communes and now otherwise set their sights on leading unconventional lives because that appeals to their sense of themselves and what the world is really like. I do mean that very small number of people who Michael Bloomberg correctly points to as responsible for most violent crime. These are people who have not been properly socialized, which means that they have not learned how to evaluate their own interests but instead engage in impulsive behavior which is self-destructive, something those same people would know if they bothered to think about it. Why is it that they cannot do so? Thomas Hobbes showed how emotions accumulate in complexity from the first level of feeling which people have, which is the same attraction and repulsion that people share with plants. The evolution of feeling peaks dramatically, according to Hobbes, when people acquire the ability to be self-conscious, which means to choose their motives, which is to construct the idea of self interest. People are not naturally given to self interest, even though some economists would like to make you think it is the most basic of human emotions. Rather, it is a construction based on having accomplished other emotions which other psychologists than Hobbes would have include basic trust or the ability to interact with others. It is a long road to self interest even though most people accomplish that. People who consult anger or fear or group solidarity rather than self interest as their motives cannot be appealed to on the basis of what is good for them so that they will, at least, stay out of jail the next time. They regularly decide to do what is not good for them however much excuses can be made that the environments in which some people operate are so hostile that only violence can work in what we nowadays would call a Hobbesian world. To the contrary, violence is the outlet for people who cannot think of alternatives. This violence is not the consequence of Mafia-like business decisions. It is the result of preferring that mechanism of dealing with life, the bad consequences of such activity not far down the line. Drug dealers live high and die young. Again, the numbers are small but the consequences for the quality of life of those who live in the environment of or are in the proximity of such bad folk are significant.
For their part, problems of poverty can be addressed through income transfer, such as Social Security, or through union negotiated wage increases, or through raising the minimum wage. That has resulted in the successful middle class working class of the Sixties, the large scale diminishing of old age poverty in the Seventies, the movement of many African-Americans into the middle class in the Eighties and Nineties. But problems of insufficient mental organization have to be addressed differently: by trying to bring the characters of these people up to minimum standards for functioning in society. That is a much more difficult problem and is not a matter of gender or ethnicity or social class even though those may be correlates of mental disorganization.
People who have not reached a level of personal organization which allows them to pay attention to self-interest come to the attention of the public in a number of different ways. Some come to the attention of the juvenile justice system or the adult criminal justice system for illegal behavior or for the likelihood that they will engage in criminal behavior. That is why a stop and frisk policy in ghetto neighborhoods seems attractive even if it does demoralize people living in those neighborhoods who are just going about their business and so police intrusion in their lives seems offensive and unnecessary, even if it is a fact that minor crimes of vandalism or shoplifting can be precursors of more serious crime. To stop and frisk is one way to nip crime in the bud and seems to have worked during the crack crisis, the police initiative supported at the time by many minority politicians who were aware that the victims of drive by or random shootings were little Black girls sleeping when a bullet came through their window rather than the white girls sleeping soundly in the suburbs, however much racists can evoke the white girl as the one in need of protection.
Other ways people with a weak sense of self interest come to public attention is through welfare departments or hospitals which treat sickly people brought to the emergency room. The point is that whatever the immediate cause of their interaction with public authority, these individuals suffer from the same syndrome: an unwillingness to listen to reason, health and psychological problems from insufficient nurturing during their early years, all manifested by poor performance in school. Even so, it is a bad idea to expand the juvenile justice system to include more and more people who come to its attention. That leads to unnecessary incarceration for people who might be treated differently, any number of remedies preferable to jail, which is just a holding pen without rehabilitative function and so an incarceration is always a failure by institutions to deal with the uncooperative population.
The most probable success route to take is to provide as much adult intrusion as possible into the lives of young people suffering from this syndrome and at as young an age as possible. That is why removing children from unsuitable homes, while draconian, has its appeal, or maybe it is enough to work hard to provide families with the parenting skills so that they can nurture their children. Early education, down to pre-K and even earlier nursery school care than that, also can play a role, even though that would be very expensive because it would mean monetizing child rearing because mothers of poor children would feel entitled to be paid for their labors since a lot of money would be spent on services for children very much like their own. Also, provide young people with organized sources of diversion, like midnight basketball or clubs, the old model of the settlement house to be revivified and extremely well funded so that no child is out there on their own trying to raise his or her own self. It should be added, though, that accompanying more services for the young should be less public demands on those on the verge of adulthood. The answer to failure at schooling should not be more schooling but rather a breather from schooling so that teenagers don’t have to attend high school if they don’t want to because they will not learn much anyway. Instead, they need only report in at opportunity centers so that someone keeps in touch with them, it being a place that allows them to find opportunities to play sports or find work which may not be all that productive and so has to be subsidized but is a way to keep these kids engaged with something until they wake up and decide it is time to make something of themselves.
The difficulty of appreciating the need for programs that turn around the lives of young people is because we so often see the social problem of un-self-interested people through the lens of race. That is because Black ghetto youth come to our attention and to the attention of the media, and so any atrocity one of them commits puts a black eye on the whole community, and defenders of the autonomy of minority groups can complain that the public is infantilizing an entire race by saying they need special supervision or have earned public distrust. But that is only because they are visible rather than invisible, to use Michael Harrington’s old distinction. White people with the same personality traits do not come to public attention. These are the residents of Appalachia and other rural spots where crime and violence are rampant but just taken to be the way it is with those people. Books like “Hillbilly Elegy” treat violence as a cultural or a personality characteristic rather than as a flaw.
Sometimes this neglect of there being a group characteristic is a good idea, as happened when the opioid crisis in rural white areas was treated as a health emergency we could all recognize as such rather than as a problem to be blamed on the community, which occurred when the crack epidemic of the eighties and nineties was treated as a problem of the black community and so measures to deal with it were treated as either racist or neglectful rather than as necessary health measures. But sometimes not labelling a community as infected with the non-self interest syndrome is not a good idea because it means not much energy will be directed at alleviating the problem precisely because it is not seen as a political problem and so politicians, such as legislators in or from Appalachia, are left off the hook.