Of Cowards And Grandmas

Everything in this post is true

[audio available here, courtesy of AskWho]

A Backpack And A Dream

When my brother was 8 and I was 16, he ran away from home. It was a nice afternoon in late spring. He let me know he was going as he packed up his backpack, because we were very close.

“Where are you going?” I asked as he stomped out the front door.

“I don’t know yet. Away from here,” he said.

“Can I come with you for a bit?” I asked. He allowed it. He told me all about he was sick and tired of our parents’ tyranny (he used smaller words) and how he wasn’t going to take it anymore. He had an entire world he could live free in, and he was going to find a way to make it out there.

“It’ll be pretty hard at first,” I told him.

“That’s fine, I’m tough,” he said.

“I know a place you can stay for a while, if you don’t mind helping out,” I said. He looked at me suspiciously. “They have a spare bed now,” I told him “and they’re pretty nice.”

“Nice how?”

“Well, they have a boy a couple years younger than you that you can play with. They don’t mind if you play video games after your homework is done. And they make sure everyone always has plenty to eat—you can get snacks out of the fridge any time, and the mom is always cooking good dinners.”

“What kind of dinners?” he asked, grudgingly intrigued now. I listed several of his favorite that my mom cooks regularly.

You guys are older than he was at the time, so you know where this is going. I described our house and our family, as I guided him around the block. He got pretty excited about what I was promising, until we were about 80% of the way back to our house and he realized where I was leading him.

“WAIT A MINUTE!” he yelled, his voice all accusation, his face a mix of betrayal and surprise that his own brother would do this to him. “Are we going home?!?”

“You don’t have to go home if you don’t want to,” I told him, “But think back to everything I said. Was there a single thing I said that wasn’t true? Did I lie once?”

He thought for half a minute. Then he agreed that actually our family sounded OK, and he’d give us another chance. For the final 20% of the trip he had a spring in his step that hadn’t been there before. He never did try to run away again.

Much later, after a turbulent late-teens that saw him fleeing drug dealers in Thailand (it’s a long story) he finally joined the military to get his life back on track. Four years in the infantry, because he wanted to get “down in the shit” and really make a difference in the most hands-on way possible. After he returned from his final tour, in Afghanistan, he had a schitzophrenic¹ break.

The Greater Good

Per Wikipedia, a micromort is a unit of risk defined as a one-in-a-million chance of death. The term saw occasional use on Less Wrong (such as when trying to determine how many micromorts biking without a helmet accrues), but really gained popularity there when COVID hit. For a year a significant fraction of posts struggled with the micromort increases of various risks (flying across the country) or their reductions via interventions (N95 vs N100 vs copper tape on doorknobs).

To a first approximation, imposing micromorts on others is bad.

At his nadir, my brother was just plain scary. He thought the CIA was trying to control him, and that they were working with the people around him, including his own family. He could not form coherent sentences — they would start out expressing some idea but get lost and go through three different arcs and end up in a place disconnected from reality... or even tangentially related to where the sentence started. He would lash out, and ended up doing tens of thousands in property damage over the years. He would threaten to hurt or kill people to their faces. He stalked at least one person.

Over time he drove away everyone who had been in his life, except for my mother, not because they didn’t care for him but out of sheer concern for their own physical safety. The first time he was involuntarily committed, he was found by police wearing a sheet as a toga and with a self-administered mohawk. He was involuntarily committed three times in two years, for 14-21 days each time.

As far as I know, he never actually physically attacked anyone. Which is a huge mercy. A military-trained, 6-foot, 200 lbs of muscle dude is not someone who should be this out of control.

After his second involuntary commitment, when he had quit his meds yet again and was terrifying people, I began to worry about my responsibility to stop this. I was in a unique position to know exactly how dangerous my brother was. Everywhere he went, he was shedding micromorts on everyone around him. Yes, he hadn’t attacked anyone yet. It was far from certain that he never would. His very presence was a danger to anyone near him because he was literally insane. It wasn’t his fault, but that doesn’t matter to the dead person that was just walking to the store and not actually a CIA Black Ops agent.

The official system was absolutely incompetent in protecting anyone from my brother. They would do nothing until he killed someone, or maimed them if we’re lucky. He was a timebomb. The best case scenario was that he’d rush into traffic on foot and only get himself killed. I spent more than one night in my room, staring at the floor, very seriously considering that it was my duty to kill my brother before he ended up killing someone else.

You really don’t feel how personal “reasoning under uncertainty” is until that uncertainty is an innocent person’s death. You don’t feel how personal “considering trade-offs” is until you’re contemplating killing your own brother.

