Because it's Friday, it looks like sunshine, and the weekend is just around the corner... let me see if I can't manage to become enemies with even more of you. With a "little text" about why precisely this is every Danish politician's favourite topic. And why it ought to make every one of us... just a bit uneasy... 🤓😉
WELFARE.
It is the softest word we have. Almost maternal. A word no one can be against, and that is precisely why it is so useful for those who want something with it.
For the word itself is beautiful. Well and fare. That man's journey through life should go well. Not that life is painless, not that it is pleasant, but that it is bearable. That one can rise after a fall.
It is an old duty. It exists in Christianity, it exists in Roman law, it exists in every culture that has earned its name. We raise the fallen, we protect the weak, we hold a hand under the sick. We must not dismantle that. We must NEVER dismantle that.
But that is not what I want to write about.
What I want to write about lies in a completely different place. It lies in what we have done to the word itself. What it means now. What architecture has been erected behind it. And what that architecture does to us, without anyone having decided it.
For like so many words that have been turned upside down, the word welfare no longer covers what most of us think it covers. It covers an apparatus. A law-regulated, paragraph-driven, professionally-administered apparatus, which has taken over the place care had, back when care was still people's own. And the apparatus bears more than one face. Sometimes it is the state's. Sometimes it is the market's. An abundance so complete that no person any longer needs another for anything whatsoever. But the movement is the same. What was before carried between people, is now delivered by a mechanism. By an apparatus.
The apparatus is not evil. It was invented for good reasons. It was meant to be an emergency brake, a net under the one who had no one, a grip that caught what would otherwise fall to the floor and break. And for the person who truly cannot rise, the crushed body, the abandoned child, the old person sitting alone three floors up who has no one left, there the net is not a temptation. There it is mercy. And it must remain standing.
THE FIRST SHIFT lies in the help itself. And it is the most underlit, because it happens so slowly that no one manages to protest.
But over the years something imperceptible happened. The emergency brake was pulled more often. It was pulled before there was an emergency. And bit by bit it was no longer a brake one grabbed in need's hour, but something one counted on, a basic condition. The net, which was meant to catch what would otherwise break, became something else. It became a place one could rest. A place one could lie down. And what becomes a resting place, becomes home with time.
Thus the hammock became the normal state. Not because anyone decided it. Not because a press conference was held that the exception had now become the rule. But because that is how systems work, when they are not held in place by something stronger than themselves.
That is the first shift, and it is the most underlit, because it happened so slowly that no one managed to protest. The difference disappeared. The difference between the one who cannot rise, and the one who could. The help to the fallen slipped imperceptibly over into a replacement for rising. The one who needed a hand out of the mud, was instead offered a roof over his head in the mud. It was not meant evilly. It was just easier. For the system, for the politician, for the one who received, and for the rest of us who no longer had to see him.
And when you sit in the hammock long enough, sitting there becomes your identity. You are no longer a man who has fallen and must rise. You are a client. You are a case. You are a case number. Your journey through life is no longer a journey. It is a variable in a stability calculation, meant to ensure that society does not shake itself apart from below.
Let me say it quite clearly.
That is not a view of humanity. That is a calculating machine.
And that shift, from person to factor, is the deepest displacement that has happened at all. For when a person has once become a factor in others' calculation, it is very difficult for him to find his way back to being something else. Ask anyone who has sat - or who still sits - stuck there.
THE SECOND SHIFT is what hurts.
But before I say what it does, look at something we have all seen.
Look at the man who retires, and who is dead before a year has passed. Look at who we actually pity, when we pity a person. For it is rarely the one who suffers. It is the one who is no longer missed by anyone. The one no one depends on. The one who could vanish tomorrow, without anything in anyone's life toppling. We nod to that, before anyone has explained to us why, and that is because we already know it in advance -
A person is not made to be sufficient for himself. He is made to be necessary for others. Take necessity from a person, and you have not liberated him. You have removed the reason to live from under him.
That is what the apparatus does.
It removes the ancient contract between man and the world. The contract that said -
"You have value because you can carry, protect and build."
Instead he is told today, you have value because you exist, the system takes care of the rest. That sounds humane. But it is the opposite. It is an existential castration.
His father is provided for by the apparatus. His mother is provided for by the apparatus. The old neighbour is provided for by the apparatus. His children would be provided for if he vanished tomorrow, and so would his wife, and so would his brother, if the brother lost his job and his balance. That net of mutual necessity, where man for a thousand years was the one who intervened when something slipped, has gone from being the frame he stood in, to being a function of others' tax payment.
