An Ancillary to Rights . . .

A great complaint among those precipitated into unemployment by the collapse of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ was they found themselves often queuing side by side in the dole offices with those who had never bothered to work at all, despite the fact that people were pouring in from all over Europe during the boom to fill the manpower deficit.  And queuing, too, with neither recognition of, nor additional benefit from, the fact that they had contributed.

The general term applied to nowadays to those who refuse—all other things being equal—to contribute is the ‘poor’.  It is a necessary term and a necessary social category for those whose particular drive is to inflate their own status by bestowing patronage, even if in many cases only a verbal patronage.  ‘Oh, the poor, the poor!’

But it would be a mistake to confuse the ‘poor’ with the weak.  The ‘poor’ are really ‘the tough who get going when the going gets tough’.  At the moment, they are simply resting.  But if for any reason anything should happen to interfere with their entitlements, watch how quickly the ‘poor mouth’ turns into a snarl.

I quoted before in 2016 from Adam Ferguson’s 1975 book, When Money Dies, about the consequences of the collapse of Austrian currency in the early 1920s:

“Near civil war between town and country was a pervasive feature of this break-down in social order. Large mobs of half-starved and vindictive townsmen descended on villages to seize food from farmers accused of hoarding. The diary of one young woman described the scene at her cousin’s farm . . . ‘In the cart I saw three slaughtered pigs. The cowshed was drenched in blood. One cow had been slaughtered where it stood and the meat torn from its bones. The monsters had slit the udder of the finest milch cow, so that she had to be put out of her misery immediately. In the granary, a rag soaked with petrol was still smouldering to show what these beasts had intended.’”

I think it would be foolish not to anticipate the return of relatively high unemployment in the near to medium future, which would probably be just about bearable unless it dragged on and on.  But there is also the prospect of the straitening of employment due to technological change, whether such will be the case or not.

Economists and social engineers used to talk—and possibly still do—of the ‘leisure society’.  The idea was that increasing mechanisation and computerisation of production would create a large population forever without work.  But, of course, such a situation only qualifies as ‘leisure’ to the extent that one has the means of taking advantage of it.  Other than that, it is simply unemployment.

Yet the fact is that this is a nonsense scenario.  It will not happen simply because most people will not let themselves be shunted into some sort of railway siding for life, no matter how notionally well-insulated the carriages might prove to be.  Acquiescence to any such scheme would represent the beginning of the end for the human race, a sort of de-evolution, an acceptance of human obsolescence.  Indeed, a strong argument can be made that we are already some way down that particular road.

Faced with such a scenario of pointlessness, the healthy part of the race will revolt and pull the temple down around their own heads and everyone else’s.  And they will be right to do so.  People do not want leisure or comfort or pleasure as their main course.  Such things are ancillary to the necessary things of purpose and meaning and relevance.  Utopias do not and cannot exist simply because people would reactively tear them down, even if they didn’t exactly know why they were doing it.  It is perhaps some variant on the ‘not by bread alone’ verse from the Gospels.

But how exactly might society as a whole cope in such a notional situation—which if left untreated would be guaranteed to blow everything apart?  For even as things stand, we are already teetering on the edge of that selfsame abyss as has destroyed so many civilisations and societies in the past: the separation of an increasingly indifferent and well-heeled minority from the spent booster rocket of almost everyone else.

The first thing that needs to be said is that a one-size-fits-all social welfare system is the first thing that has to go.  The bottom line is that no one can be left to starve or go without shelter, even if they refuse to do anything for themselves.  But beyond that the support system should be graded or tiered, in such a way as to reward those who do want to do something for themselves.  Tiered or trellised so as to provide the possibility of a route forward, as well as satisfying the basic human need for status and a sense of self-worth, not to mention being also economically rewarding.

Now I am not just talking in terms of public works, where the needy make a return directly to the state.  The times we live in, and the times that may be coming, demand a much broader system of reciprocity than that.  They demand a recognition and rewarding of both voluntarism and self-improvement.

The common routes for digging oneself out of the hole of poverty usually consist of further education, upskilling—even in circumstances where there might be no immediate prospect of a need for such skills—and also inventive entrepreneurism.

But such things generally involve an individual determination to better one’s personal lot, whereas voluntarism can be seen in a more unselfish light, capable of embracing tasks as varied as charitable work, or work to improve the local environment, or more community-centred work, such as running a boxing club or after-school facilities—the list is potentially endless.

Indeed, it is possible to imagine it extending to even such things as people’s determination to preserve their own personal fitness and mental wellbeing.  It might well apply to people engaged in serious sports training or dedicated gardeners etc. etc. For it should not be about rewarding or recognising achievement so much as willingness and enthusiasm and commitment.

This is a preliminary document, a ranging document, as it were, to which I may return at some later date—or maybe not.