We were promised care. Not love, not freedom, not even happiness – just care—a modest word, humble almost to the point of invisibility, like lukewarm tea or government-issued slippers. Care replaced solidarity once solidarity became too demanding, too embodied, and too politically unpredictable. Care was safer. Cleaner. More manageable. It can be measured in terms of hours, protocols, subsidies, and waiting lists. And once it was institutionalised and distributed through the proper channels, it became something even better: a system.
But systems don’t love. They calculate, allocate, and compensate. And so we entered into a new arrangement – not with each other, but with The State, that vast, soft-spoken accountant of our dependencies. It didn’t ask for belief. It asked for compliance. Work. Pay. Age. Retire. Die. The moral accounting will ultimately balance out.
We didn’t read the fine print.
No one ever does.
The Pyramid of Welfare
At the heart of this arrangement lies a fiction so resilient it has become a kind of ambient theology: that the future will resemble the past. That tomorrow’s workers will fund today’s pensions. Those rising costs can be offset by growth. That demographics can be nudged, imported, adjusted, and everyone will somehow remain grateful.
But even the most loyal accountants of the welfare state know the arithmetic doesn’t work anymore. What we’ve created is not a safety net, but a Ponzi scheme with a moral façade. A structure that survives only by promising more than it can deliver – and making each generation complicit in the lie. We call it solidarity, dignity, “decent society.” But the truth is more straightforward: it rewards early adopters, burdens the young, and treats any hint of questioning as betrayal.
Milton Friedman in the Welfare Labyrinth
Milton Friedman, in one of his less market-worshipping moments, once warned that “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” He never hated government – he didn’t trust it to do what it claimed. “The government solution to a problem,” he added, “is usually as bad as the problem.” And nowhere is that more visible than in the swollen underbelly of the welfare state – a structure so earnest in its intentions it forgets to ask whether the outcomes justify the apparatus.
Friedman’s most profound insight wasn’t that welfare is expensive. Everyone knows that. His point was that once the state begins distributing care, it cannot stop distributing it. Not because the need grows, but because dependency becomes institutionalised. Temporary measures become permanent entitlements. Exceptions become new baselines.
He called it the “tyranny of the status quo”. Every program, once created, develops its own constituency: bureaucrats who manage it, beneficiaries who rely on it, politicians who defend it, and economists who justify it. The welfare state operates like a slow-motion cartel – not of capital, but of virtue. It monopolises compassion, regulates risk, and redistributes guilt. It converts citizens into clients, initiative into eligibility, and risk into pathology. And it does so with a moral smirk: oppose it, and you must be cruel.
Even his most radical proposal, the negative income tax, was less about generosity than minimalism. Strip the layers. Remove the middlemen. Replace bureaucratic judgment with cash. Let people decide what care looks like. It was not kindness he sought, but dignity and dignity, he insisted, requires freedom from forms.
But we went the other way. With forms. With sliding scales. With professional empathy. A system so complex that it requires consultants to explain it, social workers to soften it, and case managers to manage the softening. All paid by the same structure that fails to solve the problems it exists to address.
And so here we are, safe but not free, cared for but not trusted, grateful but exhausted – working half the week for others, the other half for the promise of a pension that may or may not arrive. Friedman didn’t hate the welfare state. He just saw it coming.
The State That Ate the Commons
There was a time when human beings took care of one another without state intervention. Families, neighbourhoods, churches, and even workplaces held the architecture of support. Not perfect, not always just, but human.
The rise of the welfare state dismantled these structures in the name of efficiency and fairness, replacing them with sterile mechanisms that care without knowing, respond without listening, and distribute without remembering.
Where once there was reciprocity, now there is eligibility. Where once the old depended on the young through bonds of love, debt, and duty, they now rely on an app that doesn’t load properly.
We no longer live in societies. We live in service ecosystems. And The State, bloated and blind, floats above it all like a well-meaning god with poor eyesight and an infinite spreadsheet. It tells us it will take care of us, and in exchange, we give it everything: our money, our data, our future, and most importantly, our trust, not in people, but in systems.
The Age of Preemptive Distrust
Legally, we have entered the age of preemptive distrust. Innocence is no longer presumed – it is modelled, calculated, and retroactively assigned. Algorithms flag anomalies. Risk profiles define interventions. Data is cross-checked. Deviations are framed as intent. You are innocent, unless the pattern suggests otherwise. The law no longer judges acts; it reads probabilities. You are not punished for what you did, but for what your cluster might do.
In removing the humiliation of dependence, we also removed its intimacy. There is no longer shame in asking the state for help – but also no warmth, no memory, no story to tell. Just a transaction. A submission. You fill in a form. Something arrives (eventually). You say thank you to no one in particular, and hear nothing back.
The community, meanwhile, disintegrates quietly, with excellent manners. It’s not that people became cruel. They just became efficient. The rituals of everyday life – the slow, messy, reciprocal things that stitched us into something larger than a spreadsheet — have been gently euthanised.
An app replaced the shared meal.
The neighbourhood by a postal code.
