From Freeloaders To Free Givers

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Road to the Middle Class

Thursday October 23, 2025

by Christopher Chantrill

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Let the ruling liberal elite tremble at a conservative revolution. Conservatives, moderates, and liberal victims have nothing to lose but their shame. They have a world to win.

If it is true that the poor, without the help of the welfare state, have the ability and the culture to thrive as social beings, and if it is true that the middle class is diminished by its enslavement into the conformism of school and career, and if it is true that the gentry liberals have created an unjust state that uses the poor as regime supporters to maintain the gentry-liberal ruling class in political power, then what price the welfare state? The welfare state, in its present form, is based on the false choice between laissez-faire individualism and social assistance and deliberately obscures the real choice between a free and benevolent association and a compulsory government dependency.

It’s all very well to decide what would be possible for the poor and the middle class — and even a future of a genuine creative life for the gentry liberals — in a world after liberalism and the welfare state. Anyone can do that. The question is, would the poor and the middle class want that possibility? Perhaps they would want to continue in the soft totalitarianism of the welfare state as Herbert Marcuse sneeringly predicted in the 1960s. In the early 2010s, low-income Americans were advertising, through their actions, their preference for a life of government benefits in preference to a life of work. Given that a single mother of two in Pennsylvania in 2010 could could get annual benefits worth $46,000 or so, why would she attempt to work?1 Similarly middle-class Americans were demonstrating that they preferred a life checking the boxes of the middle-class entitlement multiple choice test over a life of robust responsibility, going along with free schooling and subsidized college education and highly taxed employment and government-specified retirement benefits rather than insisting upon alternatives. If they wanted something different they could have sought it out. What would it take for welfare recipients to change their minds about work? And what would it take for the middle class to lose their attachment to middle-class entitlements? The answer is pretty simple. The government would have to run out of money. Only then would people start looking around for something different. In 2012, for instance, the voters voted for President Obama to maintain the status-quo. Why not? The Republican nominee did not offer a compelling reason for change, a compelling reason to risk a change in the trajectory of big government. So the voters chose their benefits.

We have seen that there are two different ways in which humans look for something different, when they respond to an existential need to change their conditions of existence. Either they go a-freebooting, striking out into the unknown, as warrior bands have done since time immemorial, following their aggressive instincts. Or they invent a religion, in order to cut down on the freebooting and the freeloading as they have done since time immemorial, following their natural cooperative instincts.

We have spun in Chapter Five the cords that bind a community of social humans: gathering people into a community, establishing rules of behavior, an ability to sacrifice, burying enmities, directing the moral sense with cultural memes. We could bind everyone into community by force, of course, but force is expensive, so humans long ago developed religion as a more effective way than force to socialize each human into the right thinking, the right feeling, and the right acting for the good of the social group. Religion even developed cunning tricks, like the concepts of divine justice and reincarnation, to persuade people that, while evildoers don’t necessarily get their deserts in this world, they will certainly get the attention of God in the next world or get relegated to a lower caste in the next life. And, of course, a religious community also identifies potentially trustworthy people, the kind of people demonstrating daily in their actions their willingness to pay the cost of belonging to a human community.

In the last two thousand years the fundamental social problem has been the challenge of moving to the city and learning how to operate in an urban society. We saw this as a process of moving from the tribal self of the hunter-gatherer or the servile self of the agricultural peasant to a new kind of membership in the city as one of the People of the Responsible Self.

In their initial responses to the new “ultimate conditions” of existence in the city, some well-born humans thought that salvation was obtained by withdrawing from the world, a strategy that Rodney Stark has called “upper-class asceticism.” Perhaps that worked well back then for princelings like Gautama Siddhartha as it now works for tenured university professors in the modern era. But in the Protestant Reformation the rising bourgeoisie determined that “salvation is not to be found in any kind of withdrawal from the world but in the midst of worldly activities.”2 In the words of revivalist preacher Barton Stone, Protestant revivalism woke people up from “the sleep of ages” to the idea that they could become responsible beings called to a life of purpose.

