Politics and society in Mage: The Budapest Urbancrawl

The setting is finally given the post-communist cyberpunk feel it has been sorely missing.

Photo by Mehdi Sepehri on Unsplash
Political repression is very heavily implied by the magickal alternate Budapest setting laid out in this blog. The premise statement has words like dystopia, and Post-Communist, and political repression, and Paradox is supposed to be "a metaphor for discrimination and exclusion" - but so far, how or why exactly this political unease manifests itself has been left up to the GM.
This post aims to offer specifics.

Conditional Basic Income

The Danube above and around Budapest carries Quintessence, that is Primal Utility by another name, which the powers that be, or rather, the power behind the throne is tapping into to raise overall wealth levels for residents.
The explanation for why this wealthy society has become exclusionary, and xenophobic has so far been glossed over.
GMs could argue that Danube-borne Primal Utility is like oil for Arabic Peninsula caliphates or aid/Chinese investment in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the wealth is mostly pocketed and squandered by those at the top. No-one is stopping you as GM from explaining the setting's paradox between its wealth and its repression in this way, but to me it feels like a cop-out.
The paradox is resolved by Basic Income, as it is, I think, misinterpreted and misrepresented in this blog post.

The city state government has used the upsurge of wealth after the damming of the Danube to grant everyone Conditional Basic Income (Alapjáradék [ˈɒlɒpˌjaːrɒˌdeːk]).

Turning it up to 11

Mage: The Budapest Urbancrawl takes that idea, and runs with it.
What if the government guarantees a basic income that comes with strings attached, such as

• being a loyal citizen (maybe informers are given bonuses),
• not rocking the boat, and
• having (or faking) the appropriate (political, social) outlook/attitude.

What if everyone gets money without having to work, but the amount you get is determined by how much you cleave to the Szekeres-Bara Life System, what school you take your children to, how often do you volunteer for civic duty/neighbourhood watch, things like that?
Discrepancies in basic income levels would fuel the flames of jealousy and hatred between different social groups, and a universal mistrust of immigrants and scrounging freeloaders (anyone that's different).
Presto discrimination, exclusion, and self-sustaining social repression.
This, to me, is a valid (if highly unlikely and admittedly simplistic) dystopia without the internal discrepancies that threatened to unravel the whole setting, so Conditional Basic Income is, from now on, Mage: The Budapest Urbancrawl canon.