Details You Should Consider Include Micromorts

In Scott Alexander’s recent post he argues that we should consider that the mentally ill homeless won’t stop being mentally ill if we remove them from society, and also that the places they would be put are far worse than in our city’s parks and sidewalks.

I realize that he worked in a mental institution and got to witness the horrors inside one first-hand. I absolutely get how that would make you want to fight desperately for any way to prevent such horrors.

I posit that one should also consider the literal risk of assault, injury, and death that is imposed on hundreds of people when they are forced into proximity with such tragic cases. One should count up the micromorts being sprinkled around daily. One should calculate how many people avoid these areas and hide from these people in a rational calculation to minimize their micromort burden. How many women now require a male escort to walk in their city or else take on a spoonful of micromorts.

How much of a chance of innocent death per year are you willing to swallow to avoid mental institutions? How many people answering “but they’re really bad!” have had to actually consider that some day they might have to look at the broken body of one actual real person who was just trying to get to work and think to themselves “I knew this would happen. I could have stopped it. But I was too cowardly to do what I had to.”

If one can acknowledge that maybe X years of torture are preferable to 3^^^3 dust specks, then one can acknowledge that maybe a few hundred of the most severely mentally ill in each city should be sequestered away even if involuntary commitment is pretty bad.

Real Heroes Are Unsung

A few weeks ago as I was parking I saw an crazy homeless person ranting outside a grocery store. He cursed and threatened randomly, shouting at the top of his lungs, in a rage. He continued cursing and occasionally flailing as he stormed away down the street. No police came to escort him and ensure he didn’t lash out randomly. People crossed the street to avoid him. He didn’t hurt anyone. This time.

As he was retreating, an eighty-pound grandma in grocery-store-uniform emerged into the street. She had the air of a rancher come out to defend his herd, or a lord his fiefdom. Straight-back, hands on hips, eyes sharp. She asked if the man had bothered anyone. I would have sworn fealty to her if she told me the huns were coming.

Entering the store just behind her, I overheard some conversation. She was the manager of this store. That crazy bum had been sleeping beside her store and keeping his things there for days. She’d told him to move along. He was scaring people. He was sprinkling micromorts over her customers. He refused. She told him that if he didn’t take his things and go, they would wind up in the trash.

Apparently she’d eventually made good on her threat when he was out doing whatever he does during the day. He was enraged that his stuff had been removed and dumped. Then he wandered away, cursing and shouting.

This old lady had taken the initiative to remove him from the store’s grounds to protect her customers from the micromorts he’d been shedding for days. Then she’d come out of her store when she heard he was making a scene, to confront him if needed and protect her customers. White-haired, 5’3” at most, less than 100 lbs, and elderly. She had more courage than most men, and did it for the people in her community that she mostly doesn’t even know.

I felt awe, and shame. I’ve tried to be more like her since that day.

A Happy-ish Ending

The story of my brother ends in a happy-ish place. My mother never gave up on him. She poured her entire life into rescuing him. After his third involuntary commitment my brother finally realized just how out of control while not on his meds, and how much he needed to fully give himself over to someone he could trust. He now follows my mother’s instructions with almost unswerving dedication, because he realizes he cannot trust himself, and he must trust her.

Due to the miracles of modern medicine and her guidance he’s able to live a mostly-normal life. He can’t hold down a job but military disability allows him to live, and he finds ways to be useful via volunteering. He’s a doting uncle to his nieces. He doesn’t have many friends (he’s still very abrasive) but wouldn’t you know it, he now has a fiancé. :)

I realize that if the institutions we need existed five years ago, my brother could well be suffering in one now, rather than managing a decent life with effort and help. His outcome could be much worse. I do not have an answer for this. It is true. Maybe my mother could still have gotten him into mostly-working order and gotten him released. Maybe not, and he’d be stuck in there for life. He had an exceptionally good outcome. Many people do not, and it is immoral to ignore the suffering they impose on everyone else. Regardless, I’m incredibly grateful for my brother’s stellar outcome, and our moral luck. All I can do is acknowledge we benefitted from the present system, and swallow this dissonance.

Well, also I can thank those who’s work allowed for our luck. In addition to my mother, I am in awe of the ethos of advancement and progress that brought us our medical miracles. A hundred years ago my brother wouldn’t have a life worth living, if he was still alive at all. Now he gets along OK, and is an actual person. Rot in hell, degrowthers — my brother owes his life to modernity. May its miracles never cease growing.

1. Technically one of the sub-variants, but schizophrenia is the common term and is close enough.