ON THE WATER
Grow your own food to beat our failed and loopy social compact
Neels Blom: We have a deal with the government, but it is not holding up its end of the bargain. What is wrong with us?
To borrow a term from physics and squeeze it into law, there is something disturbingly loopy about the way the social compact manifests in SA — or doesn’t, as seems more likely if you follow the vector of state failure to its disastrous end. Loopy because circular. What has happened is that the elements without which society cannot thrive — security, health and education — are not adequately provided by the state. The but-for factor — the sine qua non, that for which the ANC has given its word — is absent. This we know. To see what we can do about it, it might be useful to consider the causal links between each of the three fundamental state obligations. For the moment, let’s deploy Maslow’s hierarchy of individual needs as an analogy for societal needs and consider which of the three fundamentals should be a priority, to use a favoured bureaucratic obfuscation for the government’s lack of planning. Maslow would argue that without an adequate degree of physiological integrity, there...
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