The LBC number 8 is a satire. Specifically, a collection of satirical essays by Jonathan Swift. The book is called A Modest Proposal – For Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland, from being a Burden to their Parents or Country; and for making them beneficial to the Publick.

I love satire as a genre and I was looking forward to reading this one. And I thought I knew Jonathan Swift. After Gulliver’s Travels, he had settled in my mind as a clever satirist. Sharp, imaginative, occasionally biting, but still within the comfort of storytelling. The kind of writer who shows you human folly by sending you to strange lands and introducing you to stranger people.

It starts like that. A meditation upon a broomstick is witty and has sharp observations. The broomstick is used as a metaphor for men, when the broomstick starts its life it is a tree, roots at the bottom and foliage at the top, and the situation reverses when it becomes a broomstick. The next one is a description of a city shower in verse form. Equally witty.

Then in this slim collection of essays, there is preparation for what is to come in the form of A short view of the state of Ireland. Swift lists fourteen conditions which make a nation prosper and rates Ireland on each of them.   

Then A Modest Proposal hits you.

It removes the comfort of wit almost immediately. There is no distance here. No fictional land. No buffer. It begins with poverty, and not the kind we usually talk about now. It is raw and stark. And as an Indian, it is difficult for me to imagine such poverty in the land of people who will soon rule India. Women begging on the streets with children, families unable to sustain themselves, a society that seems to have exhausted its options. You see, for me there isn’t much difference between Great Britain and the Ireland he speaks about.

This is the same political world that would go on to shape large parts of the globe, including India. The same systems that we associate with power and structure. And yet here, Swift is describing something that feels fragile, almost broken. It made me pause for a bit. Not because poverty is surprising, but because of how easily we separate power from what it produces.

And then comes the proposal.

It is unsettling. And it’s not unsettling because of what is proposed, but because of the way it is presented. It does not come across as satire in the way we expect satire to behave. There is no exaggeration that signals absurdity. Instead, it comes in the language of reason. Calm, methodical, almost administrative.

Children of the poor, Swift suggests, can be raised for a year and then sold as food for the wealthy. This would reduce the burden on families, create an economic activity, and even add to culinary diversity. He goes into details. Numbers, expected returns, benefits to landlords, possible recipes. At some point while reading, the mind resists. You want to step away and say this cannot be serious. But the argument is structured so carefully that you end up staying with it longer than you are comfortable.

The discomfort comes from that. Not just from the idea, but from how reasonable it can sound.

While reading this, I was reminded of Borat. That is also satire. It exaggerates, provokes, and exposes. But it allows you to laugh. In fact, the laughter is part of how it works. It disarms you before showing you something uncomfortable.

There is no such release here. You do not laugh. There is no moment where the text tells you that this is a joke. It maintains its tone throughout, and somewhere along the way you begin to feel that the problem is not the proposal, but the kind of thinking that can make such a proposal sound logical.

That is where it shifted for me.

This is not satire trying to be clever. It is satire pushing something to its extreme. If society is already comfortable reducing people to economic units, Swift seems to be saying, then let us follow that line properly. Let us see where it leads if we remove all hesitation.

And once you follow that line, it becomes difficult to say that the discomfort comes only from Swift’s imagination. It begins to feel uncomfortably close to how systems already function. The language may be different, the conclusions less grotesque, but the structure of thinking is not entirely unfamiliar.

The last essay in the collection extends this feeling in a different direction. In the piece about the “cries and abuses” of the kingdom, everyone is labeled. Jacobite, Papist, conspirator. I had to pause and look up these terms. A Jacobite was someone who supported the restoration of King James II. A Papist was a Protestant slur for Catholics. These were not neutral labels. They carried suspicion and fear.

What Swift captures here is not just political disagreement, but the atmosphere around it. A space where everyone is categorized, and once categorized, already judged. The tone is less shocking than A Modest Proposal, but the underlying mechanism feels similar. Reduction. Simplification. Turning people into something easier to process.

Reading these together, a pattern begins to form. Swift is not only writing about poverty or politics or religion. He is pointing to a way of thinking. One that reduces human beings to numbers, hides cruelty behind reason, replaces empathy with classification, and allows injustice to continue because it is efficient.

By the end of the collection, I found myself thinking less about the proposal itself and more about the reasoning behind it. Swift follows that reasoning with such precision that the satire never really depends on the shock value of the idea. The proposal is absurd. The logic that produces it feels much harder to dismiss.

Three hundred years later, nobody is in danger of taking Swift’s proposal seriously.

The habits of mind he is mocking are another matter entirely.