You can see this narrative at work in George Eliot’s first full-length novel, Adam Bede, published in 1859 but set in 1799. Its protagonists are shining examples of responsible virtue, of what Max Weber would come to call the “Protestant ethic.” Seeking salvation in responsible worldly lives of work and mindfulness are the rising carpenter Adam Bede and the incandescent Methodist lay preacher, Dinah Morris. But protagonists need antagonists, and so Eliot creates the heedless Arthur Donnithorne, the local squire’s son, and the foolish Hetty Sorrel to illuminate the worthiness of Bede and Morris. At every moment in the novel Adam and Dinah are thinking about how to live and act rightly, and how to follow through on their virtuous intentions. Needless to say, the heedless Arthur and Hetty do not heed anything but their shallow and selfish impulses. Because Adam Bede is a novel, divine justice gets to operate in this world as well as the next, so Adam and Dinah live happily ever after, while Hetty Sorrel is transported beyond the seas for killing the baby she bore from the seed of heedless Arthur Donnithorne.

At every great moral or social crisis in American history, according to William G. McLoughlin, Americans have met the challenge with a Great Awakening, a spiritual revival that sets the stage — spiritually, politically, and culturally — for a great age of reform. The great revival of the mid 18th century got people riled up for the American Revolution, and the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century prepared the ground for the battle against slavery. As we have seen in Chapter Five, the modern world is a ferment of religious movements trying to conjure up and enact new symbolic forms and acts to relate themselves to the ultimate conditions of their existence. There are movements that appeal to the educated elite and attempt to compensate for the Death of God. There are movements that appeal to the rising middle class, living out Max Weber’s notion of the modern Puritan seeking a life that finds meaning in work as a calling. There are movements that appeal to the urban poor, that encourage a united front to the challenges of life on the margin.

All moral movements find their energy in the eternal war between good vs. evil. They must do, for every moral movement seeks to find the meaning of life here on Earth, and the meaningful life is necessarily the good life, and life that is not informed by the true meaning of life is necessarily evil. Having satisfied itself to the meaning of life and the definition of the good life a moral movement then divides up the world into “us” and “them.” “We” are the good people working to relate our lives to the ultimate conditions of existence; “we” can be trusted to act rightly and can be given the benefit of the doubt. Within the community of “us” there is no need for force and compulsion, for trustworthy people can be trusted to do the right thing. But “they” are the evil people that cannot be trusted. Against “them” there is probably a need for armed defense, and “they” are likely only to respond to force and compulsion.

We have seen that this is not just the way of modern humans but of historical and ancient humans. Thus all bands of hunter-gatherers thought of the group of the kindred as “us” and the neighboring group as a dangerous “them.” All villages of agriculturalists thought of the village as “us” and the village over the hill as “them.” It is a striking achievement of the nation state to have extended the notion of “us” to all people that dwell within the sacred borders of the nation state and speak “our” language. People in other lands that speak other languages are not to be trusted.

Now, it is the vision of our modern ruling class of the educated elite that it is called by the ultimate conditions of existence to gather the nations into supranational federations. That is the goal of the leaders of the European Union: “ever closer union.” And beyond that, the modern ruling class would like the whole world to live under one world federation: if not the United Nations, then some other global federation. Theirs is a moral movement to unite all humankind into one “we.” This vision prompts the modern ruling class to imagine a different kind of “us” versus “them.” “We” are the people working for ever closer union; “they” are the people opposed to our vision. Within the nation states the ruling class pursues a slightly different division between “us” and “them,” where “we” are the educated ruling class and its traditionally marginalized clients, the over-under ruling coalition, and “they” are the rich, the corporations, the Christian fundamentalists, the gun owners, the bitter clingers, the deplorables, and the rednecks.

