The Machine That Eats the World

I. What Has Already Happened

You need to see this clearly before we go any further.

In February 2022, the Canadian government froze the bank accounts of people who had donated to a trucker protest. Not just the protesters—the donors. People who had contributed fifty dollars to what was, at the time, a legal demonstration woke up to find their accounts inaccessible. No court order. No criminal charge. No due process.

The Deputy Prime Minister announced that these financial surveillance tools would now be permanent.

In Melbourne, Australia, a pregnant woman was arrested in her home, in front of her children, handcuffed in her pajamas, for posting about a protest on Facebook. Citizens returning to their own country were locked in quarantine camps behind fences. Police checked coffee cups to make sure people were actually drinking—not just holding a prop to evade mask rules.

In the United Kingdom, police now record “non-crime hate incidents” on your file. Not crimes—the police admit no law was broken—but someone, somewhere, was offended. These records show up on employment checks. They follow you. People have been arrested for silent prayer. Not speaking. Not blocking anything. Standing in public, praying inside their own minds.

In the Netherlands, police fired live ammunition at a tractor driven by a sixteen-year-old boy. His crime: protesting regulations that would force the sale of his family’s farm.

In Norway, child protective services have been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for removing children from families over parenting disagreements. Not abuse. Disagreements.

In the United States, Operation Choke Point saw the Justice Department pressure banks to deny service to legal businesses the administration disliked. No law passed. No conviction. Just quiet pressure, and suddenly you can’t have a bank account.

These are not autocracies. These are liberal democracies. Constitutions. Courts. Free elections. The good guys.

So what happened?

You built a machine. And the machine is working exactly as machines work.

II. What the Machine Does

Here is what you need to understand: every institution that promises to care for people eventually becomes a system for controlling them. This is not a flaw. This is what institutions are.

You build a welfare system to help the poor. But the system needs to define who counts as poor. It needs to verify. To monitor. To check compliance. To punish fraud. Slowly, the system that was built to give becomes a system that watches, categorizes, and disciplines. The help comes with conditions. The conditions require surveillance. The surveillance generates control.

You build a public health system to protect people from disease. But the system needs authority to act in emergencies. It needs to quarantine, to mandate, to enforce. And who decides what constitutes an emergency? The system does. The power you gave it to protect you is the same power it uses to confine you.

You build child protective services to rescue children from abuse. But the system needs to define abuse. It needs discretion to act before harm occurs. That discretion becomes the power to take children from families that social workers find distasteful. The shield becomes a sword.

This happens every time. The machinery of help becomes the machinery of control because help and control are the same machinery. The database of people who need assistance is the database of people who can be targeted. The system that distributes benefits is the system that withholds them. The network that monitors for your safety is the network that monitors.

You cannot build a machine that only works in one direction.

III. What the Machine Does to You

But the machine doesn’t only control the people it was built to help. It does something worse to you—the person who built it.

You wanted to feed the hungry. That impulse was human and good. But instead of feeding anyone, you voted. You voted for policies that would, through a chain of processes you don’t see and can’t control, eventually result in resources being transferred to people you will never meet.

And something happened inside you. The hungry person in front of you—the one you could actually feed, today, with your own hands—became invisible. You had already addressed “hunger.” You had a position on it. You voted. You did your part.

You did not feed anyone. You did not see anyone. You did not sit with anyone. You were not changed by anyone.

You learned to love humanity in the abstract so you would never have to love a human in particular.

This is what the machine does to those who build it. It offers you the feeling of virtue without the cost of virtue. It lets you care about “the poor” while never being inconvenienced by poverty. It lets you advocate for “the homeless” while stepping over a homeless man to get to the advocacy meeting.

You have become capable of great compassion in the abstract and near-total indifference in the particular. The machine made you this way. The machine needed you this way. Because people who actually care for their neighbors don’t need a machine to do it for them.

IV. The Violence You Have Authorized

Let us be plain about something you prefer not to think about.

Every law is a threat. Every regulation is backed by force. Every tax is collected at gunpoint. This is not rhetoric. This is description. The state is defined as the institution that claims a monopoly on legitimate violence, and every action it takes rests on that foundation.

When you vote for programs to feed the hungry, you are voting to send armed men to your neighbor’s door to take his money. If he refuses, he will be fined. If he refuses the fine, he will be arrested. If he resists arrest, he will be subdued with whatever force is necessary. Up to and including lethal force.

This is not a slippery slope. This is Tuesday. This is how law works.

You have found a way to feel compassionate about helping the poor by using violence against your neighbors. The violence is hidden—sanitized through process, mediated through bureaucracy, legitimized through voting—but it is always there. You don’t see the IRS agent. You don’t see the court summons. You don’t see the sheriff. You only see the program. The benefit. The good result.

