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Bring out the pitchforks, poor people are ruining everything - again

Image: https://thegreatwelfarescrounge.wordpress.com

We constantly hear it in tabloid newspapers: Benefit scroungers are destroying our country! The scourge of the poor is omnipresent in the lives of every elevated middle class privileged person whose family, only a couple of generations ago, was loading coal in a factory. And it sounds like it makes sense, doesn’t it? Think of all the things we could do, as a society, with all the money thrown at people who can’t be bothered to work! It’s revolting! But is it an accurate depiction of the truth? 

Vilifying and dehumanising whole parts of the population is deeply ingrained into our culture. What might be surprising is just how old the practice is. Illusionists call it misdirection and its essence can be captured so: 

a form of deception in which the attention of an audience is focused on one thing in order to distract its attention from another.

The Romans, however, had an even older name for the practice: panem et circenses or bread and circuses. This technique, not unlike misdirection, focuses on gaining popular support not by doing things right through exemplary service to constituents or country but by distraction and mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace. 

What better way to hide the fact that governments across the West are failing in serving their constituencies than by blaming it on someone else? And, unfortunately, studies show (i.e.The Milgram Experiment) that the majority of us will believe almost anything a person in authority tells us. 

The world as we know it today is ridiculously complex and the only way our limited brains can function within it is by making shortcuts. Despite what that motivational post on Facebook says, you cannot challenge everything you know. We have evolved to look up to and trust individuals who appear to be in a position of strength, even when there is ample evidence to the contrary, because fact-checking everything? Spoiler alert: Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Ok so what? Isn’t it all true though?

Well, yes, large numbers of people are on welfare and, as the linked Daily Mail article correctly points out, benefit spending has been steadily increasing over the last few decades. However, the context is always important. 

According to the DWP, in 1996, the bill for the benefit system was £80 billion. By 2012, it had escalated to nearly £160 billion! However, the article doesn’t seem to take into account various factors such as inflation, population growth, job availability, the challenges of reintroducing people into work after long absences or the still present discrimination against employing people with disabilities. 

Using the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, £80 billion in 1996 would be the equivalent of nearly £125 billion in 2012. Publicly available data also shows us that the population of the UK grew by 8.6% between 1996 and the end of 2012, further diminishing the potentially intended illusion that the number of people on benefits or the amount of benefits received somehow doubled within a 16 year time-span. 

Also, what the article fails to mention is that £74 billion of those £160 were spent on state pensions. Surely the big bad benefit scroungers the newspapers and politicians are hinting at aren’t grandmas and grandpas across the country!? Surely it’s those damn lazy benefit scroungers living off of jobseeker’s!

Well... brace yourselves ‘cause it ain’t pretty: JSA accounts for a whopping 3.1% of benefit spending! Disability Living Allowance given to working-age claimants?(which is support for the most disabled and vulnerable members of our society)? 4.3% of benefit spending. 

OK, so newspapers can be misleading, nobody believes that crap anyway!

That may be true, however, studies show a different picture. A 2013 Ipso Mori survey quoted in a parliamentary report shows that the British public believes up to 24% of benefit claims are fraudulent. The actual number? 34 times lower, sitting at a sky-shattering 0.7%. The impact on tax-payer contributions? £1.2 billion. This is how misdirection works to manipulate our collective psychology. 

But what is our attention being directed from?  

Hard to tell, since it’s difficult to pinpoint the unseen area of an illusionist’s trick. For example, some digging might reveal that tax evasion and avoidance (the legal and illegal ways of avoiding tax) accounted for an estimated £7.1 billion in losses to the budget. A bit higher than the £1.2 lost due to fraudulent benefit claims. You would therefore expect the government to focus on where most of the money is lost, right? Wrong

The Guardian 2016

3,250 Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) staff have been assigned to investigate welfare fraud, while 300 specialise in dealing with the rich.

What the...

Unfortunately, this is just one of the symptoms of a much wider disease that is not exclusive to either the benefits vs tax evasion argument, the rich vs poor argument or even to the UK. Across the western world, a vast number of scapegoats are used to justify anything from failing economies and austerity measures to the deficit in meaningful employment and declining mental health. Immigrants, the poor, the rival political party, other bodies (the EU is taking money away from the NHS!), etc. 

So... what now?

The actual causes of the myriad of challenges faced by modern societies are as varied and as difficult to tackle as their consequences are painful and, in some cases, life ruining. They are, also, way above the scope of a blog post. However, it’s not all gloom and doom.  

Philosophers, economists, journalists, even ordinary people like you and me (and, to a lesser extent, politicians) are working constantly on finding solutions to these challenges. Maybe, in a century from now, capitalistic societies will be a thing of the past and we will be working towards a (actually functioning) Marxist utopia. Maybe we’ll all have universal incomes covering all our basic needs and we will be free to fill our lives with meaningful work that betters our society - paving the road for the greatest and fastest development of our world in history. A new and truly golden age. 

Or maybe we’ll have a nuclear war that will make most of these issues slightly irrelevant. I, personally, am hoping for the former.  

Until then, try to filter the quality of your information diet. As with food, consuming the wrong information diet is really bad for everybody’s health.

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