me_irl

Something I realized years ago.

There are many "dystopian" works of fiction where the characters actually get housing and enough food for their needs provided by the government free of charge in exchange for ideological compliance or at least pretending to. In these settings the government functions as a totalitarian entity micromanaging all aspects of existence, so the "freedom" to starve to death is effectively eradicated along with other freedoms.

By decoupling survival from labor market participation, or more accurately, by making the labor market an extension of the state, the system achieves a level of physiological stability that is undeniably attractive to anyone who has ever experienced the existential dread of housing insecurity or food scarcity in the current system.

In many dystopian settings, such as the works of Huxley and Orwell, the terror comes from the watchful eye of the state and the fear of punishment for deviation. In our current system, the terror comes from invisibility and abandonment, being ignored by a system that definitely has the resources and the means to feed you (roughly half the food produced today is being wasted) but refuses to do so unless you prove useful can definitely feel more dehumanizing and dystopian than being strictly micromanaged by an overbearing authority.