It sounds so simple, but how would a tax revolt work?

The only way to force change in South Africa, Facebook tells me, is a tax boycott.

You've probably seen them too, these dramatic calls to choke off the money supply to the looters and to force them to account for their sins.

They're always short on detail and usually raise more questions than they answer. For example, if I put in R100 at the petrol station, do I thrust R60 at the attendant and then speed away, yelling that I refuse to pay the fuel levy and the road accident levy? If I tell the folks down in Finance that I'm not paying tax any more so they mustn't deduct PAYE, am I liable for their kids' school fees when they get fired?

But amid all these frivolous questions, one remains unasked; and the fact that it is being ignored does not speak well of the people calling for a tax revolt.

It is, simply: if we stop paying taxes, what happens to the 20-million South Africans whose next meal is dependent on those taxes?

Perhaps the silence around this question is a measure of how angry taxpayers are: when you want to knock down a bully, you tend not to see the bystanders he might fall on.

But I have also noticed an unpleasant odour creeping into the issue; a way of forming ideas and arguments that seems superficially sensible but reveals a subtle hostility to the poor.

You'll see it in almost every scare-piece shared on Facebook: the reminder that only 7-million South Africans pay income tax; that those solid citizens shoulder a disproportionate and ultimately unbearable burden.

These facts are true, but what leaps off the page are not facts but implications. Because every single one of these texts says the same thing: that more than 40-million South Africans "do not pay income tax". Not "cannot pay income tax". "Do not". Almost as if it's a choice.

It is a fact that the millions of South Africans who do not pay income tax would love to pay income tax. They would like nothing more than to earn enough money to make them liable for huge tax bills. But that fact is unconsciously edited away. "Can't" is reported as "don't", and the odour of resentment seeps into public life.

Here and there the hostility becomes explicit. Many of those receiving social grants live in rural areas, the same constituencies keeping the ANC in power, and I have read angry posts by people asking why they should keep subsidising voters who insist on shooting themselves in the foot by rubber-stamping the thieves back into power every five years.

When you are stressed and anxious, and believe that you are slipping backwards in the rat race, this is a seductive anger. It tells us that we are victims, and once we believe this it is very difficult to imagine that other victims have it worse than us.

It whispers to us that compassion is a luxury we can't afford, because we can't afford anything any more. It makes it impossible to understand that a poor rural South African, who was saved from apartheid by the ANC, and who is kept alive by money sent by the ANC government, would have to be certifiably insane to vote for any party other than the ANC.

It is soothing, this anger, because it is a short release from the fear and grief of living in a crumbling country; but once it takes hold, it ferments and festers into a damp, bitter mould that eats away at us until compassion is impossible and nobody can remember the fundamentally sensible premise of civilised nations: that those who have more must help those with less.

It is a crisis that so few South Africans pay income tax, but it is dangerous to point a finger at those who "don't". Rather, let us point to a government intent on national suicide, refusing to fix a broken education system, refusing to supply business and industry with young minds and ambition. Blame the people who have prevented millions of South Africans from earning enough to pay income tax. Because trust me, they want to pay. And they want to pay plenty.