"All social workers want is to get everyone involved in a programme. Because a programme provides full employment for three generations of social workers. And they mess up"
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Eddings lands this like a pub-table grenade: the target isn’t compassion, it’s the bureaucratic machine that compassion can be drafted into. The line’s blunt engine is motive-stripping. “All social workers want” is deliberately unfair, a sweeping generalization that mimics the kind of reductive thinking he’s accusing institutions of practicing. He’s not building a case; he’s staging a provocation, inviting the reader to feel the irritation of being processed.
The key word is “programme,” a sneer at systems that turn messy human need into a managed pipeline. “Full employment for three generations” isn’t just hyperbole; it’s a theory of inertia. Once a program exists, it develops constituencies, budgets, career ladders, and self-justifying metrics. Help becomes indistinguishable from maintenance. In that reading, “involved” is a euphemism for captured: people as clients, cases, numbers that keep the apparatus humming.
“And they mess up” is the punchline’s brutality. It’s short, childlike, almost lazy, which is the point: after all the inflated institutional language, the end result is crudely human damage. The subtext is less “social workers are bad” than “good intentions can be weaponized by procedure.” Coming from a fantasy novelist often skeptical of courtly or administrative power, it fits a genre tradition where competence is personal and bureaucracies are obstacles, not solutions.
The discomfort here is that it flirts with contempt for frontline workers while mostly indicting the incentive structures above them. The line works because it’s rude enough to feel true, even when it’s not fair enough to be true.
The key word is “programme,” a sneer at systems that turn messy human need into a managed pipeline. “Full employment for three generations” isn’t just hyperbole; it’s a theory of inertia. Once a program exists, it develops constituencies, budgets, career ladders, and self-justifying metrics. Help becomes indistinguishable from maintenance. In that reading, “involved” is a euphemism for captured: people as clients, cases, numbers that keep the apparatus humming.
“And they mess up” is the punchline’s brutality. It’s short, childlike, almost lazy, which is the point: after all the inflated institutional language, the end result is crudely human damage. The subtext is less “social workers are bad” than “good intentions can be weaponized by procedure.” Coming from a fantasy novelist often skeptical of courtly or administrative power, it fits a genre tradition where competence is personal and bureaucracies are obstacles, not solutions.
The discomfort here is that it flirts with contempt for frontline workers while mostly indicting the incentive structures above them. The line works because it’s rude enough to feel true, even when it’s not fair enough to be true.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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