Atomic

A WEIRD view of homelessness in Hawaii

While ‘researching’ last night’s post on homelessness in Hawaii,

I came across this May 2025 Hipsta Pravda article by Uni-farce-ity of Hawaii pro-farcer Neal Milner:

The homelessness problem in Hawaiʻi is much bigger than you think and includes people you never imagined.

Officially, Hawaiʻi has about 6,500 homeless. A more realistic estimate? Say hello to 30,000 more.

The official method that states like Hawaiʻi use to count homeless severely undercounts.

[…]

The official count doesn’t include people who aren’t in shelters or on the streets. The biggest miss of all is those “doubling up,” moving in with family or friends for brief or often extended, overextended really, periods of time.

[…]

In Hawaiʻi, doubling up is not just a homeless strategy. It’s a way of life. Because of our huge, unattainable housing costs, doubling up is a general survival strategy. Honolulu has a greater number of people per household than most large U.S. cities.

People here celebrate this doubling up by sugarcoating it, calling it ʻohana [Hawaiian for ‘family’].

We tend only to think about ʻohana’s strength and good “cultural” side — the willingness to take people into your household, to live as an extended family. Multigenerational families living under one roof not just surviving but thriving.

But also consider possible limits. Crowdedness is crowdedness — the lack of privacy, people doubling and tripling up sleeping arrangements. We’re talking about unfulfilled dreams in undersized quarters.

So much to unpack there, and as always, so little time.

As a Goodthinker, Milner loves victims in the abstract and wants to boost their numbers as much as possible. Even if that means twisting homeless to include people who are at … OMG … HOME!

Which is interesting, because normally Goodthinkers like Milner reject all things Europpressive because Brown Is Best. And yet Milner dared to criticize ʻohana (family). Even though Hawaiian words are holy.

What is going on here?

Was Milner so driven to exaggerate homelessness that he was willing to be hard on us Dark Ones?

No, I think there’s more at play here. Not in just in Milner’s mind but in the Waste in general. Right as well as Left.

The Waste is … Atomic.

Its mascot might as well be Mighty Atom¹.

The apex of the Atomic mindset is Objectivism. The perfect man of Ayn Rand’s cult² is John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged who has no parents - no family of any sort. He just comes out of nowhere - pregnancy and children do not exist in Rand’s Atomic universe of adults - and is self-made apart from a period when he was the student of Hugh Akston (based on Aristotle) and Robert Stadler (based on J. Robert Oppenheimer).

Rand’s previous perfect man, Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead, is also a being out of the void.

The only family relationship I can recall from her novels is that between her heroine Dagny Taggart and her no-good brother James, a burden to his sister, an M-powered womyn. In Rand’s universe, family just drags you down. We’re all better off as freeee in-duh-viduals, all self-made. We just came to be … somehow. Randverse characters only have sex for fun. Procreation? Wuzzat?

Rand takes the Atomic mindset to an impossible extreme. Real people don’t just appear ex nihilo, free of family ties.

Even orphans are shaped by their absence of family ties. But in milder yet still hazardous forms, it permeates the Waste. Her ideological enemy Milner shares it. To Milner, you’re homeless unless you have your own apartment or house. Homeless unless you are Atomic.

Many in Hawaii fall short of Milner (and Rand’s) ideal. Those poor - both pitiful and impoverished - folks don’t have their own personal prison cells where they can be John Galt or Howard Roark or Milner’s favorite character all by their glorious selves.

A White on the Right side was shocked that my Japanese family didn’t close its doors inside their multigenerational home. OMG NO PRIVACY. We were … shudder … sub-Atomic.

In the average American White home, do family members close their doors to each other? Turn their rooms into Atomic chambers?

I am struck by how Atomic all the Whites I know are. Left, Right, Dissident Right, Objectivist, even Tradcaths³. No multigenerational households. No nonnuclear households. Little to no interaction between parents and adult children or between siblings, much less more distant family members. Families scattered across states. Grandma is someone you see on rare occasions - if at all - not someone you live with.

“Live with” is apparently a horror that you strive to escape at eighteen. Unless you’re a ‘failure to launch’, you take off by moving out and never looking back. You are M-powered. You go where your career leads you. Away from your family. Who needs ’em?

You might create a family of your own that will scatter to the winds just like you did.

Or you might remain an atom to the end. I know so many middle-aged single White men and women. They have ‘good’ jobs, money, and even their own houses. They are Mighty Atoms. And yet they seem depressed. Deprived. They know no one in Jobland who isn’t a coworker - whose relationship to them ends at the office door.

White Americans seem Atomic to the max. But there are other flavors of Atomic as well. Even here in this non-White majority state.

In Hawaii, almost everyone is an immigrant or descended from one.⁴ Immigration facilitates becoming Atomic. Families are separated by oceans. I haven’t contacted my family in Japan for almost forty years.

