WELFARE

Welfare. It is the softest word we have. Almost motherly. A word no one can be against, and that is precisely why it is so useful to those who want something from it.

For the word itself is beautiful. Well, and fare. That a human's faring through life should go well. Not that life is painless, not that it is comfortable, but that it is bearable. That you can rise after a fall.

It is an old duty. It is there in Christianity, it is there in Roman law, it is there in every culture that has earned its name. We raise the fallen, we protect the weak, we hold a hand beneath 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 somewhere else entirely. It lies in what we have done to the word itself. What it means now. What architecture has been raised behind it. And what that architecture does to us, without anyone having decided it.

For like so many words that have been turned on their heads, the word welfare no longer covers what most of us think it covers. It covers an apparatus. A law-regulated, statute-driven, profession-administered apparatus that has taken over the place care once held, back when care was still the people's own. And the apparatus wears more than one face. Sometimes it is the state's. Sometimes it is the market's. An abundance so complete that no human any longer needs another for anything at all. But the movement is the same. What was once 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 beneath the one who had no one, a grip that caught what would otherwise fall to the floor and break. And for the human who truly cannot rise, the broken body, the abandoned child, the old woman sitting alone three doors up with no one left, there the net is not a temptation. There it is mercy. And it must remain.

THE FIRST SHIFT lies in the help itself. And it is the most overlooked, because it happens so slowly that no one has time to protest.

But over the years something happened, imperceptibly. The emergency brake was pulled more often. It was pulled before there was any emergency. And little by little it was no longer a brake you reached for in the hour of need, but something you counted on, a given. The net, which was meant to catch what would otherwise break, became something else. It became a place to rest. A place to lie down. And what becomes a resting place becomes, in time, a home.

That is how the hammock became the normal condition. Not because anyone decided it. Not because a press conference was held to announce 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.

This is the first shift, and it is the most overlooked, because it happened so slowly that no one had time to protest. The distinction vanished. The distinction between the one who cannot rise and the one who could. Help to the fallen slid imperceptibly into a substitute for rising. The one who needed a hand up out of the mud was instead offered a roof over his head in the mud. It was not meant cruelly. It was simply 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 file number. Your faring through life is no longer a faring. It is a variable in a stability calculation meant to ensure that society does not shake itself to pieces from below.

Let me say it plainly.

This is not a view of the human being. It is a calculating machine.

And that shift, from human to factor, is the deepest displacement that has happened at all. For once a human has become a factor in someone else's calculation, it is very hard for him to find his own way back to being anything else. Ask anyone who has sat there, or who still sits there, stuck.

THE SECOND SHIFT is the one that hurts.

But before I say what it does, look at something we have all seen.

Look at the man who retires and is dead before the year is out. Look at who it really is we pity, when we pity a human being. For it is rarely the one who suffers. It is the one no longer missed by anyone. The one no one depends on. The one who could vanish tomorrow without anything in anyone's life giving way. We nod at this before anyone has explained why, and that is because we already know it.

A human is not made to be sufficient unto himself. He is made to be necessary to others. Take necessity away from a human, and you have not freed him. You have pulled the reason to live out from under him.

That is what the apparatus does.

It removes the ancient contract between the man and the world. The contract that said,

"You have worth because you can carry, protect, and build."

Instead he is told today, you have worth because you exist, the system takes care of the rest. It 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 neighbor 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 work and his footing. That web of mutual necessity, in which the man for a thousand years was the one who stepped in when something gave way, has gone from being the frame he stood inside to being a function of other people's taxes.

And here it matters that I do not say something I do not mean. So that I am sure you understand. I am not saying the old neighbor should have been left alone. I am not saying the son should abandon his sick father. And so on. I am saying that when the apparatus took over what the healthy, capable, load-bearing son would otherwise have carried himself, it did not free him. It uncoupled him. It took his load and called it progress.

And it makes no difference by which road necessity was lifted off him. Whether it was a generous state that lifted it, or an abundance so total that no human needed another any longer, 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 Nordics and in the hollowed-out towns of America. These are two roads. That end in the same place.

For a man without a burden does not become free. Read that sentence again.

He becomes restless, bitter, and empty.

And the worst thing a human can experience is not pain.

It is to be unnecessary!

With nothing to carry, he has no direction. Without direction, his strength turns to restlessness. His aggression turns to anger without a target. His sexuality turns to drive without obligation. His intelligence turns to cynicism. His longing turns to dependency.

We are living all of it, in spades, all around us. Some call what they see "toxic masculinity." It is not that. But it is not healthy. Not for the Man, not for the Woman, not for the Child, and not for Society.

This is the deep explanation for the young man we can all see now, the one no one quite knows what to do with. The one who cannot find his footing, cannot commit, cannot decide, cannot carry. It is not because he is evil. Or stupid. And it is not because he is weak by nature. It is because his nature has been uncoupled from Reality. He is built to pull a load, and the load has been taken from him.

But the load does not disappear. It still has to be pulled. And when men no longer carry, because they are told they are no longer needed, then others must.

And it is the women who do now. They become provider and care in one. 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 two places. And they do it well, you have to give them that. 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.

That is why we see burned-out women. That is why we see confused children who cannot tell softness from firmness, because both have come from the same hand. That is why we see a battle of the sexes, yes, by now it has turned into an outright, all-out WAR, disguised as equality, but which is really a fight over who is now to carry what the man no longer carries.

