The
Welfare Matrix; a modest proposal
What becomes
of society’s losers? Jared Diamond asked a similar question; what becomes of
the losers of tribal warfare? He found three solutions. For sparcely-populated
hunter-gatherer societies (politically-incorrectly called ‘savage’), the losers
are driven off the land, to starvation or more marginal land or dispossessing
someone else. For middling-density pre-state agricultural societies
(‘barbarians’), the losers are exterminated, down to the last woman and
child. And for high-density state-dominated
farming societies (‘empires’), the losers are enslaved.
These
three solutions translate to the modern criminal code. The savage ‘Jacksonian’
solution is exile; the barbaric ‘Hitlerian’ solution is capital punishment; and
the imperial ‘Pharaonic’ solution is imprisonment. But are these the only
alternatives?
The
Romans experimented with another solution; bread and circuses. The idea was to
keep potential trouble-makers too well fed and entertained to desire revolt.
It’s a drain on the imperial economy, but less than revolt is, so it’s a sound
insurance policy; an investment in public order. How would this translate to
the modern age?
I
propose the “Welfare Matrix”. It would work this way: when one of the losers of
society's internal wars needs Welfare money, he has to put on the
virtual-reality helmet and go into the Matrix, where the Welfare Bureaucracy
resides. So instead of standing in endless lines in a brick-and-mortal
building, you stand in endless lines in a virtual building. There will be
video-game characteristics built in - you have to zap demon attacks, first-person
shooter stuff like that - just to keep people busy and venting their
frustrations. The Matrix is hard enough that you have to work all day for the
Welfare, and the Welfare is stingy enough that you never get off the Matrix.
This suggests the question; are we
already in the Welfare Matrix without knowing it? Given endless virtual work
for virtual pay?