The knock on the door was from a welfare check.
The friend who checks in by a caseworker who rotates every six months and signs emails with “Kind regards.”
There was no revolt. No fire. No crime against humanity. Just a polite unravelling.
What We Get in Return
What do we get for sustaining a structure that grows but never shrinks, that asks more of us every year and offers less in return?
We get the illusion of security. The right to retire at an age defined when people still died at 63. Monthly statements. Glossy brochures on healthy ageing. Reminders to download our pension app. Dignity – bureaucratically administered, means-tested, liable to revision.
We get time, theoretically. But leisure is expensive now. Our parents could afford summer homes on one salary. We can barely afford brunch with avocado. And when we finally manage to escape, what do we get? The all-inclusive resort: freedom with wristbands, indulgence rationed by buffet hours, a spreadsheet with palm trees. Pre-packaged pleasure optimised for logistics. Vaguely rested, vaguely disappointed, fully ready to do it again next year, because this is what care looks like now.
The Myth of Gratitud
There’s a strange tone – somewhere between guilt and gratefulness – that accompanies all discussions of the welfare state. To acknowledge its failings is to side with cruelty. “At least we have a safety net,” we whisper, forgetting that it’s full of holes, conditional clauses, and a 14-month waiting list. To complain is to seem spoiled. To question is to invite suspicion. Gratitude, here, functions less as a feeling and more as a performance – one we’re expected to rehearse with proper civic humility.
This is how liberalism defends itself now: not with utopia, but with comparison. Not with imagination, but with fear. “Would you rather live in America?” As if the only alternatives to bureaucratic fatigue are gunfire and debt from insulin. As if there are only two models available – Scandinavian paperwork or American collapse. The moral horizon has narrowed to a binary: either compliance or chaos.
And so the trick is simple, devastatingly so: lower your expectations until resignation feels like gratitude. Accept mediocrity as mercy. Translate disappointment into decency. Tell yourself that being processed is the same as being protected. The presence of systems is a testament to solidarity. That to be civilised is to be tired – but nicely.
We no longer imagine the good society. We fear the worst ones.
The Bureaucratisation of Life
What began as a gesture of solidarity has metastasised into a civilisation of managed dependence. The welfare state no longer supplements life; it choreographs it, guiding us from prenatal screening to cremation vouchers in a seamless arc of interventions, shepherding us through systems designed not to see us, but to sort us.
Care has become a formality, empathy a mere courtesy, and intimacy a compliance risk.
We are told this is progress: that to be civilised is to be monitored, that to be free is to optimise one’s downtime, that to be mature is to understand one's pension will never be enough and still offer thanks to the system that made it so. Autonomy is measured in QR codes and policy outcomes, responsibility reduced to eligibility, and trust directed not toward the neighbour but toward the infrastructure.
And so we live not in societies but in processed collectivities, populated by clients, managed by caseworkers, soothed by campaigns about resilience, moving through lives that feel less inhabited than administered. The good life is no longer lived but allocated, accompanied not by memory or ritual but by user manuals, review forms, and helpdesk tickets. We scroll through government portals not in search of guidance, but in search of confirmation that we still exist.
Perhaps that is the final trick: to replace meaning with management, to exchange the unpredictable burden of community for the cold convenience of coordination, to confuse care with coverage, risk with pathology, and solidarity with service provision. But something remains missing, and not in the system but in us: something once carried in our voices and silences, in the glance across the table, in the capacity to know when not to calculate, something no interface can store or reproduce.
So maybe the question is not what happens when the pyramid collapses, but what happens when no one remembers what once stood in its place.
And yet, we are not left with one failure, but with two. One worships the individual and dissolves the bonds that once made shared life possible. The other worships the state and replaces those bonds with forms, guidelines, and managed dependencies. One disenchants community by denying its necessity; the other by simulating it.
This is the deeper tragedy: not that freedom was lost or that care became conditional, but that both models – market and system, autonomy and administration – have succeeded in evacuating the in-between, that fragile space where human beings once negotiated meaning, loyalty, and need without being told how to do so.
And yet, not everything has been absorbed by the grid of legibility. Outside the fluorescent corridors of managed care, a stubborn refusal persists, one that does not announce itself as a revolt but remains a practice, quiet, improvisational, and unrecorded. Neighbours still bring food without a barcode, hands still linger on shoulders without a protocol, families still gather without a registration code, and children still visit their grandparents without leaving a data trail.
Life remains more than the categories that seek to contain it. There is still a form of dignity that does not ask for permission, a solidarity that requires no coordination, a freedom that is not the absence of ties but the refusal to let them be mapped. The state may see better from above, but the ground remains tangled, opaque, and alive.
And perhaps here, in the thicket of the everyday – messy, relational, incalculable – lies the last possibility of rebuilding what was lost: not through another system, but through the deliberate reinvention of forms of life the pyramid cannot see.
Not the freedom to be left alone, but the freedom to remain unreadable. Not the right to care, but the return of caring as a shared human art. Not the social contract, but the slow, stubborn reweaving of trust.
