I can think if very few things on this earth that I hope more to never do. But I appreciate the compliment all the same.
I’d say it’s anarcho-communist with an advanced post-scarcity economy. Anarchism refers more to the governing structure than the economic system. Some people misunderstand it to mean no rules, but it more accurately means no rulers. Although the Culture has no laws, it has strong social norms apparently geared to maximize the balance of agency/liberty and aided by freedom from material need and most conceivable want, the ability to neutralize rare predators with nearly omniscient involuntary supervision, and of course a culture that fosters a strong sense of its core values combined with an education that presumably inculcates the utility of those values.
While the Minds of the mainstream Culture (we’re given to understand there are hard and soft forks of the society featured in the stories) exercise a strong managerial role, the subculture among them compels them to respect the vesting of administrative decisions in the entire Culture citizenry, natural and synthetic, in a form of direct participatory democracy that appears in some of the stories to strongly resemble my preferred form of socialism, syndicalism.
That said, a couple brief passages in Excession and Consider Phlebas suggest the Minds are more than a little capable of modeling the behavior of the humaniods, non-humaniods and drones in their care. How they balance this power of foresight against not manipulating decisions is something I’ve long wondered about.
Precisely. It is not the means of production but the owners of the means of production that produce static inequality.
a teen removed from his family lived in 17 different foster placements under the watch of 23 different social workers and caregivers over an 11 year period.
One of the problems here (and in the USA) is bureaucracy. Having worked in the welfare bureaucracy for a decade in the 80s and 90s, and being on the other side of the desk at this time in my life, I know lots about the bureaucracy that runs “taking care of people.” Their idea of care is to have layers and layers of paperwork, at lot of it hierarchical, and have ton of hard to get proofs just to get into the system. Then you’re told you can’t be helped by X, you must go to Y, and start this all over again. At Y, you’re told you only qualify for Z, but that’s somewhere else in some other building, and you’d think you finally got somewhere, only to find out the caseworker assigned to you is out on leave.
And social workers, who have to have Master’s degrees, get paid less than those benefits workers ^ with a high school diploma. They’re supposed to care, but are told not to get involved, and the turnover is amazing because the work is so heartbreaking. I don’t know what the cost of living is in that part of Canada, or if salaries are just that high, but a social worker here in the US makes half of the $8000 a month quoted in the article for a caregiver. And a standard caregiver? Like an LPN? same.