It is the argument of this book that the moral movement of the modern ruling class has failed, and is heading to red ruin, because of a fatal flaw. This flaw is the failure of the ruling class to lead the clients of the administrative welfare state, the people of the subordinate self, towards the life of the “responsible self.” Every cohort of humans that has migrated to the city has embraced the notion of the “responsible self” in order to thrive in the city and adapt its conditions of life to the conditions of the city, and, up to now, each cohort has had to work out the means of adaptation on its own. But the modern ruling class decided in the 19th century to award itself a power of attorney to act on behalf of the lower orders, and since then has rarely encouraged the clients of the welfare state to take up the life of the responsible self; instead it has encouraged in its clients the notion of the “marginalized self,” the victimized self separated by injustice from the enjoyments of its fair share of the wealth of the city.

Today’s ruling class justifies its leadership on the grounds of “economic inequality,” a revised version of the exploitation argument made by the Educated Youth of the 19th century. It presumes that the poverty and “inequality” suffered by the poor in the city is due to injustice, social and political impediments, institutional barriers to the welfare of the poor. Where this “inequality” can be found to obtain, and it usually can, then it follows that the ruling class should act to remove those barriers using government force.

If the marginalized folk in the city were truly barred from the opportunity to thrive in the city then the program of the ruling class would be the right one. It would be necessary to protect the inner-city poor from unscrupulous employers and landlords, from redlining banks and racist rednecks. And it goes without saying that a whole menu of social benefits would be necessary to preserve the poor from indigence. But we have seen in Chapter Twelve that in the Third World the poor manage to thrive without social benefits, and even manage to find the money to get their children into illegal private schools so that they can acquire the basic skills needed to thrive in the city. Even in South Chicago, down the street from President Obama’s liberal enclave of Hyde Park, the urban poor exhibit extraordinary skills in their struggle to thrive. On this argument the disabilities of the poor issue less from social injustice and more from cultural disability, an unwillingness or inability to present themselves to the landlords and employers in a way calculated to inspire trust. Liberal economist Robert William Fogel attempted in The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism to convert his liberal friends away from the program of fighting material inequality towards an appreciation of the poor suffering from a “maldistribution of spiritual resources”,3 i.e. character. On his view, the problem is not material inequality but cultural deprivation.

But how does a person develop the kind of character that will help to make up their deficiencies in “spiritual resources,” and help them present themselves to landlords and employers in the right way, and enable them to thrive in the city? The answer is religion. It was Methodism that taught Adam Bede and Dinah Morris how to live the life of the responsible self. It is Pentecostalism that teaches the Latin-American poor to abandon the culture of machismo for responsible work in a calling. It is house churches that teach the deracinated urban women of China how to make sense of their conditions of existence and rebuild community out of the rubble and the injustice of the Maoist communist system.

And you will note that in each case the religion operating outside the supervision and control of the ruling class, and is feared and mistrusted by the ruling class.

1Gary Alexander, “Welfare’s Failure and the Solution,” slideshow, American Enterprise Institute. Accessed 2/11/2013: http://www.aei.org/files/2012/07/11-alexander-presentation_10063532278.pdf

2Ibid., p. 368.

3Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 235.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.christopherchantrill.com.

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Crisis of the Administrative State
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Government and the Technology of Force
If you scratch a reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government

Business, Slavery and Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.

Humanity’s Big Problem: Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.

The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history has lacked religion.

A Critique of Human Mechanics
When governments tried to govern on mechanical principles.

The Paradox of Individualism
People that believe in individualism experience individualism as an advanced form of socialization.

From Multitude to Civil Society
Softening the hard edge of instrumental reason.

The Answer is Civil Society
Civil Society: the joint development of the market, civil society, and nationalism.

The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power you must limit power.

Conservatism Three by Three
Balancing tradition with adapting to changing times.

Imagining a Culture of Involvement
You must suggest an alternative.

The Poor Without the Welfare State
What would happen to the poor without a welfare state?

The Middle Class Without the Welfare State
Can the middle class thrive without the supervision of the welfare state?

Liberals and the Welfare State
Liberals ought to be equal to the task of living lives of creative endeavor without political power.

From Freeloaders to Free Givers
But are we too wedded to freeloading?

The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”

Why We Fight
We must fight for our “shining city on a hill”

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MANIFESTO

A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners of America Unite!