And here it is important, that I do not say something I do not mean. So I am certain you understand. I am not saying that the old neighbour should have been left alone. I am not saying that the son should abandon his sick father. And so on. I am saying - that when the apparatus took over what the healthy, capable, carrying son would otherwise have carried himself, then it did not liberate him. It disconnected him. It took his load and called it progress.
And it is irrelevant which way necessity was lifted from him. Whether it was a generous state that lifted it, or an abundance so total that no person any longer needed another - the man at the other end is the same man. That is why you find him both in the richest, most provided-for corners of the Nordic countries and in the hollowed-out towns in the USA. They are two roads. That end in the same place.
For a man without burden does not become free.
Read that sentence again.
He becomes restless, bitter and empty.
And the worst thing a person can experience is not pain.
It is to be unnecessary!
Without something to carry he has no direction. Without direction his strength becomes restlessness. His aggression becomes anger without aim. His sexuality becomes drive without commitment. His intelligence becomes cynicism. His longing becomes dependency.
We experience all of it by the yard around us.
Some call what they see "toxic masculinity" - it is not that. But it is not healthy. Neither for Man, for Woman, for Child or for Society.
That is the deep explanation for the young man we can all see now, and whom no one really knows what to do with. The one who cannot find footing, cannot bind himself, cannot decide, cannot carry. It is not because he is evil. Or stupid. And it is not because he is weak in his nature. It is because his nature has been disconnected from Reality. He is built to pull a load, and they have taken the load from him.
But the load does not disappear. It still must be pulled. And when men no longer carry, because they are told they are no longer necessary - then others must carry.
And women do that now. They become provider and care at once. They become shield and softness in the same body. They become father and mother to their children, because there is no longer a man necessary enough to fill one of the places. And they do it capably, credit to them. They do it with will and with strength.
BUT. They do it at the cost of something in themselves, and that something cannot hold in the long run.
Therefore we see burned-out women. Therefore we see confused children who do not know the difference between softness and firmness, because both have come from the same hand. Therefore we see a gender battle - yes, it has ended in outright brain BATTLE - that is disguised as equality, but is really a fight about who must now carry what man no longer carries.
It is not an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise well-functioning system. And it is not an adjustment that needs to be calibrated a bit better.
It is the RESULT.
It is PRECISELY what happens, when you build an architecture that makes one half of the population superfluous and lets the other half pay the price.
THE THIRD SHIFT is the deepest.
The same thing that happened to Man, is now happening to the father.
When the apparatus steps in as provider, protector and last instance, it takes over precisely what made the father a father. And then he becomes secondary. Not because anyone pushed him out, not because anyone as such decided it, but because there is no longer anything for him to be.
The state is the perfect, but cold father.
Which is precisely why it is so destructive.
For a father is not first and foremost a provider. He is boundary. He is direction. He is consequence. He says, "if you act like this, then this happens". He looks you in the eyes. He believes in you, quite concretely. He can say no out of love. Stand firm. Immovable. Even in a storm. That is what forms people.
The state says, "if something goes wrong, we take over". It can regulate. It can administer. It can sanction. But. It cannot look you in the eyes. It cannot miss you. It cannot know who you are. It cannot love you. It can pretend to, but that is a lie... and everyone knows it.
At best it can create obedient citizens.
But it does not create adult, upright, free and responsible people.
When the inner Law, which the father would otherwise have planted, is no longer formed, then regulation must come from outside. More rules. More systems. More interventions.
Less father gives - less inner structure and need for more outer control. That it is so, is not an outcome among many. It is a Law.
A society without fathers does not become free.
It becomes administered.
That is where we are today. And the way we are moving, even deeper down it.
Let us take a breath and sink for a moment - for I know well, this is a hard pill to swallow - so while we do that, let us ask the question we far too rarely ask.
Where does the architecture for all of this come from?
Who in the world thought it forward?
And the honest answer is, that no one built the net itself with this in mind. It was erected by conservatives who wanted to take the wind out of revolution, by liberals who acted out of decency, by Lutheran state churches and popular movements who acted out of solidarity. None of them wanted the result we stand with.
But a net is one thing. What the net is used for, is something else. And the dream that has taken it over, has a name.
It is the social engineer's dream.
The notion that a society is a drawing-board task. That the bonds people themselves bind, the family, the kin, the faith, the neighbourhood, are outdated, random, perhaps even oppressive, and that they can be torn down and replaced by something planned, and administered by "those who know better". That man is not whole in himself, but first becomes so, when he steps into the larger order. The state's. That the family is only a step on the way to it. That the larger order is the goal, and man only the means needed to reach it.