This is not an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise well-functioning system. And it is not an adjustment to be calibrated a little 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 the Man is now happening to the father.

When the apparatus steps in as provider, protector, and last resort, it takes over precisely what made the father a father. And so 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 a boundary. He is a direction. He is consequence. He says, "if you act like this, then this will follow." He looks you in the eye. He believes in you, concretely. He can say no out of love. Stand firm. Immovable. Even in a storm. That is what forms human beings.

The state says, "if something goes wrong, we will take over." It can regulate. It can administer. It can sanction. But. It cannot look you in the eye. 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, that may produce obedient citizens.

But it does not produce grown, upright, free, and responsible human beings.

When the inner Law the father would otherwise have planted is no longer formed, the regulation must come from outside. More rules. More systems. More interventions.

Less father gives less inner structure, and a need for more outer control. That this is so is not one outcome among many. It is a Law.

A society without fathers does not become free. It becomes administered.

This is where we are today. And the road we are on takes us deeper down still.

Let us breathe and let it sink in for a moment, for I know this is a hard pill to swallow, so while we do, let us ask the question we ask far too rarely.

Where does the architecture behind all this come from? Who on earth thought it up?

And the honest answer is that no one built the net itself with this in mind. It was raised 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 are left with.

But a net is one thing. What the net is used for is another. 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 problem to be solved at the drawing board. That the bonds people tie themselves, the family, the kin, the faith, the neighborhood, are outdated, accidental, perhaps even oppressive, and that they can be torn down and replaced with something planned, administered by "those who know better." That the human is not whole in himself, but only becomes whole when he steps into the larger order. The state's. That the family is merely a step on the way there. That the great order is the goal, and the human 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 worked out on a spreadsheet. And it is ALIVE AND WELL in the apparatus we call WELFARE.

And here we arrive at the most insidious part of all.

For none of this is the product of a secret plan, and there is not even a real planner. Here there is only what we might call "a good person."

For we still carry deep within us a feeling that we must bear the weak. That we must not let a human fall alone. That feeling is unmistakable, and it is real. It is the inheritance of a Christianity most of us no longer believe in, but which built our conscience before it left us.

For back when the faith was there, that duty had somewhere to go. It was a matter between you and God, who was watching, and between you and the person standing in front of you, with a face and a name. You knew who saw you, and you knew whom you were to reach your hand to. Now the faith is gone. The feeling remained. But the two, God ABOVE you and your neighbor in FRONT of you, have both disappeared.

The duty remains. But the address is gone.

And a duty that no longer knows where it is to be delivered goes looking for somewhere to set itself 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 into the hands of.

• ding dong *

That is the door the modern politician walks through.

For here comes the Lie. And it is the Lie they milk for votes.

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 human being left behind. That is the conscience he can switch on, and that is the one he can aim at a particular ballot box.

He, or actually, these days it is far more often She (even though gender supposedly no longer exists), says, "vote for me, and we will take care of one another." "Vote for me, and we will not fail the weak." "Vote for me, and you are a good person."

And every time she says it, she sells the opposite of what she promises. For every krone that moves from you to the apparatus, a piece of your own chance to be the one who carries moves too. Every task that passes to an agency is taken from the neighbor who would otherwise have looked in on her. Every duty that passes into a statute is removed from the son who would otherwise have carried his father.

And when you are left with neither the duty nor the chance to carry, the politician has removed the thing that makes you a full human being, and you do not notice, because she has given you something instead.

She has given you THE FEELING OF BEING GOOD, BECAUSE YOU VOTED THE RIGHT WAY.

That is the trade.

You hand over your duty, and you get a moral identity back. You hand over your responsibility, and you get a political stance back. You hand over the thing that would have made you necessary, and you get an identity-flag to stand under. A side to belong to.

This is what we call a welfare society. This is what we call community. This is what we call solidarity.

And this is how a language can be turned around until 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 remains when the community is gone. Care carried out by an agency is not care. It is administration. A people that has handed its conscience to a ballot box is not a Free People.

And once the machine is built, it has to be fed. The politician no longer needs to convince you that anything is true. He only has to keep the machine running. You vote him in, and he pays you back, and so it can go on.

That does not mean everyone is bought. Most of those who defend the apparatus pay in far more than they get out, and they mean every word of what they say. But the more people who have to 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 would like to.

It is not a chain that drags you. It is a floor that tilts a little more every year. No one pushes. But at some point it has become easier to slide along than to rise.

Meanwhile the word welfare disappears into its own sound.

It no longer means that "a human's faring through life should go well."

It means that the apparatus must grow.

The two 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 there is.

...Breathe... Close your eyes for a moment. Let it digest. I mean it kindly. Even though it is not pleasant to read. But we need to read it.

The duty remains, toward your neighbor. 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 taken out and put away again. It must remain standing beneath the one who truly fell and cannot rise on his own. But it must never become our Father. It must never become our Mother. It must never become the thing 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 older than the state and more necessary than any apparatus can ever become.

The duty is mine. It cannot be handed over. It can only be carried. It is not the price of being Human. It is the Proof.

Everything else is something we say so we don't have to carry it. Welfare.

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