Americanization accelerates the Atomic breakdown of non-White families. How can you be close to what remains of your family when you don’t even speak their language? Severed overseas branches break up into twigs whose leaves fall off and become childless dead ends (raises hand).

If cultural forces aren’t enough to make you go Atomic, economics will be. You go to where the ‘good’ jobs are - off these rocks and on the Mainland. Bye bye, ʻohana.

We non-Whites in Hawaii are now undergoing what Western Europeans underwent centuries ago.

Last week I saw ♱ Rurik Christwalker ♱ link to Blue Vir’s article on how the Waste became Atomic:

I had bookmarked the article but failed to read it until the Blondie song “Atomic” came to mind last night and I started this post. “WEIRD Nuclear Family” was just what I needed to read after Milner’s “Hawaiʻi’s Uncounted Homeless Are The People Sleeping On Your Couch”:

Often now, with the increase in discourse of the WEIRD [Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic] concept and traits, I see poasters riffing about the corruption of Western institutions by ethnocentric non-white groups and families. Contrasted with those peoples are North-West Europeans and the diaspora, who have lived in nuclear families for centuries.

Who have been Atomic for centuries.

These peoples, with their weak familial ties and broken clans, created open, impartial meritocratic institutions and civic organisations and a ‘high-trust’ culture, where you don’t have to be constantly on guard for scams or spend half an hour haggling in the market over a few baskets of fruit.

“[B]roken clans” … notice how clannish has negative connotations in English. On February 15, I saw the Dateline NBC episode “The Mystery on Horseshoe Drive” about a multigenerational White household described not only as “clannish” (IIRC) but also as like a cult (cultish? cultlike? I only remember “cult” in the expression). Yes, that household was painted to be the ‘bad guys’. Shocker.

These institutions and practices essentially define the modern world ranging from academia, the modern judiciary, the corporation, half of Fortune Global 500 companies and the modern state military system. However, essentially all of these institutions and others have been infiltrated and subverted, as many others have written about, implementing policies that disadvantage whites and males, particularly white males.

The response from much of the right-of-Trump crowd has been to advocate for retaking the institutions, and to recreate the high trust societies of the 20th century and before. Yet ‘high-trust society’, and the civic institutions that come with it are the product of the subjugation of the European people by elites and, as we have seen, are fragile and ultimately shatter in the face of even incompetent diversity to be weaponized against the same people that created them.

Atomic is part of the problem, not the solution.

I’m out of time. I strongly recommend you read the rest of Blue Vir’s article. You’ll then understand why I think being Atomic makes us weak.

1. Yes, Mighty Atom is Japanese rather than Waste-rn, but even modern Japan is becoming Atomic (emphasis mine):

The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare’s Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions for 2023 found that there were 54,452,000 households in Japan as of June 1 of the same year. Among them, “single-person households” were the most common, totaling 18,495,000, or 34.0% of all households. This was followed by the 13,516,000 households consisting of a married couple and their unmarried children and 13,395,000 households consisting of a married couple only, respectively constituting 24.8% and 24.6% of all households. The average household consisted of 2.23 members, a decrease of 0.02 compared to the previous year.

There was hardly any difference between households with couples and with or without unmarried children. Three years later, households with childless couples probably outnumber households with children.

Households with children under 18 numbered 9,835,000, representing 18.1% of all households, a decrease of 10 percentage points compared to 28.8% in 2001.

Subtracting those 9,835,000 households with children under 18 from 13,516,000 households with unmarried children of any age results in 3,681,000 households with children over 18. Would Milner consider the over-18 children in those 3.6 million households to be homeless?

2. Which I confess was once mine.

3. I could argue that the Tradcaths are not Atomic because the Church has become their surrogate family. However, the fact remains that they are isolated from their actual families. Moreover, some priest (possibly from a foreign country) who could move on to a new parish in a few years is their substitute patriarch, not a relative with a vested interest in them.

Secular Atomic society has also replaced permanent familial authority with short-term strangers: teachers and managers. Atomic society loves fungibility.

We’re all just interchangeable LEGO bricks in a machine, not integral members of a clan.

Ancient Indians saw lineages as being like joints in a bamboo stem, so Sanskrit vaṁśa ‘stem’ by extension means ‘family’. You can’t add and remove joints at will.

Far to the west, Germans came to use Stamm, their cognate for English stem, for ‘tribe’.

Which is stronger, a bamboo stem or single LEGO bricks?

4. Almost all Native Hawaiians have some degree of immigrant ancestry. In Hawaii, Native Hawaiian refers to anyone with any degree of indigenous ancestry. As of 1986, 95% of Native Hawaiians had some degree of nonindigenous (i.e., immigrant) ancestry. Forty years later, that figure may be 99%.