That dream is older than the parties. It runs through Marx, who wanted to abolish the organic bonds as oppression, and through the technocrat, who believes a human life can be calculated on a spreadsheet. And it lives IN THE BEST OF HEALTH in the apparatus we call WELFARE.
And here we arrive at the most insidious of it all.
For all of this is not the result of a secret plan - and there is not even an actual planner. Here there is only what we can call "a good person".
For we still have deep in us a feeling that we must carry the weak. That we must not let a person fall alone. That feeling cannot be mistaken, and it is genuine. It is the inheritance after a Christianity, which most of us no longer believe in, but which built our conscience, before it left us.
For when the faith was there, the duty had a place to go. It was a matter between you and God, who kept watch, and between you and the person who stood before you, with a face and a name. You knew who saw you, and you knew to whom you should extend your hand. Now the faith is gone. The feeling remained. But the two - God ABOVE you and the neighbour BEFORE you, have both vanished.
The duty persists. But the address has vanished.
And a duty that no longer knows where it should be delivered, searches for a place to put it down... That is why it finds the apparatus. You pay your taxes, and the duty feels paid, because there is no longer a face to place it in the hands of.
* ding dong *
That is the door the modern politician walks through.
For here comes the Lie. And that is the Lie one milks votes from.
The politician has discovered that the moral impulse is still alive in people. People want to be good. They want to raise the fallen. They have a conscience that screams, when they see a person being left behind. That is the conscience he can ignite, and that is the one he can direct toward a particular ballot box.
He - or actually it is far more often, She these days (even though gender no longer exists) - says, "vote for me, and we take care of each other". "Vote for me, and we do not abandon the weak". "Vote for me, and you are a good person".
And every time she says that, she is selling the opposite of what she promises. For every krone that is moved from you to the apparatus, also moves a piece of your possibility to be the one who carries. Every task that becomes an instance, is taken from the neighbour who should otherwise have looked after her. Every duty that becomes a paragraph, is removed from the son who should otherwise have carried his father.
And when you are left with neither duty nor possibility to carry, then the politician has removed what makes you a full person, and you do not discover it, because she has given you something instead.
She has given you THE FEELING OF BEING GOOD, BECAUSE YOU HAVE VOTED CORRECTLY.
That is the trade.
You deliver your duty, and you get a moral identity in return. You deliver your responsibility, and you get a political position in return. You deliver what would have made you necessary, and you get an identity-flag to stand under. A side to belong to.
That is what we call the welfare society.
That is what we call community.
That is what we call solidarity.
And that is how a language can be turned around, so it means almost the opposite of what it once did.
For a community you cannot leave, is not a community. It is the word that is left, when the community is gone. A care that is performed by an instance, is not care. It is administration. A people that has delivered its conscience to a ballot box, is not a Free People.
And once the machine is built, it must be fed. The politician no longer needs to convince you that something is true. He just needs to keep the machine running. You vote him in, and he pays you back, and so it can continue.
That does not mean everyone is bought. Most who defend the apparatus, pay far more in than they get out, and they mean every word of what they say. But the more who must lean on the machine, the more votes are bound to the hand that keeps it running. Not because anyone is forced, but because it is hard to vote against the hand that holds you up, even when you wanted to.
It is not a chain that pulls you. It is a floor that tilts more each year. No one pushes. But at some point it has become easier to slide with than to rise.
Meanwhile the word welfare disappears into its own sound.
It no longer means that 'man's journey through life should go well'.
It means that the apparatus must grow.
The two things have NOTHING to do with each other, but we say them as if they were the same, and that is the deepest form of linguistic power that exists.
...Take a breath... Close your eyes for a moment. Digest it. I mean well. Even though it is not pleasant to read. But we need to read it.
The duty persists toward the neighbour. It is old and deep and immovable.
But the Apparatus. The apparatus is something else. It is a tool. It must be able to be brought forward and put away again. It must remain standing under the one who truly fell and cannot rise himself. But it must never become our Father. It must never become our Mother. It must never become what we call Community.
A safety net is not a Home.
A statute is not a Hand.
A payment is not a Blessing.
Three words have melted together, and they must be separated again, or we lose something that is older than the state and more necessary than any apparatus can ever become.
The duty is mine. It cannot be delivered. It can only be carried.
It is not the price for being Human.
It is the Proof.
All the rest is something we say, so we can avoid carrying it.
Welfare.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy weekend.
I think.