But someone saw the agent. Someone received the summons. Someone met the sheriff. The violence that funds your compassion was experienced by someone. You just made sure it wasn’t you, and you didn’t have to watch.

This is moral laundering. You have outsourced your charity to an institution that collects donations at gunpoint, and you have told yourself this makes you generous.

V. You Will Not Always Hold the Gun

Here is the part you refuse to see.

The people who built the Emergencies Act did not envision it being used against truckers. The people who designed Operation Choke Point did not intend for the next administration to turn the same techniques against abortion providers. The people who built public health emergency powers did not imagine them being used for indefinite detention.

You think you will always be the one operating the machine. You build these tools for your purposes, and you cannot imagine them being turned against you.

But you will not always be in power. Your coalition will lose. The other side will take control. And when they do, they will find everything you built—the surveillance, the financial controls, the emergency powers, the databases, the bureaucracies that can classify and track and freeze and seize—and they will use these tools according to their values. Not yours.

The right builds national security machinery; the left inherits it. The left builds social welfare machinery; the right inherits it. Each side is shocked when the other uses the tools. Neither side considers that the tools are the problem.

The Canadian truckers donated to a cause you may find foolish. The next time, it will be a cause you support. The Australian woman posted about a protest you may think was wrongheaded. The next time, it will be your protest. The machinery does not care about the worthiness of targets. It only knows that it has capabilities, and capabilities get used.

You are building the tools of your own oppression and telling yourself it’s compassion.

VI. Where This Road Ends

A society that outsources care to the state produces people who cannot care for each other.

Why should neighbors bring meals to the sick when there are social services? Why should families care for elderly parents when there’s Medicaid? Why should anyone do anything when there’s a program for it?

Each function that moves to the state is a function that atrophies everywhere else. The muscles you don’t use, you lose. Within a generation, the capacity is gone. The community that could once care for itself can no longer imagine doing so.

This works as long as the machine works. But machines break.

What happens when the economy collapses, the grid fails, the supply chains snap, the currency hyperinflates? What happens when the system everyone depends on stops functioning?

People who have never learned to give will not suddenly discover generosity. People who have never built relationships of trust will not suddenly form communities. People who have never sacrificed for neighbors will not suddenly find solidarity. The capacity was never developed. The machine crowded it out.

What happens instead is what always happens when atomized masses face scarcity. Panic. Hoarding. Rage. Scapegoating. Violence.

The great totalitarian movements of the twentieth century did not arise in traditional communities with strong local bonds. They arose in modernized, atomized societies where the intermediate structures—family, church, guild, village, all the organic relationships of mutual obligation—had been hollowed out. People who have no community will join a movement. People who have no identity will take one from a leader. People who have no purpose will accept a mission.

The total state does not conquer intact communities. It flows into the vacuum where communities used to be.

You are creating that vacuum. Every program that replaces a human relationship with a bureaucratic one. Every institution that makes neighbors unnecessary to each other. Every system that lets you care about people without knowing any.

You think you are building a safety net.

You are building a trap.

VII. The Evidence

You might think this is theory. It is not. We have data.

Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist with no ideological axe to grind, spent decades documenting what he called the decline of “social capital” in America. His findings are devastating.

Membership in parent-teacher associations dropped from over 12 million in 1964 to barely 5 million in 1982. Union membership—once a dense network of working-class mutual support—fell from 32.5 percent of the workforce in 1953 to under 16 percent by 1992. Fraternal organizations, women’s clubs, civic leagues, volunteer fire departments, bowling leagues—all collapsed. The trajectory reversed in the 1960s and ‘70s, and the decline appeared in every segment of American society regardless of demographic, economic, or geographic factors.

What replaced these organic networks? Professionalized organizations. Check-writing. What were once grassroots volunteer efforts became national nonprofits with paid staff and marketing departments. Americans learned to donate money instead of time, to join mailing lists instead of communities. They found a way to feel involved without ever being present.

Church attendance tells the same story. In the 1950s, nearly 70 percent of Americans attended services regularly. Today, it is closer to 20 percent. Church membership has fallen below 50 percent for the first time in American history. In Europe, the collapse is even more dramatic—weekly attendance in traditionally Catholic countries like Belgium, France, and Ireland dropped between 4 and 14 percentage points in just two decades.

These institutions—churches, unions, fraternal lodges, civic associations—were not merely social clubs. They were the infrastructure of mutual aid. They were where people learned to care for each other without the state. Their disappearance is not incidental to the rise of the welfare state. It is the same phenomenon viewed from two angles.

