The Anti-Social Contract.

The 'Social Contract' is supposed to be a notional document which defines the role of the state in the life of the country.
In fact, is was something which delineated the allowable level of individuality permitted to actual individuals within the geographical regions sold to the contractors for whatever was deemed a fair price, sometime back in the twentieth century.

I never agreed. I was too young. In fact I was never given a chance to agree or disagree, and was never asked to sign an actual contract.
Nobody was. The 'social' variety of contract is in fact a deadly serious concept, a contract even more important than one between two business entities.
It is supposed to bind an entire world to a promise, a promise that we already know to be unachievable, false even.

The only part that applies is the binding.
And the binding is applied at will, because the 'Social Contract' is a Carte-Blanche one, not set to paper, except for a few vague and grandiose promises about the immense prosperity which will surely follow if we just do as we are told.
Very quickly the people who could achieve prosperity made their presence (or lack of it) felt ,by not doing as they were told.
And when they shrugged and ignored this legally unenforceable contract, they were immediately blamed for the failure, so that they became scapegoats for resisting their own human sacrifice.

Meanwhile, how did, how could, anybody feel emboldened to the state where they could envision such a device?
I think of it this way.
A generation of children was grown in school.
Schooling was involuntary and inescapable.This was supposed to inculcate social cohesion in the group; if it didn't exactly succeed, it did at least lead to a large number of young people growing into the expectation of a 'place' in the 'world', supplied by the 'world', safe, comfortable, and from the cradle to the grave.
But when they finished school at sixteen, they would go out into the remnants of the real world, and this shit would be kicked out of them and into a remnant itself, a last, lost gasp of dependency on and honest promise, something to resent, cherish and long for hopelessly.

Of course, the intelligent kids who stayed on to university had to be corralled, so their universities were also taken over by the state and turned into Catch-22 intellectual torture zones, where the rivalries of the Cold War could be relegated to an exploitable belief in West Side Story-type gangs.

And our gang 'won'.
But they won a game run by the other gang.