In my various writings, I’ve not had a good thing to say about the welfare systems and social security systems of our modern age. I only want to write a short entry explaining the basic principle behind my opposition to welfare systems and social security systems.
We are physical creatures, creatures who need food and shelter and physical companionship amongst various and many needs. We are not even so individualistic as are cats, perhaps the most individualistic of social or higher mammals. We have bonds of dependency, first of all those bonds formed between mothers and children. A child’s love for his mother begins with his dependence upon her breasts and arms and legs. He is dependent upon her for food and for shelter and for the companionship which first shows as cuddling and cooing, not as some sort of spiritual communion.
Such bonds are the foundations of all human ties. Even our Lord Jesus Christ formed such bonds with His blessed mother during His infancy.
Our loves are not some sort of magical or ‘spiritual’ bonds that come to us from… Where? We are physical creatures and our social bonds, our deepest emotional ties, come first of all from our bonds of dependency. Our bonds to God Himself come through His acts as Creator of our physical selves and of the physical environments that are our homes during our mortal lives. We are dependent upon our Maker and we owe Him everything.
What are our modern bonds of dependency? Certainly, they are not bonds tying us to local political communities or communities of worship. Certainly they don’t tie us to the extended family. We have even weakened our still-existing bonds to the so-called nuclear family.
Our strongest bonds are to those Principalities and Powers which I called ‘the gods of the marketplaces’ in my book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand. We are more dependent upon Toyota and the Social Security Administration than we are upon our siblings or local merchants or local churches or synagogues. Our souls are formed by the moral midgets of the entertainment industry and not by our priests or ministers or rabbis.
Social security and welfare systems as they exist in modern nation-states are evil because they replace our local bonds of dependencies with bonds to central powers, the Principalities and Powers in the Hellenistic language of St. Paul. For those who care about history: the first national welfare and social security systems in the modern world were built by the Iron Duke, Otto von Bismarck, as he militarized and centralized Prussia. He despised people who needed to be taken care of, but he became convinced that welfare and social security were necessary to bond Prussians to their increasingly powerful central government.
The Roman politicians who presided over the decay of the Republic into the Empire acted as if this were true, though I don’t know if they had any conscious plans to build the welfare bureaucracy that existed before Rome had a professional army. As time goes on, it seems that those early victims of the modern age — the anabaptists, understood it better than the rest of us. The central powers are not to be trusted. Christians and Jews are very unwise to make alliances with those embryonic Principalities and Powers. But there are many in the pro-life movement as well as those fighting to retain traditional regulation of marriage who would do all over again, thinking: This time when we regain control over those Principalities and Powers, we’ll do it right and not lose control. No. Once power is sufficiently centralized, it takes on a life of its own — think in terms of the evil side of the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith. Power will serve its own purposes, as mindless and lifeless and destructive as those purposes might be.
But that centralization of power can always be started up with a simple appeal to people’s needs. Let some politicians gain general taxation powers in a morally well-structured society and soon they’ll be saying, “We’ll set up a safety net to help only those without family or community bonds.” And soon, most will be forsaking their family and community bonds to enter the always exciting marketplaces.