Does government welfare actually crowd out private giving? The research is contested, but the evidence leans in one direction. Studies have found that each dollar of government welfare spending reduces private charitable giving by somewhere between 28 and 75 cents. The higher estimate comes from a comprehensive study of over 8,000 American charities, which found that most of the crowding out occurs because charities reduce their fundraising efforts when government funding increases. Why ask people to give when the state already provides?

A skeptic will point to Scandinavia. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have extensive welfare states and high levels of volunteering and social trust. Doesn’t this disprove the thesis?

Not quite. Look closer at what happened in Sweden.

In the 1970s, at the peak of the Swedish welfare state, the government provided the majority of eldercare. Families provided less. The system worked—until it couldn’t. When Sweden faced fiscal crisis in the 1990s and cut back services, something remarkable happened: family care doubled. Today, Swedish relatives provide twice the amount of eldercare that local governments do—a complete reversal of the 1970s ratio. Nursing home capacity has been cut in half. The families stepped up because they had to.

This is not a success story. Swedish media describe it as a crisis. Informal caregivers report being trapped and overwhelmed. The “Swedish model” is fraying. But it reveals something important: the capacity for care was not destroyed. It was suppressed. It lay dormant, crowded out by the state’s promise to handle everything. When the state could no longer deliver, the families remembered how to care for their own—but they had to relearn it under duress, without the community infrastructure that would have made it sustainable.

The Scandinavian countries also maintained high formal volunteering—people joining organizations, showing up for scheduled activities. What declined was informal mutual aid—the unscheduled, spontaneous, neighbor-to-neighbor care that requires no organization. Community work, one Swedish study noted, “has had a weak position for decades in the Nordic countries, due to the reliance on the universal welfare state to meet needs and solve social issues.” The machine didn’t destroy all social capacity. It destroyed the particular capacity that the machine was designed to replace.

And consider: the Scandinavian welfare states were built by popular movements—unions, cooperatives, churches, and civic associations that shaped the state in their image. The state did not replace civil society; it was an expression of civil society. America’s welfare state was built differently—more top-down, more bureaucratic, less rooted in organic community structures. The crowding-out effect may depend on how the machine was built and what it was built to replace.

But the most telling evidence comes from history—from an experiment that would be impossible to run today.

In the late nineteenth century, several American cities abolished “outdoor relief”—direct cash assistance to the poor. Brooklyn did it in 1879. Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Washington D.C., and others followed. For a quarter century, these cities relied almost entirely on private charity to care for their poor.

In 1899, Frederic Almy, secretary of the Buffalo Charity Organization, gathered data on outdoor relief and private charity across forty cities, ten of which had completely abolished government assistance. His finding: private giving increased to fill the gap. The crowding-out effect worked in reverse. When the state stepped back, civil society stepped forward.

This was not a paradise. Private charity was imperfect, uneven, sometimes harsh. But it was real—real relationships between real people, real communities taking responsibility for their own. The capacity existed because it had never been destroyed.

That capacity is now largely gone. We have run the experiment in the other direction for sixty years, and the results are in. The machine has done what machines do. It has replaced human judgment with procedure, human relationships with case files, human communities with client populations.

And we are weaker for it. Disastrously, measurably, demonstrably weaker.

VIII. The Way Out

There is another path. It is harder. It does not scale. You cannot vote for it. You can only live it.

Stop building the machine. Stop feeding it. Stop pretending that voting for coerced redistribution is the same as giving. Stop pretending that policy positions are the same as love. Stop hiding in the crowd.

Care for the people in front of you. The actual ones. The ones with names and faces and stories. The ones whose needs are specific and inconvenient and cannot be solved by policy. Your neighbors. Your family. Your community.

Build relationships of genuine obligation—not programs, not institutions, but the bonds between people who have made actual commitments to each other. Accept that these relationships will be small and inefficient. Accept that they cannot solve all problems. Accept that suffering will continue.

But in these relationships, something lives that the machine cannot produce: actual love. The kind that knows names. The kind that costs the giver something. The kind that shows up at three in the morning. The kind that transforms both parties through encounter.

The machine offers care without cost, love without presence, virtue without sacrifice. These are lies. There is no care that does not cost. There is no love at a distance. There is no humanity in the aggregate.

You have a choice.

You can be a person who loves—who shows up, who gives, who is changed by the encounter with another human being. This will be difficult. It will be inefficient. It will not scale. It will cost you everything you have.

Or you can be a component in a machine that processes people. This is easier. It scales. It asks nothing of you but your vote and your compliance. And it will eat you last.

The machine is running.

Choose.