The Welfare Office as Modern Myth
The welfare office is not merely a place where money changes hands or where regulations are applied. It is a structure, a system of signs, a ritualized stage where society tells itself who it is.
Every encounter between client and social worker enacts a set of opposites: dependence versus authority, order versus chaos, deserving versus undeserving. These opposites do not resolve; they circle endlessly, like myth itself. The client must present proof of need — papers, certificates, stories — while the social worker performs the role of the gatekeeper, applying the law as though it were divine ordinance. Yet both sides are dependent: the client depends on the institution for survival, and the worker depends on the client’s existence for his or her own function and salary. This mutual dependence is concealed beneath the surface narrative of “help.”
Instead of bringing goats or incense to the temple, clients bring forms, signatures, receipts. These offerings are inspected, stamped, and filed away in archives — offerings to the invisible gods of the system: the state, the budget, the law. Only when the sacrifice is deemed sufficient is aid granted.
What is masked in this ritual is that the office does not eliminate poverty or despair; it manages them. Like a priesthood that cannot banish death but can prescribe funerals, the welfare office does not cure the wound but keeps it within boundaries, within categories that can be administered. The system requires a steady flow of suffering subjects to justify its own permanence.
Society consoles itself with this structure. It says: we are humane, we take care of the weak. But this myth hides the truth that help is conditional, rationed, and often humiliating. It hides that the worker and the client mirror each other: one cannot exist without the other. It hides that the real gods — ministries, budgets, shifting political winds — are absent from the room yet determine everything within it.
The welfare office is therefore not a machine of compassion but of reproduction: it reproduces poverty as a manageable category, it reproduces dependency as a permanent condition, it reproduces the system’s own legitimacy. It is not designed to solve but to continue.
This is the structuralist truth: the welfare office functions the way myth does. It does not tell us the literal truth of the world, but it gives us a story that allows us to live with contradictions. We believe we are helping, even as the structure ensures the wound never heals.
And here is the sting: modern bureaucracy disguises itself as rational, efficient, scientific. But beneath the paperwork, it is ancient — it is myth and ritual, smoke and sacrifice. Its hidden function is not to free but to bind. It is the priesthood of the state, feeding on dependency, justifying itself through endless rites. Unless we pierce this disguise, we will continue mistaking ritual survival for real change.